In many respects, wealth begets wealth. Rich people have attractive investment options that just simply are not available to "regular people. On top of those issues are obstacles related to government policy. The sort of monopolistic and robber-baron activities that created the world's first self-made multi-millionaires in the s is now largely illegal across almost the entire world. Moreover, taxes, in general, are higher now and governments offer fewer loopholes and shelters than in the past.
This is not to say that a creative and motivated entrepreneur will not find ways around these obstacles, but it seems fair to say that the business of getting hyper-rich has gotten harder with time.
Less quantitative, but certainly important, is the role of psychology. Simply put, it seems that most people find it is hard to stay as hungry and aggressive when they have ample wealth as when they were poor and had little to lose or fall back on if things failed. All of these men are quite wealthy and certainly have shown a large degree of comfort with the use of leverage in their investing.
The problem is, though, is that it is hard to imagine that any of these men see the need to take on that kind of risk. But these men already have built what is quite likely to be multi-generational wealth, why would they throw that away on a risky and improbable gamble?
So is there anyone alive today who could approach trillionaire status? Clearly, that is a fine start. But consider how impossibly large Facebook would have to become to fuel that sort of wealth. With his ownership stake, Facebook would have to grow to become ten times the current size of ExxonMobil to make him a trillionaire. One off-the-board candidate to consider would be Craig Venter.
Famous as the founder of Celera Genomics, and for overseeing research that has led to what arguably amounts to the first example of synthetic life, Venter is both brilliant and keenly ambitious. Although he does not appear to be currently targeting cancer as a subject of his research focusing instead on synthetic biology that could be applied to clean fuels , imagine what a cure for cancer could be worth. The U. Then again, clean biofuel is nothing to sneeze at either; it likely will not make Venter a trillionaire, but the idea cannot be wholly dismissed.
Inflation will make the job a little easier a million dollars isn't worth what it used to be , but it is still an incredible and mind-boggling goal. Considering that nobody would have predicted that Gates would become a billionaire from computer software who even thought of "personal" computers when he began or that Al Mann would become a billionaire from insulin pumps, it is likely that the world's first true trillion-dollar idea will come from somebody's imagination and would seem ridiculous today.
Credit Suisse. Accessed May 19, The World Bank. Federal Trade Commission. Iacurci, Greg. Jr, Tom Huddleston. Zetlin, Minda. Com, 16 Jan. Fact Checks. Do Trillionaires Exist? False About this rating.
Top Fact Checks. View all. Most Searched. For instance, did you know that,. One trillion dollars would stretch nearly from the earth to the sun. It would take a military jet flying at the speed of sound, reeling out a roll of dollar bills behind it, 14 years before it reeled out one trillion dollar bills. The Megapenny project uses something a lot more common to most of us, a penny.
Most people have a few in their pockets or in a jar on the bookshelf and it provides a much better sense of scale. Place them side by side in a line and they stretch out one foot. One million pennies creates a wall four feet wide, five feet tall and one foot thick. This wall weighs nearly 6, pounds, or just over three tons!
Stepping up to a billion, things start to change as we start imagining stacks of pennies the size of a typical school bus.
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