Elon Musk don become world first trillionaire for Friday, after SpaceX go public. But wetin be 1 trillion dollar? The number big well-well, and e get power wey many people no fit imagine.
SpaceX valuation don make am stand out against historical benchmarks. But as AI rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic get valuation wey dey hover around $900 billion, e suggest say trillion dollar fit become new standard.
Numbers of this scale rare for everyday life. Google track word usage across millions of books, and e show say references to “trillion” remain scarce for much of 19th and early 20th centuries before e increase after World War II.
“Up until relatively recently, we had no real reason to talk about such numbers,” John Allen Paulos, professor emeritus of mathematics at Temple University, talk. “So it’s not surprising that they don’t make much sense to people.”
For im 1988 book “Innumeracy,” Paulos argue say humans especially bad at reasoning when e come to very large numbers. Part of the difficulty come from our inability to intuitively grasp exponential growth. As result, figures like 1 billion and 1 trillion fit feel deceptively close. For reality, the gap enormous: 1 trillion equals 1,000 billion.
Physical comparisons also helpful. A stack of $100 bills worth $1 million stand just over 3 feet tall. Scale that up to $1 billion, and the stack over half a mile high. At $1 trillion, however, the stack reach a staggering 679 miles in height, nearly 11 times the distance from Earth’s surface to edge of outer space.
A billion dollars’ worth of stacked $100 bills organized into $1 million bundles go fill a garage. IPO valuation more than 15 years ago. A trillion na another magnitude. A pile of similar $1 million bundles go rival Statue of Liberty, or almost as tall as SpaceX Starship, the reusable spacecraft wey design to carry crew and cargo to space.
For terms of purchasing power, Musk’s trillion fit buy 8,880 Boeing 737s or New York Knicks 102 times over. Or if you fortunate to have and spend a million dollars a day, e go take 2,740 years to spend the entirety of a trillion-dollar budget.
When ask wetin the next big number fit be, Paulos joke: “A trillion and one.”
