Gary Stevenson

Okay, welcome back to Gary's Economics.

Today we are going to explain everything you need to know about the world's first trillionaire.

Okay, so this week, the world got its first trillionaire.

It is Elon Musk.

Congratulations to Elon Musk.

We're going to explain to you everything that means today.

The first thing is what is a trillionaire?

What is a trillion?

We've had this long running problem in explaining inequality with the fact that like a billion dollars is like so much money that it's like impossible to conceptualize.

And people don't understand the difference between a million, which is like quite a lot of money, but like amount that

Nowadays a lot of ordinary people will accumulate especially in countries like the UK the US and a billion which is like Oh my god, like it's insane so much money I think the best the best example we've had to explain the difference between a million and a billion up till now is a million minutes

is just under two years and a billion minutes is just under 2000 years.

So a million minutes ago was a couple of years ago.

A billion minutes ago was like Roman Empire.

The problem you have is if you try to extend that to a trillion, then you say like a trillion minutes is just under two million years.

And then once again, you're back with the problem of this number is so big that the human brain can't comprehend it.

So we probably have to go down to seconds.

A million seconds is a week and a half.

A billion seconds is 32 years, and a trillion seconds is 32,000 years.

Basically, a trillion is just an unbelievably stupidly enormous number, and it's really hard to just understand how big it is.