✍️ Elon Musk’s Paper Empire
What Roman history tells us about the difference between fortune and power
A million seconds ago, tech magnate Elon Musk was not yet a trillionaire. A billion seconds ago, Italy was still using the lira currency and now-deceased media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi was new on the political scene. And a trillion seconds ago was pre-history: people still lived in caves, animals had yet to be domesticated, and the ground beneath modern-day Venice was more than 200 kilometers from the closest shore.
This month, Musk became the first person with a net worth north of a trillion U.S. dollars -- that’s a number with twelve zeros behind it (as of publication, he’s not quite there in euros).
I need help in understanding numbers that large. Thinking in seconds is one way. Here are a few others: His fortune is around the size of the annual economic output of Switzerland or Saudi Arabia. Collected in 100-dollar bills, his wealth would weigh more than the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Musk’s net worth is the equivalent of two-thirds of all the physical euro banknotes in circulation.
These kinds of comparisons may help us understand how large Musk’s fortune is. But they do not tell us what comes with that kind of wealth.
For that, we need Caesar Augustus.
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