{"id":560,"date":"2026-06-13T04:16:24","date_gmt":"2026-06-13T04:16:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=560"},"modified":"2026-06-13T04:16:24","modified_gmt":"2026-06-13T04:16:24","slug":"why-no-human-being-should-ever-be-allowed-to-have-a-trillion-dollars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=560","title":{"rendered":"Why No Human Being Should Ever Be Allowed to Have a Trillion Dollars"},"content":{"rendered":"
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C<\/span>o<\/span>u<\/span>l<\/span>d<\/span> you count<\/span> to a trillion? Oh, hell no.<\/p>\n

I just timed myself counting to 100 as fast as I could. It took 38 seconds. <\/p>\n

The higher you count, the longer the numbers get, and so the slower the count becomes, but let\u2019s be ridiculously conservative and assume I could maintain that rapid counting pace. Counting to a trillion would then take 380 billion seconds. <\/p>

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That\u2019s 12,050 years.<\/p>\n

How high could<\/em> a person count? Well, for the sake of argument, suppose I commenced counting immediately upon emerging from my mama\u2019s vagina and kept at it for 100 years\u2014before dying abruptly, because I hadn\u2019t eaten, drank, nor slept during those 100 years. <\/p>\n

I would have only made it to 8.3 billion.<\/p>\n

A trillion is 1,000 billion<\/em>. It\u2019s an unfathomable number. As the Wall Street Journal<\/em> noted yesterday, if you stack a trillion pennies one atop the other, they\u2019ll stretch to the moon and back\u2014twice.<\/p>\n

Back in 2021, I published a book, Jackpot<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n

Should billionaires exist?<\/em> How quaint. What I can now say with authority is that nobody should have a trillion bucks\u2014ever<\/em>. It\u2019s entirely absurd. Among the nearly 200 nations on earth, only about 20 have a GDP that big. Simply put, it\u2019s way, way, way too much money for any individual to possess\u2014not to mention that Musk didn\u2019t earn it. We allowed him to accumulate it. That was a choice\u2014a bad one, and also dangerous.<\/p>\n

I will elaborate, but first let\u2019s have a little fun.<\/p>\n

I did some<\/span> calculations a while back to demonstrate how egregiously rich the world\u2019s richest guy was\u2014and that was at a time when Musk\u2019s net worth was only<\/em> $200 billion. Here\u2019s my update:<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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\u2014the \u201cmiddle 40\u2033\u2014and 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\u2019ll let him start with $500. How much would Musk then get?<\/p>\n

He gets $1.1 billion. (Actually more, since he\u2019s now up to $1.1 trillion, per Forbes<\/em>, but I\u2019ll stick with $1 trillion for simplicity.)<\/p>\n

You couldn\u2019t realistically count that high, either, in your lifetime.<\/p>\n

So now we\u2019ve got a problem, because each Monopoly set only comes with $20,580. To play this game requires 53,597 sets, which at today\u2019s low Amazon price of $11.99 will run you $643,162. Our middle-class player couldn\u2019t cover that even if he sold his home and liquidated his other assets.<\/p>

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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.<\/p>\n

Our middle-class player doesn\u2019t have any rooms that big in his house\u2014which he had to sell anyway to cover his half of the cost of the sets.<\/p>\n

Suppose you took all Musk\u2019s 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\u2019s try this with real-life currency.<\/p>\n

If you were to convert Musk\u2019s trillion dollars into $100 bills, we\u2019re talking about 10 billion Franklins<\/em>. Those bills would paper over 1,112,875,000 square feet\u2014just under 40 square miles\u2014enough to cover Manhattan and then some. Put in World Cup terms, Musk\u2019s wealth would cover 14,480 FIFA-approved soccer pitches with $100 bills. Fields of green, indeed.<\/p>\n

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\u2014who wrote for Mother Jones<\/em> in 2024 on the coming of the world\u2019s first trillionaire\u2014had a more recent piece on the rise of American oligarchy and how it has infected our democracy. He wrote:<\/p>\n

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No person anywhere, in any era, has spent as much to sway election outcomes as Musk, the richest person in history who, according to\u00a0Open Secrets, shelled out almost $292 million in 2024 helping get Trump and other Republican candidates elected. And that doesn\u2019t count the value of harnessing his X platform to support a twice-impeached, felonious former president who openly promised to make the rich richer\u2014and delivered.<\/p>\n

Musk expended 0.1 percent of his wealth in the process and got far more in return. The Trump administration\u00a0promptly shelved\u00a0dozens of investigations into Musk\u2019s companies, awarded him billions of dollars in new contracts, and sent his firms\u2019 share prices soaring by placing him in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency, an unsanctioned body that succeeded wildly\u2014not in eliminating\u00a0government fraud and waste as promised, but in\u00a0gutting and disabling\u00a0federal agencies, including the ones\u00a0creating headaches\u00a0for Musk\u2019s companies.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The oligarchs, as it were, paid off the government\u2019s keeper, and now Musk has scored the winning goal.<\/p>

Read more Karmelo Anthony and the Futility of Claiming Self-Defense While Black<\/a><\/p>\n

It is, alas, an own-goal for America and her democratic experiment. <\/p>\n<\/article>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Elon Musk\u2019s big milestone is no bueno.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":558,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"\nWhy No Human Being Should Ever Be Allowed to Have a Trillion Dollars - Moving and Mortgage Hub<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=560\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why No Human Being Should Ever Be Allowed to Have a Trillion Dollars - Moving and Mortgage Hub\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Elon Musk\u2019s big milestone is no bueno.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=560\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Moving and Mortgage Hub\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-06-13T04:16:24+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/35bc15a897bae526eed4fa0f20fec81f.webp\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"2000\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"1125\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/webp\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/movingandmortgagehub.com\\\/?p=560#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/movingandmortgagehub.com\\\/?p=560\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/movingandmortgagehub.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/6b7c79bcfd888d98f34c5413df7e81a2\"},\"headline\":\"Why No Human Being Should Ever Be Allowed to Have a Trillion Dollars\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-06-13T04:16:24+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/movingandmortgagehub.com\\\/?p=560\"},\"wordCount\":1066,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/movingandmortgagehub.com\\\/?p=560#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/movingandmortgagehub.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/06\\\/8769fd264cc4ded7a4d1d06330ffa573.webp\",\"articleSection\":[\"Politics\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/movingandmortgagehub.com\\\/?p=560#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/movingandmortgagehub.com\\\/?p=560\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/movingandmortgagehub.com\\\/?p=560\",\"name\":\"Why No Human Being Should Ever Be Allowed to Have a Trillion Dollars - 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