A trillion dollars is a stupid amount of money

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.

You could also visualize by weight, as a US dollar bill weighs exactly one gram — a consistency that’s designed to make it easier to count stacks of money. A million $1 dollar bills would therefore weigh a metric ton (2,204 pounds), which is roughly equivalent to a small hatchback car. A trillion $1 dollar bills would weigh the same as 5,000 of the biggest blue whales the world has ever seen (they can reach 200 metric tonnes) piled on top of each other.

The Wall Street Journal has a cool visualization if you want to see how this looks in pennies. A million pennies stacked would reach about a mile high, or almost four Empire State Buildings. But a stack of 1 trillion pennies would reach the moon and back — twice.

You get the idea. And that vast sum of money could do many, many things. A trillion dollars is more than enough to solve world hunger by 2030, according to the United Nations, which estimates it would take $93 billion per year. That leaves Musk with $628 billion — enough to also fund the $600 billion that OpenAI is expected to spend on compute by 2030, and still have enough change to be richer than 99.9999 percent of the global population.

If we split $1 trillion across the entire 349 million US population, then every person would get $2,865. Or, if you theoretically had the liquidity to put $1 trillion into a bank account with a standard 4 percent interest rate, you would earn roughly $110 million every day — almost enough to launch two Falcon 9 rockets.

Just remember: the next time someone tells you to count your pennies, Elon Musk wouldn’t be able to do so in a lifetime, even if he recruited his small army of offspring to help.