Who Will Be The World's First Trillionaire?
With the regularity that you hear the word "billionaire" thrown around these days, it's easy to forget that $1 billion dollars is an absolutely obscene amount of money. No, seriously. Sure, the terms millionaire and billionaire sound similar if you say them fast, but those two wallets look radically different beside each other. As Entrepreneur explains, if one billionaire decided to give his money away, that dude could snap his fingers and turn 1,000 people into instant millionaires.
Is it ethical to amass such fortunes? Depends who you ask, but as Current Affairs points out, there's definitely moral issues with any one individual having ridiculous amounts of cash stored away in a savings account, collecting dust, while so many other people are living in increasing poverty. To be fair, certain billionaires like Bill Gates constantly donate to humanitarian causes ... but on the other hand, don't forget that $1 billion has become chump change to today's richest people. As their wealth continues ballooning, the world may soon see its first trillionaire, horrifyingly enough.
Who's it going to be?
Meet the usual suspects, vying for $1 trillion
$1 trillion, according to Investopedia, is the nominal GDP of Mexico, and is enough cash to buy Apple and Google outright. Mind-boggling? For sure, especially when you realize that today's wealthiest billionaires may reach this number in the near future. For instance, the Independent speculates that Bill Gates could hit $1 trillion within the next 25 years. That said, wealthy as Gates may be, he's probably the one person on the Forbes list who would try the hardest to avoid the trillionaire tag, most likely by donating as much money as possible to various charitable causes. Remember, this is the guy who co-founded the Giving Pledge.
Perhaps a more likely candidate, then, is Jeff Bezos. As the world's richest person, Bezos has so much money that there's even a popular internet game, titled, "You are Jeff Bezos," where players win by spending his every last penny (and yes, to answer your question, it's quite hard to win). According to CNBC, Bezos saw a wealth gain of $68 billion in 2018. Now, he did lose a big chunk of cash in his 2019 divorce, according to Entrepreneur, but if his net worth continues growing at the same pace it has, he could potentially reach trillionaire status by 2026. Another possibility is Mark Zuckerberg, though as you've probably noticed, he's been having some problems — including a $22 billion loss at the end of 2018, according to Business Insider, since everybody hates Facebook now.
Keep in mind, all of this is hypothetical, since there are many variables. A wealth tax could be instituted, a worldwide apocalypse could wipe out all banks... you get the idea. So far, though, Bezos seems to be pulling ahead in this morally dubious trillion-dollar "race."