Elon Musk has entered the four comma club.
The world’s first trillionaire is a man who gave an apparent Nazi salute and proceeded on a cost-cutting rampage through the U.S. federal government, at one point gutting an agency that fed needy children around the world for decades.
He also runs SpaceX, the rocket company that made its trading debut on Friday, boosting its value to some $2.21 trillion — up there with Amazon, Apple and Alphabet.
Musk is now worth a reported $1.1 trillion due mostly to the value of the stock he holds in his companies, which include the electric carmaker Tesla. It’s the first time any one person has managed to amass that much wealth.
But how much, exactly, is $1 trillion? It’s almost certainly more than you think. People have a difficult time envisioning a billion, let alone a figure that is one thousand times a billion.
Journalists have tried various ways to help readers grasp the concept, even though not so long ago it was only the stuff of science fiction. On Friday, The Wall Street Journal published an excellent feature that solicits estimates from readers on where $1 billion sits on a scale between $1 million and $1 trillion. The vast majority are very, very wrong in their guesses — woefully underestimating the incredible size of Musk’s current fortune.
We’re here to help, though. The simplest way to think of “a trillion” may be in terms of time.
One million seconds is around 12 days. So, one million seconds ago, it was the start of June. One billion seconds ago, it was 1994. One trillion seconds ago, human beings were creating some of the earliest cave paintings that have ever been found — some 32,000 years ago, way back in the Ice Age.
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But maybe it’s easier to think of it in terms of area.
One square inch is about the width of a U.S. quarter. One million square inches’ worth of space would be roughly the area of one-and-a-half professional basketball courts. One billion square inches’ worth of space would give you about 120 football fields. One trillion square inches’ worth of space is bigger than the area of the city of Chicago.
We’ll give you one more example.
One million pounds is about the weight of about 7,350 people, enough to fill a small stadium. One billion pounds is the weight of 7.4 million people, or about the size of the Houston metro area. One trillion pounds is, by one study, more than the weight of every human being on Earth combined. (The average global weight of a human is generally estimated to be 62 kilograms, or 136 pounds.)
For those who would argue that billionaires should not exist in a fair-minded society dealing with an ongoing and deeply entrenched crisis of inequality, the minting of the very first trillionaire seems likely to supercharge the movement to force the wealthiest among us to pay what is commonly referred to as “their fair share.”