Today, the man who has been called “both bonkers and brilliant” became the world’s first trillionaire with the launch of his SpaceX blockbuster Initial Public Offering (IPO).
Elon Musk’s “sprawling rocket-building, satellite-launching and artificial intelligence company” which trades under the ticker symbol “SPCX,” has as its mission statement, “to revolutionize space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets.” Its vision statement reads, “to make life multi-planetary by establishing a self-sustaining city on Mars.”
Numerous articles have been written to try to put Elon Musk’s wealth into perspective and to help visualize the magnitude of one trillion dollars.
• Only 19 countries have GDPs that surpass $1 trillion, ranging from the U.S. to the Netherlands, according to World Bank data.
• That wealth makes Musk richer than the bottom 46% of the world’s population, or a combined 3.8 billion people, according to Oxfam. (A global confederation of non-governmental organizations dedicated to ending poverty, fighting inequality, and providing humanitarian aid worldwide.)
NBC News puts it this way: “In terms of purchasing power, Musk’s trillion could buy 8,880 Boeing 737s or the New York Knicks 102 times over. Put another way, it would take the typical U.S. household, earning almost $84,000 a year, nearly 12 million years to accumulate that much wealth…”
Yahoo Finance: “All the property in Houston, both residential and commercial, is worth less than Musk’s fortune.”
There are plenty of ways to help one visualize the sheer magnitude of one trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000).
My “AI assistant” with the help from YouTube tells me:
• If you were to count to one trillion out loud, saying one number per second continuously, it would take you about 31,546 years.
• A stack of one trillion $1 bills would reach roughly 67,800 miles high. Laid end-to-end, they would wrap around the Earth roughly 4 times.
• Transporting one trillion dollars in physical cash would require nearly 80 Boeing 747 cargo planes. If stacked in a room, you would need a massive warehouse covering the length of a football field to securely hold it.
NBC News:
“If one were to spend $1 million every hour every day, it would still take more than a century to spend $1 trillion.”
• Earth is about a trillion meters far from the Moon
• The Galaxy contains about a trillion stars
• There are around 3 trillion trees on Earth
And how about this one:
As I started reading NBC’s “1,000,000,000,000 by any other name: A trillion in words and graphics,” I was advised:.
You’ve started reading.
We’ll track how long you spend on this article. When you reach the end, we’ll show how much money you would win if you were awarded $1 billion for every second you spent on this page.
And lo and behold, at the end, the statement below appeared
