How big is a trillion-dollar fortune, really?

Last Friday (12.06), SpaceX shares surged by 23% in their Wall Street debut, making its CEO, Elon Musk, the first trillionaire in history.

The shares opened at $150 and reached $166.90, while the company announced a market capitalization* of $2.18 trillion.

Forbes now estimates Elon Musk’s net worth at $1.1 trillion.

*This is the amount calculated by multiplying the total number of a company’s shares by its current share price on the stock market.

The human mind finds it very difficult to grasp “one trillion.”

One trillion dollars is 1,000 times larger than $1 billion and 1 million times larger than $1 million.

As a number, it is written as “1” followed by 12 zeros: 1,000,000,000,000.

• 1 trillion seconds is approximately 31,709 years.
• 1 trillion meters is approximately 1 billion kilometers, or about 6 to 7 times the distance between Earth and the Sun.
• 1 trillion pages, if stacked one on top of another, would reach a height of approximately 100,000 kilometers, or about one-quarter of the distance to the Moon.

• If a person sent 100 messages every day, it would take them around 27 million years to send 1 trillion messages.
• If you spent $1 million every day, it would take you around 2,740 years to spend $1 trillion.
• You could buy 20,000 private islands in the Caribbean at $50 million each, send one and a half Greeces — 16 million people — to Harvard at $62,000 per year, and buy 200 billion $5 burgers.

• So if $1 trillion were distributed among everyone, each person would receive almost $122.
• $1 trillion is more than twice the annual GDP of South Africa, the country where Elon Musk was born.
• Only 21 countries in the world currently have a GDP larger than $1 trillion. The United States and China are at the top, with more than $32.38 trillion and $20.85 trillion respectively — far above the countries that follow.

• $1 trillion could be used to combat world hunger 166 times over.
• It could also be invested in providing clean water to everyone on Earth for the next 20 years.
• Gaza could be rebuilt 14 times.
• To accumulate $1 trillion, an average Western household would have to work for more than 11 million years.

Elon Musk’s name first began to be heard in the late 1990s, while in 2020 he was only the 35th richest person in the world.

Today, he is almost 4 times richer than his closest competitor, Google co-founder Larry Page, and more than 5 times richer than Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

Elon Musk and Larry Page are followed by:

• Sergey Brin (Google / $277.2 billion)
• Jeff Bezos (Amazon / $255.7 billion)
• Larry Ellison (Oracle / $241.7 billion)

One hundred and ten years before the announcement of the first trillionaire, the planet came to know its first billionaire.

On September 29, 1916, the fortune of John D. Rockefeller, the oil magnate, reached $1 billion — $30 billion today.

In 1820, 100 years before John D. Rockefeller, John Jacob Astor, a real-estate magnate, became the first millionaire in the United States and probably in the world.

• Associated Press
• Al Jazeera
• Wall Street Journal 
• New York Times
• BBC
• NASA