// THE VERGE — MOBILE & WEB
A trillion dollars is a stupid amount of money
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That kind of wealth is inconceivable, but we tried to make sense of it anyway.
That kind of wealth is inconceivable, but we tried to make sense of it anyway.
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Elon Musk is now officially the world’s first trillionaire. That is a colossal amount of wealth (and by proxy, power) for one individual to have. Its scale — a thousand times more than a billion — is difficult to fathom for those of us who aren’t among the 3,363 billionaires that currently exist in our world. But let’s try to comprehend it anyway.
The most frequently cited comparison is time. If you were to count out 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 reach that point today, you would have needed to start counting in the Paleolithic era, around the time that Neanderthals went extinct.
How about distance? Let’s say you earn $1 million dollars for every meter you walk. If you started at Times Square in NYC, you could make $1 billion by just walking down the street to The Museum of Modern Art. But to reach a trillion dollars, you would have to walk 621 miles, which is about 23 consecutive marathons. According to Google Maps, that’s the equivalent of walking from Times Square to Dayton, Ohio, and it would take around nine and a half days to do so.