Elon Musk, worth $696 billion as of Wednesday, is poised to become the world’s first trillionaire when SpaceX goes public Friday. But what does 1 trillion actually mean? Here’s how to think about its immensity and the power it represents.
SpaceX’s projected IPO valuation of $1.77 trillion is nearly 10 times that of Alibaba’s in 2014, which is still the highest ever recorded in the U.S.
While SpaceX may stand out against historical benchmarks, the rapid growth of AI rivals OpenAI and Anthropic, each with a valuation hovering around $900 billion, suggests that a trillion dollars could become a new standard.
Numbers of this scale are rare in everyday life. Google tracks word usage across millions of books and its data shows that references to “trillion” remained scarce for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries before increasing after World War II.
“Up until relatively recently, we had no real reason to talk about such numbers,” said John Allen Paulos, a professor emeritus of mathematics at Temple University. “So it’s not surprising that they don’t make much sense to people.”
In his 1988 book “Innumeracy,” Paulos argues that humans are especially bad at reasoning when it comes to very large numbers. Part of the difficulty stems from our inability to intuitively grasp exponential growth. As a result, figures such as 1 billion (1,000,000,000) and 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) can feel deceptively close. In reality, the gap is enormous: 1 trillion equals 1,000 billion.
To help visualize such enormity, Paulos recommended a time scale: 1 million seconds in the past is less than two weeks ago, but a billion seconds puts us in 1994, and a trillion seconds goes back to approximately 29,000 B.C., predating recorded history.
Physical comparisons are also helpful. A stack of $100 bills worth $1 million stands just over 3 feet tall. Scale that up to $1 billion, and the stack is over half a mile high. At $1 trillion, however, the stack reaches a staggering 679 miles in height, nearly 11 times the distance from Earth’s surface to the edge of outer space.
A billion dollars’ worth of stacked $100 bills organized into $1 million bundles would fill a garage. That’s roughly the scale of Tesla’s $1.7 billion IPO valuation more than 15 years ago.
A trillion is another magnitude. A pile of similar $1 million bundles would rival the Statue of Liberty, or would be almost as tall as SpaceX’s Starship, the reusable spacecraft designed to carry crew and cargo out to space.
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. Or, if you were fortunate enough to have and spend a million dollars a day, it would take 2,740 years to spend the entirety of a trillion-dollar budget.
When asked what the next big number might be, Paulos joked: “A trillion and one.”
