The Age of the Trillionaire

Once millionaires were rare. Now the US has 18K+ of them. According to the Forbes 2021 list, there are a whopping 2755 global billionaires in 2021, up 660 from Covid Year 2020. Now it’s all about trillions. We’ve trillion dollar economies, trillion dollar industries and much much more.

Q1: How many global tech billionaires does it take to make $1 trillion?
A: 11.
According to the Forbes 2021 list, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is worth $177 billion, Tesla-SpaceX’s Elon Musk—$151b, Microsoft’s Bill Gates—$124b, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerburg—$97b, Oracle’s Larry Ellison—$93b, Google’s Larry Page—$91.5b & Sergey Brin—$89b, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer—$68.7b, Alibaba’s Jack Ma—$48.4b, Michael Dell—$45.1b and TikTok’s Zhang Yiming—$35.6b. Add them all and you cross a cool trillion.
Note: A person who has a 100 billion is called a centibillionaire.

Q2: How many Silicon Valley companies does it take to earn $1 trillion in revenue?
A: 7.
Looking at the Fortune 500 2020 rankings, the earnings are as follows: Amazon $280.5b, Apple $260.2b, Alphabet $161.9b, Microsoft $125.8b, IBM $77.1b, Intel $72b & Facebook $70.7b. How rich is the valley! There are many other global giants in the list too: Samsung $198b, Mitsubishi $136b, Siemens $98b, JD.com $83.5b, Hitachi $80.6b, Sony $76b & Alibaba $73.1b.

Q3: How many companies does it take to achieve a total market capitalization of $1 trillion?
A: 1.
The following tech companies have achieved a valuation of $1 trillion each: Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet. Apple in fact has achieved a marcap of $2 trillion. Facebook came close: $838.7b. In fact one wonders who came up with FAANG (Facebook Apple Amazon Netflix Google). If you notice then Netflix is in none of the above lists, but Microsoft is everywhere. It should in fact be FAAMG.

Q4: How many cryptocurrencies does it take to achieve a valuation of $1 trillion?
A: 1.
It’s amazing that the cryptocurrencies weren’t even in circulation in 2007. Now all the Bitcoins in the world crossed $1 trillion recently. Bitcoin is already better than many of the smaller currencies and like a separate country in its own right. Ethereum is touching $400b and even Dogecoin could touch $100b.

Q5: How many bytes is a trillion?
A: 1 terabyte (TB), or one household.
We all deal with TBs. You may have a drive that big, or cloud storage capacity on those lines. A trillion terabytes is one yottabyte (YB).

Q6: So what comes after trillion?
A: Quadrillion.
A 1000 trillion is a quadrillion. We could be dealing with that in a few decades, who knows? A 1000 quadrillion is a quintillion. Then sextilion, septillion, octillion and so on. A trillion is 10 raised to the power 12. That way the first choice for Google’s name was Googol which is 10 raised to the power of 100. So they got that right and really thought big!