Musk’s trillion-dollar fortune puts extreme wealth in perspective

Elon Musk has become the world’s first trillionaire, The Verge reported, placing a new marker on the scale of individual wealth in its coverage of SpaceX’s public-market debut. The figure is difficult to measure against ordinary experience because $1 trillion equals 1,000 billions.

The Verge noted that the world has 3,363 billionaires, but even among that group, a trillion-dollar fortune sits on a different scale. To explain the size, the site compared the number with time, walking distance, physical weight and public spending.

Time and distance show the scale

By The Verge’s comparison, counting 1 million seconds would take about 11 and a half days. Counting 1 billion seconds would take 31.7 years, while 1 trillion seconds would take 31,700 years.

The Verge said that means a person finishing the count today would have had to start in the Paleolithic era, around the period when Neanderthals disappeared. The time comparison shows why a trillion can be hard to understand when set beside the more familiar million and billion.

The site also used a walking example. If someone earned $1 million for every meter walked, The Verge calculated that a person starting in Times Square could reach $1 billion by walking to the Museum of Modern Art.

Reaching $1 trillion under that same setup would require a 621-mile walk, or about 23 marathons, according to The Verge. Google Maps places that distance at roughly the trip from Times Square to Dayton, Ohio, taking about nine and a half days on foot, The Verge reported.

Cash, pennies and spending power

The Verge said a U.S. dollar bill weighs one gram, making 1 million one-dollar bills about one metric ton, or 2,204 pounds. It compared that to the weight of a small hatchback car.

At the trillion-dollar level, The Verge calculated that the same stack of one-dollar bills would weigh as much as 5,000 of the largest blue whales, using a 200-metric-ton weight for each whale. The Wall Street Journal used pennies for a separate visualization, according to The Verge: 1 million pennies stacked would rise about a mile, while 1 trillion pennies would reach the moon and back twice.

The money would also cover large spending targets cited by public and corporate sources. The United Nations has estimated that ending world hunger by 2030 would require $93 billion a year, The Verge reported.

Using that estimate, The Verge calculated that Musk would still have $628 billion left after funding the hunger target through 2030. CNBC has reported that OpenAI is expected to spend about $600 billion on compute by 2030, and The Verge said Musk could theoretically cover that too while remaining wealthier than 99.9999 percent of the global population.

The Verge also calculated that splitting $1 trillion across the 349 million people in the United States would give each person $2,865. If the full amount were placed in a bank account paying 4 percent interest, The Verge said it would generate about $110 million a day, nearly enough to pay for two Falcon 9 launches.

This story draws on original reporting from The Verge.