Thought Exercise: Trillion-Dollar Thinking

What would you do with a trillion dollars?

One trillion dollars is an absurd amount of resources. The best way to understand the true scale of a trillion dollars is to compare it to another known sum.

Let’s compare the numbers a thousand, a million, and a trillion in terms of seconds.

• One thousand seconds would be about 17 minutes
• One million seconds would be about 12 days
• One billion seconds would be about 32 years
• One trillion seconds would be about 32,000 years

That’s the difference at each scale.

Thought Exercise

As a thought exercise, consider what would be the most good you could do with given resources starting with $1 million and multiplying each denomination by 10 until you get to $1 trillion dollars.

When you think of impact, think of what is important to you and what would last the longest amount of time.

The denominations to consider are:

• $1 million
• $10 million
• $100 million
• $1 billion
• $10 billion
• $100 billion
• $1 trillion

There is no right or wrong here. The hope is that this exercise helps reveal some of your priorities as you increasingly think at a grander scale and a much longer time horizon.