Elon Musk’s wealth could double the economy of his native South Africa as world’s first trillionaire

Catapulted by the market debut of his rocket company Space X, Elon Musk could become the world’s first trillionaire by the end of the day. That level of wealth, all owned by just one person, was once unfathomable. Before Friday, the trillion dollar mark was reserved for measures like the GDP (or staggering debt ) of a handful of major economies — and, in the last decade alone, the value of some of the biggest companies to ever trade on the stock market. Musk’s new title arrives amid a wider acceleration for the richest of the rich. Year after year, his former (although now very distant) billionaires club has reaped a growing number of members — from tech titans to celebrities. All the while, more and more people worldwide are struggling to pay their everyday bills. Many have decried the arrival of the first trillionaire as the latest and most alarming example of that wealth gap. The number “one trillion” is hard in itself for the human mind to comprehend. One trillion dollars is a thousand times greater than $1 billion. And a million times more than $1 million. Still, here are some ways to think about how far that amount of money could go. To the moon and back, over 200 times Thinking about what $1 trillion looks like is almost as astronomical as the interplanetary — and at this point, still far from realized — goals SpaceX has laid out for itself. In terms of physical cash, one trillion U.S. dollar bills laid end to end would stretch nearly 97 million miles (or almost 156 million kilometers). That would account for the distance of more than 200 round trip journeys to the moon — which NASA says sits an average of 238,855 miles (nearly 384,400 kilometers) away from Earth. It would also surpass the roughly 93 million miles (about 150 million kilometers) between Earth and the sun. $122 for every person on Earth There are nearly 8.2 billion people living on Earth today, per the latest numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau. If $1 trillion was divided among the e