How Much is a Trillion Dollars, Really?
Robin Fuller ’27
A trillion dollars: it's an unimaginable amount of money for most of us. So let's try to visualize it. A stack of 100 dollar bills totaling 1 trillion dollars would be nearly 68,000 miles high. That's nearly 2.7 times the earth’s equator. 1 trillion dollars would fill nearly 5 olympic sized swimming pools, which are typically about 50 meters long, 25 meters wide and minimum 2 meters deep.
But these are just visuals. What about the actual spending power of 1 trillion dollars? According to CNN, 1 trillion dollars can buy you
Every car sold in America
The entire corporation of Coca-Cola, as well as a Coke for every person on the planet
465 Icon of the Seas ships, the world's largest cruise ship
~$3,000 bonus for everyone on the planet
The entire country of Switzerland, if that were possible
And if even those stats weren’t enough to convince you of the gravity of a trillion dollar deposit, what about this one: If you were to spend 1 million dollars every day, it would take 1,000,000 days – or 2,740 years – to exhaust a trillion dollars. That’s roughly 37 average human life spans.
Can you imagine all this spending power in the hands of a single person? Well, it might actually become a reality. As of mid-November 2025, Tesla shareholders approved a pay package for infamous Tesla CEO Elon Musk, which could propel his wealth into the 13 digits and has the power to potentially make him the first trillionaire within the next few years.
The amount of power that the one percent of society holds in their wallets cannot be overstated. Musk’s various companies and political involvements, combined with his ever-increasing wealth, make him a force to be reckoned with. A trillion dollars is not just a measure of wealth, it's a measure of power. Whether Musk eventually does become a trillionaire or not, it proves that we are living in a time where CEOs can amass wealth so large we cannot even conceptualize it.
The rise of potential trillionaires could highlight something deeper: the widening economic, social and cultural gap between the unimaginably rich and the rest of society. This can easily be seen when clicking on any news site where headlines about millions of Americans losing SNAP benefits and basic housing run alongside headlines about Trump’s extravagant galas and refurnishing the white house bathrooms. As everyone knows, wealth generates more wealth, and people with a trillion to their name have access to financial tools, connections, safety nets, and legal loopholes we might not have even imagined yet.
The bottom line is that whether good or bad, the idea of a single person holding that amount of wealth in their pockets is incomprehensible, and it goes beyond just numbers. The power that trillionaires could attain and the effect they could have on the people below them is terrifying to think about. They can bypass legal consequences, and are essentially above the rules that keep everyone else in check.