A trillion dollars is a stupid amount of money

一万亿美元是一个荒谬的数字

That kind of wealth is inconceivable, but we tried to make sense of it anyway. 这种程度的财富令人难以想象，但我们还是尝试去解读它。

Elon Musk is now officially the world’s first trillionaire. That is a colossal amount of wealth (and by proxy, power) for one individual to have. Its scale — a thousand times more than a billion — is difficult to fathom for those of us who aren’t among the 3,363 billionaires that currently exist in our world. But let’s try to comprehend it anyway. 埃隆·马斯克（Elon Musk）现已正式成为全球首位万亿富翁。对于个人而言，这是一笔极其庞大的财富（以及随之而来的权力）。它的规模——是十亿的一千倍——对于我们这些不在全球现有 3,363 位亿万富翁之列的人来说，很难理解。但我们还是试着去理解一下吧。

The most frequently cited comparison is time. If you were to count out a million seconds, it would take you 11 and a half days. A billion seconds would take you 31.7 years. But a trillion seconds would take 31,700 years — to reach that point today, you would have needed to start counting in the Paleolithic era, around the time that Neanderthals went extinct. 最常被引用的比较是时间。如果你要数出一百万秒，需要花费 11 天半。十亿秒则需要 31.7 年。但一万亿秒需要 31,700 年——如果要数到今天，你必须从旧石器时代就开始数，大约是在尼安德特人灭绝的时期。

How about distance? Let’s say you earn $1 million dollars for every meter you walk. If you started at Times Square in NYC, you could make $1 billion by just walking down the street to The Museum of Modern Art. But to reach a trillion dollars, you would have to walk 621 miles, which is about 23 consecutive marathons. According to Google Maps, that’s the equivalent of walking from Times Square to Dayton, Ohio, and it would take around nine and a half days to do so. 距离又如何呢？假设你每走一米就能赚 100 万美元。如果你从纽约时代广场出发，只需走到现代艺术博物馆，就能赚到 10 亿美元。但要达到一万亿美元，你必须走 621 英里，这相当于连续跑 23 个马拉松。根据谷歌地图，这相当于从时代广场走到俄亥俄州的代顿市，大约需要九天半的时间。

You could also visualize by weight, as a US dollar bill weighs exactly one gram — a consistency that’s designed to make it easier to count stacks of money. A million $1 bills would therefore weigh a metric ton (2,204 pounds), which is roughly equivalent to a small hatchback car. A trillion $1 bills would weigh the same as 5,000 of the biggest blue whales the world has ever seen (they can reach 200 metric tons) piled on top of each other. 你也可以通过重量来想象，因为一张美元纸币的重量正好是一克——这种一致性是为了方便清点成堆的现金。因此，一百万张 1 美元纸币重达一公吨（2,204 磅），大约相当于一辆小型掀背车。而一万亿张 1 美元纸币的重量，相当于 5,000 条世界上有史以来最大的蓝鲸（每条可达 200 公吨）堆叠在一起的重量。

The Wall Street Journal has a cool visualization if you want to see how this looks in pennies. A million pennies stacked would reach about a mile high, or almost four Empire State Buildings. But a stack of 1 trillion pennies would reach the Moon and back — twice. 如果你想看看这些钱换成一美分硬币是什么样子，《华尔街日报》有一个很酷的可视化图表。一百万枚一美分硬币堆叠起来大约有一英里高，或者说几乎相当于四座帝国大厦。但一万亿枚一美分硬币堆叠起来，可以往返月球两次。

You get the idea. And that vast sum of money could do many, many things. A trillion dollars is more than enough to solve world hunger by 2030, according to the United Nations, which estimates it would take $93 billion per year. That leaves Musk with $628 billion — enough to also fund the $600 billion that OpenAI is expected to spend on compute by 2030, and he’d still have enough change to be richer than 99.9999 percent of the global population. 你明白这个概念了吧。这笔巨款可以做很多很多事情。根据联合国的估计，解决全球饥饿问题每年需要 930 亿美元，因此一万亿美元绰绰有余，足以在 2030 年前解决这一问题。这样马斯克还剩下 6,280 亿美元——这足以资助 OpenAI 预计在 2030 年前投入的 6,000 亿美元算力成本，而且他剩下的零头依然比全球 99.9999% 的人口还要富有。

If we split $1 trillion across the entire 349 million US population, then every person would get $2,865. Or, if you theoretically had the liquidity to put $1 trillion into a bank account with a standard 4 percent interest rate, you would earn roughly $110 million every day — almost enough to launch two Falcon 9 rockets. 如果我们把一万亿美元分给全美 3.49 亿人口，每个人可以分到 2,865 美元。或者，如果你理论上有足够的流动资金，将一万亿美元存入一个年利率为 4% 的银行账户，你每天大约能赚 1.1 亿美元——这几乎足够发射两枚猎鹰 9 号火箭了。

Just remember: The next time someone tells you to count your pennies, Elon Musk wouldn’t be able to do so in a lifetime, even if he recruited his small army of offspring to help. 请记住：下次当有人让你“数数你的零钱”时，埃隆·马斯克就算招募他那庞大的后代大军来帮忙，他自己这辈子也数不完他的钱。