The rise of the world's first trillionaire

In the last few years, billionaires have only been adding to their net worth, and it likely will not be long until someone reaches the status of a trillionaire.

When will someone be worth $1 trillion?

It is hard to pinpoint a definitive answer, given that the net worths of the world's richest people are constantly fluctuating. However, a number of financial calculators have attempted to predict when the world might see its first trillionaire.

Oxfam International released an inequality report which determined that the world "could have its first-ever trillionaire in just a decade." This assessment comes as the world's five richest people have more than doubled their fortunes since 2020 to a staggering $869 billion, Oxfam said.

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Finance and procurement platform Approve also analyzed the state of the world's priciest elite a few years back, looking at data from the 30 wealthiest people in the world. Based on 2022 figures, their results showed that someone's net worth could exceed $1 trillion sooner — potentially sometime in 2024, though this appears to be getting less likely as the year begins to wind down. 

Who will it be, and will there be others?

The obvious answer seems to remain X CEO and Tesla founder Elon Musk. The controversial tech mogul is currently valued at $252 billion, according to Forbes. He has around $45 billion more than the second-richest person in the world, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who has also been cited as one of the world's potential next trillionaires.

However, while Musk's net worth has been up-and-down recently, he still appears to remain the consensus choice to become the world's first person with a $1 trillion net worth. "Of the 21 individuals who stand a chance of reaching this phenomenal milestone in their lifetime, Elon Musk is predicted to be the first," said CEO Magazine. 

Musk's net worth has been fluctuating in recent years, in part due to plunging Tesla stocks and a number of controversial decisions he made surrounding his $44 billion acquisition of X. Despite this, his wealth remains consistent, largely due to his financial holdings in Tesla, SpaceX and others. Musk is "the clear favorite to become the first trillionaire by 2027," according to a financial report from Informa Connect. This is largely because Musk's net worth is "growing at an average rate of 109.88% every year."

But if someone else were to beat Musk to the punch, who could it be? Indian business model and port developer Gautam Adani is the second-likeliest person to become a trillionaire, according to Informa. While Adani currently has a net worth less than $100 billion, his companies "have multi-billion market cap valuations," and his wealth has an "average growth rate of 122.86% per year" — higher than Musk's. If this pace continues, Adani could become a trillionaire by 2028. Adani is also working on large projects such as a "private bid to take over the state-run Jomo Kenyatta International Airport" in Kenya for $1.9 billion, said Bloomberg. 

Others cited by both Informa and Approve as potential trillionaire candidates include Zhang Yiming, the founder of Chinese tech company ByteDance Technology, who is valued at $45 billion and is the richest person in China, and Jensen Huang, the CEO of the massively rising chipmaker Nvidia, who has a net worth of $77 billion.

However, even some ultra-rich people themselves believe the world's first trillionaire will come from the tech space. The "world's first trillionaires are going to come from somebody who masters AI and all its derivatives and applies it in ways we never thought of," billionaire Mark Cuban, known for owning the Dallas Mavericks and his entrepreneurialism on ABC's "Shark Tank," said in 2017. The world will "see more technological advances over the next ten years than we have over the last thirty. It's just going to blow everything away."

So just how much money is $1 trillion?

It can be hard to grasp just how much more money $1 trillion is than $1 billion. In essence, $1 trillion is equal to 1,000 billion dollars, which itself equals 1,000 million dollars, Investopedia said. A trillionaire would be the custodian of a "phenomenal sum of money."

$1 trillion is so large that trying to put it into perspective can often be difficult. For starters, the sum is roughly the same as many countries' gross domestic products, according to the World Bank. This includes Australia, which has an estimated GDP of $1.6 trillion, Brazil, which has a GDP of $1.9 trillion, and Indonesia, which has a GDP of $1.3 trillion. While many countries have GDPs in the tens of trillions, there are still a number of highly developed states that just barely reach the trillion-dollar mark.

USA Today compiled a list of some of the things a person could do with $1 trillion. For example, you "could buy a very nice apartment for everybody" in San Francisco, a city where the average rent is $3,600 and home prices average $1.35 million. A sports fan could buy the Miami Dolphins football team — 1,000 times over. In fact, you could buy every team in every sports league, Fox Business said, and "still have well over three-quarters of your fortune left." You could also buy all of the shares of ExxonMobil, McDonald's and Coca-Cola and have money to spare.

Beyond the financial aspects of $1 trillion, it can be hard to comprehend just how much more one trillion is than one billion, of anything. USA Today noted that if you were to time travel back one billion seconds, you would be in 1987, which, relative to world history, is not long at all. However, time travel back one trillion seconds, and you would be quite a bit farther back on the timeline — approximately 30,000 B.C.

Should trillionaires even exist?

Some people would argue they should not, and there is a scale that shows just how vast wealth inequality is — not only in the United States, but the world. A video made by CollegeHumor illustrates just how much money someone like Jeff Bezos truly has, critiquing his wealth in contrast to claims from Amazon employees that they work long hours without bathroom breaks. Other ultra-wealthy billionaires have faced similar backlash.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates, himself one of the longtime richest people in the world, has weighed in on whether people should be able to accumulate this type of wealth. "For the first time in my life, people are saying, 'Okay, should you have billionaires?'" Gates said to Forbes. "If you really implemented something like that, the amount you would gain would be much less than the amount you would lose."

Others disagree with the premise that a trillionaire will be among us so soon — and whether anyone would actually want to be a trillionaire. There is "not much obvious personal benefit to becoming a trillionaire," economics professor Tyler Cowen said at Bloomberg. Indeed, that shift could make whoever that trillionaire is a "political target." X, for example, is now worth much less than Elon Musk originally paid for it, making it "that much harder for him to become a trillionaire," Cowen said.

And at the end of the day, taxes rule all, Cowen said. Whenever it happens, at some point the global economy ensures there will be a trillionaire, and a "good share of the credit should go to the Federal Reserve, not necessarily the person who earned the money."