A trillion dollars is a stupid amount of money

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Elon Musk is now officially the world’s first trillionaire. That is a colossal amount of wealth (and by proxy, power) for one individual to have. Its scale – a thousand times more than a billion — is difficult to fathom for those of us who aren’t among the 3,363 billionaires that currently exist in our world. But let’s try to comprehend it anyway.

The most frequently cited comparison is time. If you were to count out a million seconds, it would take you 11 and a half days. A billion seconds would take you 31.7 years. But a trillion seconds would take 31,700 years — to reach that point today, you would have needed to start counting in the Paleolithic era, around the time that neanderthals went extinct.

How about distance? Let’s say you earn $1 million dollars for every meter you walk. If you started at Times Square...

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