What Elon Musk could buy with $1 trillion

As expected, Tesla shareholders did a truly unprecedented thing, approving a pay package for Elon Musk that could, over the next decade, turn the CEO into the world’s first trillionaire.

First, some important caveats: Tesla and Musk need to hit certain milestones, including raising its already lofty market capitalization by 466%. Is it possible? Sure. Probable? Depends on whom you ask. But since there’s a not-zero chance Musk pulls it off, it’s worth exploring what we talk about when we talk about a “trillion.”

A lot of tech and financial media have been tossing the T-word around lately as if it means something. The thing is, it doesn’t. You know how I know that? Quick, think of a trillion … anything. A trillion dollar bills. A trillion grains of sand. A trillion puppies. Whatever you’re imagining that number to look like, you’re way off. One trillion is so much comically larger than anything we can wrap our heads around, it’s practically meaningless.

And that is, in part, why Tesla, in its pivot to become an AI and robotics company, is leaning into hyperbole. If I’d told you that Tesla just approved an eleventy-gazillion-jillion-dollar package, it wouldn’t make much of a difference. Musk already has a $475 billion fortune — more money than any one person anywhere, ever, in the history of the world, and needless to say more money than any person could ever spend.

Consider the example cited by KRWG columnist Jerry Pacheco in 2020: If you spent $40 per second, around the clock, it would take you 289 days to exhaust a billion dollars. If you did the same thing with a trillion dollars, it would take you 792.5 years to go broke.