Why No Human Being Should Ever Be Allowed to Have a Trillion Dollars – Mother Jones
Mother Jones illustratoin; Chesnot/Getty
Could you count to a trillion? Oh, hell no.
I just timed myself counting to 100 as fast as I could. It took 38 seconds.
The higher you count, the longer the numbers get, and so the slower the count becomes, but let’s be ridiculously conservative and assume I could maintain that rapid counting pace. Counting to a trillion would then take 380 billion seconds.
That’s 12,050 years.
How high could a person count? Well, for the sake of argument, suppose I commenced counting immediately upon emerging from my mama’s vagina and kept at it for 100 years—before dying abruptly, because I hadn’t eaten, drank, nor slept during those 100 years.
I would have only made it to 8.3 billion.
A trillion is 1,000 billion. It’s an unfathomable number. As the Wall Street Journal noted yesterday, if you stack a trillion pennies one atop the other, they’ll stretch to the moon and back—twice.
Back in 2021, I published a book, Jackpot, about runaway wealth in America and its effects on those who come into it, and on society at large. One question that came up a lot was, well, should billionaires exist? Even some of my very wealthy sources felt there should perhaps be some upper limits placed on wealth accumulation.
Should billionaires exist? How quaint. What I can now say with authority is that nobody should have a trillion bucks—ever. It’s entirely absurd. Among the nearly 200 nations on earth, only about 20 have a GDP that big. Simply put, it’s way, way, way too much money for any individual to possess—not to mention that Musk didn’t earn it. We allowed him to accumulate it. That was a choice—a bad one, and also dangerous.
I will elaborate, but first let’s have a little fun.
I did some calculations a while back to demonstrate how egregiously rich the world’s richest guy was—and that was at a time when Musk’s net worth was only $200 billion. Here’s my update:
Suppose we wanted to have a game of Monopoly in which the amount of money each player starts with reflects their relative wealth in real life.
And suppose we want it to be Elon Musk vs. some guy with the average middle-class wealth of $453,300. (Economists define middle class as the 50th through 90th wealth percentiles—the “middle 40″—and this number comes from RealTimeInequality.org.)
So, normally, each player starts a Monopoly game with $1,500. In our rigged version, we want our middle-class player to have at least enough to buy a property or two, so we’ll let him start with $500. How much would Musk then get?
He gets $1.1 billion. (Actually more, since he’s now up to $1.1 trillion, per Forbes, but I’ll stick with $1 trillion for simplicity.)
You couldn’t realistically count that high, either, in your lifetime.
So now we’ve got a problem, because each Monopoly set only comes with $20,580. To play this game requires 53,597 sets, which at today’s low Amazon price of $11.99 will run you $643,162. Our middle-class player couldn’t cover that even if he sold his home and liquidated his other assets.
And also, where would you put the boxes? Each set comes in a box 0.19 cubic feet in volume. All told, they would consume 10,183 cubic feet. Assuming you have standard 9-foot ceilings, they would completely fill a 1,131-square-foot room from floor to ceiling.
Our middle-class player doesn’t have any rooms that big in his house—which he had to sell anyway to cover his half of the cost of the sets.
Suppose you took all Musk’s Monopoly money and spread it out on the ground? Turns out, it would paper over roughly 11 football fields, including the end zones. But as those bills are small and multiple denominations, let’s try this with real-life currency.
If you were to convert Musk’s trillion dollars into $100 bills, we’re talking about 10 billion Franklins. Those bills would paper over 1,112,875,000 square feet—just under 40 square miles—enough to cover Manhattan and then some. Put in World Cup terms, Musk’s wealth would cover 14,480 FIFA-approved soccer pitches with $100 bills. Fields of green, indeed.
Far more important than the physical magnitude of $1 trillion, of course, is the power it musters. With his ridiculous trove, Musk, already unaccountable, becomes even more so. Tax expert Bob Lord—who wrote for Mother Jones in 2024 on the coming of the world’s first trillionaire—had a more recent piece on the rise of American oligarchy and how it has infected our democracy. He wrote:
No person anywhere, in any era, has spent as much to sway election outcomes as Musk, the richest person in history who, according to Open Secrets, shelled out almost $292 million in 2024 helping get Trump and other Republican candidates elected. And that doesn’t count the value of harnessing his X platform to support a twice-impeached, felonious former president who openly promised to make the rich richer—and delivered.
Musk expended 0.1 percent of his wealth in the process and got far more in return. The Trump administration promptly shelved dozens of investigations into Musk’s companies, awarded him billions of dollars in new contracts, and sent his firms’ share prices soaring by placing him in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency, an unsanctioned body that succeeded wildly—not in eliminating government fraud and waste as promised, but in gutting and disabling federal agencies, including the ones creating headaches for Musk’s companies.
Lord details policy choices that have enabled wealth to concentrate in an increasingly small number of hands, culminating in the rise of a hyper-privileged few with the undeserved power to sway public affairs in their interests. This oligarchic class, as Northwestern University scholar Jeffrey Winters demonstrates in a powerful recent book excerpt, is untaxable and untouchable. And none so much as the trillionaire Musk.
The oligarchs, as it were, paid off the government’s keeper, and now Musk has scored the winning goal.
It is, alas, an own-goal for America and her democratic experiment.
Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.
By signing up, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of use, and to receive messages from Mother Jones and our partners.
We need your help. We’re halfway through our Summer Membership Drive, and only $35,000 toward our $200,000 goal. But there’s good news: This week only, every donation will be doubled, up to $50,000, thanks to a generous reader.
That’s twice the impact for intrepid reporting that peels back the layers to publish the truth—and the context you need to break it all down. It’s twice the fuel for investigations on voting rights and justice, critical in this midterm election year. And it’s twice the power for exposing the chaos and corruption of a White House trying to control the narrative.
This is a pivotal moment in our nation, with democracy on the line, and we can only do this work because readers like you step up. Every donation, of any amount, makes a difference here. And every donation will be doubled.
We cannot do this work without you. Join the fight. Double your donation to defend democracy.
We need your help. We’re halfway through our Summer Membership Drive, and only $35,000 toward our $200,000 goal. But there’s good news: This week only, every donation will be doubled, up to $50,000, thanks to a generous reader.
That’s twice the impact for intrepid reporting that peels back the layers to publish the truth—and the context you need to break it all down. It’s twice the fuel for investigations on voting rights and justice, critical in this midterm election year. And it’s twice the power for exposing the chaos and corruption of a White House trying to control the narrative.
This is a pivotal moment in our nation, with democracy on the line, and we can only do this work because readers like you step up. Every donation, of any amount, makes a difference here. And every donation will be doubled.
We cannot do this work without you. Join the fight. Double your donation to defend democracy.
Gabriel Zucman
Jeffrey Winters
Tim Murphy
Bob Lord
Samantha Michaels
Laura C. Morel
Inae Oh
Sponsored Post
CARE
Molly Taft
Sophie Hurwitz
Sophie Hurwitz
Hannah Thomasy
Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.
By signing up, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of use, and to receive messages from Mother Jones and our partners.
Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.
Mother Jones has no billionaires calling the shots—just readers like you making fearless reporting possible
Inexpensive, too! Subscribe today and get a full year of Mother Jones for just $19.95.
Award-winning photojournalism.
Stunning video. Fearless conversations.
Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.
By signing up, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of use, and to receive messages from Mother Jones and our partners.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Copyright © 2026 Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting. All Rights Reserved.
And we respect that! But maybe you’d consider supporting our work directly? Right now, we need to raise $200,000 to fund more journalism that seeks the truth and holds power to account. We can’t miss this goal—and we can’t do this work without you. Give today.
We noticed you have an ad blocker on. Can you pitch in a few bucks to help fund Mother Jones’ investigative journalism?
Halfway through our Summer Membership Drive, we’ve raised just $35,000 of a $200,000 goal that we can’t afford to miss. But there’s good news: This week only, every donation will be doubled up, to $50,000.
That means, right now, you can have twice the impact for crucial investigative reporting that holds the powerful to account. Will you help fund more fearless journalism today?
Halfway through our Summer Membership Drive, we’ve raised just $35,000 of a $200,000 goal that we can’t afford to miss. But there’s good news: This week only, every donation will be doubled up, to $50,000.
That means, right now, you can have twice the impact for crucial investigative reporting that holds the powerful to account. Will you help fund more fearless journalism today?
Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.
