https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/02/us/billionaire-boom-jackson-teton-wyoming.html?unlocked_article_code=1.QlA.YXoG.AU9Q-6rDMi4z&smid=url-share

For numbers as big as a trillion, not sure how helpful this is though

When we round to a trillion seconds is 30,000 years... we're DROPPING 1688 years, 8 months and 26 days.

In terms of time: (assuming the starting date is November 20, 2025, subtracting 1,688 years, 8 months, and 26 days lands on the date February 22, 337.

And in terms of money, plenty of people would take just the 26 days we are dropping which is more than $2 million.

However, the exponential notations are not helpful for a common person. They are just another symbolic representation that obfuscates the size / scale of the number. Anyway, I think it's important to note that it is a heavy lift to change the way the business and media world presents their numbers ($1 billion dollars vs $10⁹ dollars)

Just my 2 cents...

I have had good luck using seconds. 100,000 seconds is a little over a day. A million seconds is a little over 11 days. A billion seconds is a little over 30 years. A trillion seconds is a little over 30,000 years. The earliest evidence of anything resembling agriculture, a kind of gardening, is from about 23,000 years ago. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture)

Then I challenge them to pick a company and government program to compare profit and delivery cost. For example, Cameco, a uranium mining company headquartered in Saskatchewan has profits in the range of $200 million per year. Saskatchewan government eliminated our rural public transit (STC) because it cost $17 million more to operate than the revenue it brought in. Easy peasy. One company could have funded the shortfall and still be very profitable. Spread that across a bunch of companies and it would be little more than a rounding error in their profit and loss statements.

Maybe in terms of healthcare and medical research. Maybe compare to State/Nation GDP.

Elon's just one example. Another is the amount of money being invested in AI companies right now. Or crypto markets.. Etc. The numbers are truly astounding — I'm just not convinced that we can wrap our heads around the magnitude of the money that is moving around right now.

Like when they say that Elon Musk is getting a $1 trillion payout from Tesla, it means he could fund the entire US Food Stamp program for a year (100.3 billion)... and still have $899.7 billion leftover.

"Am I average?" If not, then this doesn't really resonate.

I think it would be more meaningful if a person could identify where they land on a continuum of income, savings, net worth, expenses, geography, etc. and then have the numbers put into perspective based on a set of parameters. I think that would be more meaningful.