Elon Musk has officially become the world's first trillionaire, which is a number so absurdly large that it sounds like the GDP of a small planet rather than one guy's bank account. For context, there are currently 3,363 billionaires on Earth, and Musk is now a thousand times richer than any of them - a scale that makes 'having more money than God' feel like an understatement.
Let's try to wrap our heads around this number, because our brains are not equipped for it. If you counted seconds: a million seconds is 11.5 days, a billion is 31.7 years, and a trillion seconds would take you back 31,700 years - to when Neanderthals were still walking around. If you earned $1 million per meter walked, you'd hit $1 billion by strolling from Times Square to MoMA. To hit $1 trillion, you'd need to walk 621 miles - about 23 marathons - to Dayton, Ohio, taking nine and a half days.
By weight, a million $1 bills weighs a metric ton (a small hatchback). A trillion $1 bills would weigh as much as 5,000 of the largest blue whales ever recorded (200 metric tonnes each) stacked together. In pennies: a million pennies stacked reaches a mile high, or almost four Empire State Buildings. A trillion pennies would reach the moon and back twice, according to The Wall Street Journal.
That money could do real things. The UN says $93 billion per year could end world hunger by 2030. Musk's $1 trillion leaves $628 billion after that - enough to also cover the $600 billion OpenAI expects to spend on compute by 2030, with change to remain richer than 99.9999% of people. Split across the US population of 349 million, every person would get $2,865. Or, earning 4% interest, Musk would pocket $110 million daily - almost enough to launch two Falcon 9 rockets.
So the next time someone tells you to count your pennies, remember: even Musk, with his alleged small army of offspring, couldn't do it in a lifetime.