Do you know what a trillion dollars will make you do? Will you buy a private jet or dune buggy fleet, or dine on gold-plated chicken wings, perhaps? Or would you just withdraw and burn a big pile of cash for fun?
Some amounts of money are so high, they defy imagination: Mexico's gross domestic product is just short of a trillion dollars. So, for some reason, it would take more than 16,000 years to collect a billion dollars on the median US household income of just under $60,000, assuming you didn't spend any of it. It will take you over 16 million years to make a trillion.
With a market cap of $1 trillion, Apple recently became the first US-listed firm. So how long will it be before the same milestone is surpassed by a person and what will they have to do to get so filthy rich?
Been there, done that: we would have had the first trillionaire already,
Hyperinflation created a lot of trillionaires in Zimbabwe 10 years ago, but it's probably safe to assume that they do not count in a currency so useless that a Z$100 billion bill will cover only one ride on a public bus.
However, for ancient rulers, financiers and kleptocrats, there's a better scenario. It is very tricky to estimate their income, but a few regularly make the list. King Mansa Musa of Mali had so much gold that his wealth was literally beyond understanding.
Other rulers had immense resources, both in the Middle Ages and in ancient times, but it's difficult to gauge just how much. The Roman Emperor Augustus Caesar's fortune was measured by Stanford historian Ian Morris at around $4.6 trillion, but he acknowledges these numbers need to be taken with a fistful of salt.
Even people like you and me can watch TV today, use the Internet or walk into Boots or Walgreens and purchase medications such as Viagra or Prozac for which Roman emperors would have offered their hind teeth. We're wealthier in a way than Augustus, and yet he was wealthier in other ways, on a scale that makes Donald Trump look like he's on the minimum wage, he notes.
Putting people with robots out of jobs
Many futurists assume that the first trillionaire is going to make their fortune from inventions that make the technology of today seem a little ancient. In recent years, artificial intelligence ( AI) has advanced in leaps and bounds, and its future applications could affect virtually every corner of our lives. Companies invest heavily, and at least one billionaire thinks it's a solid investment.
But how exactly can AI build tycoons? There are several possibilities. "For drug development and design, machine learning is already being used. Imagine a modern AI-engineered medicine that can dramatically increase the lifetime of people or cure Alzheimer's ... Martin Ford, the author of Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Prospect of a Jobless Future, says that will certainly result in huge wealth.
The threat, however, is that the killing of workers is a trillion-dollar fortune. If a computer can do the same job without demanding wages, holidays or health benefits, why employ a human? A smaller workforce doing the same job could lead to more cash floating to the top. AI could replace as many as 800 million jobs, the consultancy McKinsey reports.
In the 19th century, these concerns and threats had many similarities. The industrial revolution, like today's age of digital change, fueled a major shift in the economy and made some people incredibly wealthy. Cornelius Vanderbilt made a fortune from rail and shipping, while John D Rockefeller made his oil fortune and was probably the first billionaire in America (although this is contested), although Henry Ford was the second carmaker. All were undoubtedly richer than the founder and CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos is today, adjusted for inflation (but again, comparisons need to be handled with caution).
It is up for discussion precisely how the potentially wrenching economic transition of this century will play out. Some assume that the focus of work will simply change (similar to the industrial revolution before it) and we will simply end up doing various kinds of jobs. Others feel the change could be more profound, and as AI progresses and takes on an growing array of positions, it could leave some employees permanently unemployed. And how easily things are going to change is hard to predict.
"It's certainly a good possibility if the AI is leveraged (something that seems inevitable) for work automation," says Martin Ford. "On the other hand, if the generation of wealth results mainly from exploiting AI in financial markets or biotechnology, then the effect on labor markets might be less immediate, but possibly still unavoidable once technology scales through other industries."
Cryptocurrencies
There are bloody evangelists and pump-and-dump scammers in the crypto-world. But in a very short time, it has made a diverse community of individuals wealthy. In early February, Forbes assembled a list that indicated that there were at least a few potential billionaires, including the Winklevoss twins and Ripple's (XRP) founder, Chris Larsen, who, according to the New York Times and other US media, briefly became one of the richest men in the world at the height of the crypto craze.
"In many respects we never imagined in the past, there are a lot of innovative people finding out how to monetise this," says Thomas Frey, a futurist who has written extensively about the sectors that would produce the first trillionaire. "Right now, there's so much activity in that room. And so many people are interested, that there's the opportunity to scale it up quickly.
Bitcoin made the most headlines, with 1,318 percent growth during 2017, but when it comes to rapid growth, it wasn't even near the top of the list. Other well-known cryptocurrencies, such as Litecoin and Ethereum, grew faster, while Ripple (XRP) grew 36,018 percent in the same period , meaning that by the beginning of 2018, $100 invested in Ripple in January 2017 would have risen to over $36,000. With such high returns, it's easy to see how investors, if they cash out, can get rich really fast.
However, any triumph could be temporary. It has been shown that cryptocurrencies are exceptionally unpredictable. It was out of date until it went to print when Forbes produced its list earlier this year, with many of the richest (like the Winklevosses) falling below the billion-dollar line until publication.
So, a wealthy and reckless tycoon, making a massive casino-style bet on a cryptocurrency and getting lucky, might be the first trillionaire. But Thomas Frey says that anyone who crosses the threshold of twelve figures this way may only survive for a day or two in the stratosphere until gravity teaches them a lesson.
Rock tycoons of the moon
The planet has limited natural resources, such as oil or diamonds, but it seems that our appetite for them continues to expand. For some metals used in electronic parts, that's especially true. And if we can't find what we need on earth, someone may be able to make a fortune finding them somewhere else.
There are several riches to be gained in space, according to the website Asterank, which estimates the mineral and benefit potential of known asteroids. Deposits worth over $100 trillion could be concealed by the most valuable asteroids.
"According to Takeshi Hakamada, founder and CEO of ispace, a company that hopes to land on the moon and ultimately benefit from it too," The space resources market is an untapped market and it will definitely be a lucrative one, so there is a great opportunity, particularly for early investors.
The problem , of course, is that recovering these riches is incredibly costly. Many corporations have gone bankrupt searching for gold here on earth, so the financial risk of doing the same in space is obvious. But Hakamada says there is a longer game. Extracting resources is only the first step in building an entire space economy.
The use of resources would only be the starting point for opening up other business opportunities in space. When resources are established, businesses will be able to view the Moon as an extension of their company on Earth, allowing individuals to live and work on the Moon, he says.
Fountain of Youth
Immortality has long been a human dream, and any number of studies, both conventional and eccentric, have been the focus of it. A few people have cryogenically frozen themselves in the event that medical research catches up with whatever killed them.
Other options are also being looked at by major players. A billion-dollar research company called Calico, which studies the ageing process and focuses on "moonshot" strategies that prolong life, has been funded by Google.
The market is fairly simple, and Thomas Frey says it's easy to see how in a very short period of time a cost-effective solution promising immortality will scale up. Frey points out that if someone on earth spent $10 a day on a pill to keep them alive, and it was basically a life-or - death decision to continue taking the pill, whoever made the pill would be incredibly wealthy.
Science, however, is so fresh and so untested that it's hard to find out which strategies are promising and which ones are not.
We saw the first trillionaire, but there are no trillionaires yet.
Let's just say it: there's a fair chance Amazon creator Jeff Bezos will be the first trillionaire. He 's got more than $150bn in fortune, which means he 's got a $50bn head start on the next richest man, Bill Gates, who's too busy giving his money away to catch up.
The world of business is always fickle, and a poor stock market week could wipe out a lot of that money overnight. Yet Amazon seems to be getting stronger at the moment. When Amazon reveals that it will close in on their turf, whole sectors now tremble. And its earnings, much more modest than its enormous sales for a long time, are rising.
Also, nothing is as good as wealth itself in generating wealth. And one calculation indicates that, to stop gaining more money, Jeff Bezos will have to invest $28 million a day. Oxfam research has found that the wealth owned by the super-rich has risen by an average of 11 percent a year since 2009. We might see the world's first trillionaire in 25 years if billionaires manage to secure these returns. Not everybody buys that calculation, but the richest person in the world will have to be a candidate, no matter what.
Are we going to have trillionaires?
The claim in favor of vast wealth is that it is a reward for innovators who change the way we live profoundly, and typically for the better. A trillion-dollar wealth might come from a large, productive business that generates employment and provides valuable goods and services. But is it really going to occur that way?
Sure, wealth honors creativity and hard work to a certain degree. But it doesn't, to a large degree,' says Ana Caistor Arendar, head of Oxfam's fight for injustice.
On the back of creativity, not all fortune is earned. Some of the affluent inherit their estate, while others inherit a head start at least. They have the means to more conveniently escape taxation than the rest of us. Often, their firms pay low salaries to citizens in developed countries. She claims, in short, that a trillion-dollar fortune might come at everyone else's cost.
But reigning in vast wealth is tricky. The highest marginal tax bracket hit 90 percent in the US in the middle of the last century, but relatively few paid it in practice because it was based on profits rather than savings. And the affluent employ good accountants who help them retain as much of their money as they can legally.
Few governments have shown any particular recent interest in these measures being revisited. Then again, governments were motivated into motion by the vast inequalities in wealth of the gilded age. Perhaps governments may feel forced to behave as the super-rich demand an ever-greater share of the pie.
But if they don't, then it could only be a matter of time for the first trillionaire.
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