How Big is One Trillion Dollars?

In 2017, the direct spending of the meetings industry, worldwide, was $1.07 trillion.  That amount, at the time, was larger than the net worth of any U.S. company. 

Apple became the first U.S. company to surpass $1,000,000,000,000; they did it in 2018.  Since then other U.S. companies to reach that valuation have included Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft.  Apple exceeded the $2 trillion mark in August of 2020.

The U.S. government spent $6.55 trillion in FY 2019 (October 1, 2019-September 30, 2020).

So how big is a trillion dollars? It’s a million times a million dollars.  That’s a large number to conceptualize. 

When I was a kid, a million dollars seemed like a lot of money.  And it was.  Still is today … just doesn’t buy as much.

I can visualize a hundred-dollar bill. I can hold it in my hand. A stack of (100) $100 bills—that’s $10,000— is approximately half-inch thick. If I get a stack from the bank, I can easily slip it into an interior pocket of my suit jacket, and no one would know it’s there. 

I could fit 30 of those stacks in a grocery bag – that’s $300,000 -- and still have room to spare.

A 4’x4’ skid with $100 dollar bills, shrink-wrapped and banded, would fill a space 48”x40”x42” high, and would contain $100 million dollars.  Ten of those skids would equal one billion dollars.  And that billion dollars would weigh 11 tons. So how does a billion equate to a trillion?  In the first place it’s a thousand times bigger.  A trillion is a thousand billion. It’s a million, million. Wow!

To put it into perspective, let’s look at a few statistics: 

A trillion seconds is more than 31,688 years. 

A trillion dollar bills, laid end to end, would stretch 96,906,656 miles—further than the distance of the earth to the sun.

A trillion dollars laid side to side, would cover more square miles than the states of Rhode Island and Delaware combined.

A trillion dollars on skids would need to be transported by 478 semi-trailers. Unloaded, it would fill a football field from sideline to sideline, and almost goal line to goal line.

If you were to spend $40/second, it would take 289 days to spend a billion dollars. And that’s at a spending rate of almost $3.456 million per day.

At the same spending rate of $40/second, it would take 792.5 years to blow through one trillion dollars. 

In recent years, the term “a trillion dollars” has been tossed around frequently. One trillion dollars would be over $3,000 to every man, woman, and child living in the U.S., or about $4,800 to every individual person in the U.S. over the age of 18.

How big is a trillion dollars? To understate the obvious: a trillion dollars is a lot of money.