How Much is a Trillion dollars? What a Trillion Can Buy

You have just won the lottery for a trillion dollars, tax-free! (Just go with it; face reality later.) That’s a 1 with twelve zeroes: $1,000,000,000,000. What will you do with your newfound gains?

First, let’s put a trillion dollars in perspective. A stack of a trillion one-dollar bills would go almost one quarter of the way to the moon and weigh approximately ten tons. Assuming you live fifty more years (and cannot purchase immortality for a trillion dollars and/or your soul), you could spend over $54 million every day of your life and still leave a few grand in the bank for the kids.

So how are you going to spend all that money? You are certainly welcome to share it with us, but here are some other ideas.

Buy All the Sports Leagues – Every billionaire seems to desire a sports team. However, as a trillionaire, you can buy them all. The average NFL franchise is worth $1.4 billion, thus the entire roster of teams is valued at nearly $45 billion. That is pocket change to you. Buy the whole league. Make them play wherever and whenever you want. Have twelve Super Bowls a year and appoint yourself the halftime entertainment. (But please keep Left Shark!) When you are done with that, you could buy up Major League Baseball, the NBA, the NHL and NASCAR, and still have well over three-quarters of your fortune left.

Buy Apple – At current market value as of this writing, you could buy the entire Apple Company (NASDAQ:AAPL) and still have more than $250 billion left over – plenty enough to buy all those sports teams. Would you rather buy the products? Let’s say you buy iPhone 6 Plus handsets with 64GB at retail $849. You could buy 1.178 billion of them, enough to give three of them to every man, woman and child in the U.S. Unfortunately, if you chose to help another country instead, you could only supply 92% of India’s population with one or 84% of China’s population, so a few folks will have to settle for the 5S model. Sorry, folks.

Buy Cars – The most expensive car sold at auction as of this writing was a 1963 Ferrari 250 GTO, which sold for a little over $38 million. You could buy over 26,000 of these cars – if you could find 26,000 of them. You could also buy a nice responsible 2015 Tesla Model S electric vehicle for around $80,000 (with a volume discount, of course). Buy 12.5 million of those and supply every licensed driver in New York, with a few left over. Send those to Beijing; maybe it will clean up their air.

Put People Through College – Free community college…why think small? With $1 trillion and an average cost of a little over $30,000 annually for private colleges, you could put 8.33 million people through all four years of college. Then, as you go on a college tour to be thanked, it’s VIP status and free beer for you at all the parties. Want to pay off all existing student debt instead? Sorry, you can’t – that is more than a trillion dollars.

Help the Government – You could wipe out the 2014 trade deficit ($505 billion), or you could pay for 25% of the $4 trillion budget that was just proposed by President Obama. You could also knock off between 5% and 6% of our national debt (as of this writing, near $18.15 trillion). But why on earth would you do that when you can buy sports leagues and sports cars….

Okay, time to return to reality: you’re not the Earth’s first trillionaire… yet. But if you keep reading MoneyTips….