Who wants to be a Trillionaire?

In order to become a Trillionaire, one will need to amass one million million dollars! Is that even possible? Could one person ever acquire that much wealth? Bill Gates is worth some 50+ billion dollars; a trillion dollars is enough to provide 20 people with Bill Gates' wealth.


My guess is that amassing a trillion dollars is probably not possible by individuals; or even by large corporations. Only large country governments even talk about trillions of dollars.

Because of recent global economic circumstances and other exorbitant spending, such as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the term ¡°trillion is becoming more commonplace every day, as we attempt to bail out and otherwise reinforce or rebuild world economies, and pay for costly wars and other cash-consuming ideologies.

For someone like Bill Gates (who is the closest to becoming a trillionaire that I am aware of) to actually become a trillionaire, his fortune would have to multiply by 20 fold (ergo; the 20 people mentioned earlier).

Doing the math to find out how long it would take Bill to reach a trillion dollars, even if he could get continuous 25% return on investment of his whole fortune, is beyond my calculator's capabilities (and my own!); but I believe it would be quite a long time; decades, if not centuries.

OK; enough about Bill Gates. Let's look at what a trillion dollars in cash might look like. Here are 15 "Trillion Trivia" items to think about:

1. A trillion dollars, in one-dollar bills, lined up end to end, can circle the earth about 3800 times.
2. A trillion dollars, single-stacked in one-dollar bills, would stand about 679,000 miles high; almost three times farther than the moon.
3. A trillion dollars worth of pennies, stacked in a single stack, would reach about 79,000,000 miles high; over three-quarters of the distance to the sun.
4. A trillion dollars, laid out flat with one-dollar bills, would cover an area of nearly 4000 squar
   e miles; nearly enough to cover the state of Delaware, not once, but twice; and it could cover Washington D.C. with about 2 1/2 inches of one-dollar bills.
5. A trillion dollars, strung end to end across the United States and stacked in a single-line stack, would build a wall 115 feet high across the country.
6. A trillion dollars, even in 100 dollar bills, stacked in a single stack, would reach over 6700 miles high.
7. A trillion dollars, in 100 dollar bills, lined up end to end, would circle the globe about 39 times.
8. To spend a trillion dollars in one year, you would have to spend $2,739,726,027.39 each and every day.
9. To spend a trillion dollars in ten years, you would have to spend $273,972,602.73 each and every day.
10. To spend a trillion dollars in an average lifetime (72 years), you would have to spend $38,051,750.38 each and every day.
11. The weight of a trillion dollars, in one-dollar bills, is about 1,093,750 tons; about as much as 15 Queen Elizabeth II cruise ships (Gross Tonnage).
12. A trillion dollars in one-dollar bills would take about 32,000 years to count, assuming a counting rate of a dollar per second, and counting for 24 hours each day, seven days a week. No food, no sleep, no breaks.
13. A trillion dollars in one-dollar bills, placed on the centerline of America's nearly 4 million miles of roadways in a single-line stack, would create a stack over 1 1/2 inches thick, or 38 layers.
14. A trillion dollars could purchase over 3 million of the most expensive Rolls Royce autos.
15. A trillion dollars could purchase over 2.5 million of the most expensive Lamborghini sports cars.

Now, armed with all this important information, maybe we can better understand just how much debt the United States is really in. Figures I've seen recently put our debt at over 10 Trillion dollars! So, to get a sense of what THAT number represents, just multiply all the above items by 10. Wow!

Quite unfathomable really, isn't it? Suffice it to say that we probably won't be seeing any ¡°Trillionaires anytime soon. And, even if someone does actually attain to such a level, who would be able to count it?

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