A trillion dollars is a ridiculous amount of money

Elon Musk is now officially the world’s first trillionaire. That is a lot of wealth (and by proxy, power) for one person to possess. Its magnitude – a thousand times more than a billion – is difficult to comprehend for those of us who are not among the 3,363 billion people on earth. But let’s try to understand it.

Quantitative comparison with time. If you could count a million seconds, it would take you 11 and a half days. A billion seconds would take you 31.7 years. But a trillion seconds would take 31,700 years – to get here today, you would have had to start dating back to the Paleolithic era, when the neanderthals died out.

What about distance? Let’s say you earn $1 million for every meter you travel. If you started in Times Square in NYC, you could make $1 billion walking down the street to the Museum of Modern Art. But to reach a trillion dollars, you have to travel 621 kilometers, which is about 23 in a row. According to Google Maps, it’s the equivalent of walking from Times Square to Dayton, Ohio, and it would take nine and a half days to do so.

You can also see the weight, as a US dollar coin weighs exactly one gram – a consistency designed to make it easier to count piles of money. One million dollar bills weigh a metric ton (2,204 pounds), which is about the same as a small hatchback. 1 trillion dollars would weigh as much as 5,000 of the largest whales the world has ever seen (they can weigh up to 200 tons) stacked on top of each other.

The Wall Street Journal they have some great visuals if you want to see what this looks like in pennies. Millions in total 1,000,000,000,000,000,00,000,00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. But the amount of 1 trillion comes to the month and returns – twice.

You get the idea. And that much money can do a lot of things. A trillion dollars is enough to end world hunger by 2030, according to the United Nationswhich is estimated to take in $93 billion a year. That leaves Musk with $628 billion — enough to pay off cash $600 billion for OpenAI they are expected to spend by 2030, and still have enough change to be richer than 99.9999 percent of the world’s population.

If we divide $1 trillion among all 349 million people in the US, then each person will receive $2,865. Or, if you had $1 trillion invested in a bank account with an interest rate of 4 percent, you would get about $110 million. every day – almost enough to launch two Falcon 9 rockets.

Just remember: the next time someone tells you to count your money, Elon Musk couldn’t do it in a lifetime, even if he enlisted his army of children to help them.