10 Different Perspectives on the Big Numbers

Have you ever wondered how a million looks like in $100 bills? How about a billion? And a Trillion? Look no further, just scroll down and have a look for yourself. For the sake of clarification, the measure used is the short scale definition of a billion as 1000 million and a trillion as 1000 billion.

This is our starting point, the $100 bill. Most likely you’ve owned or at least had a glimpse at one Franklin note, nothing special right? Now let’s have a look bellow to see as these bills stack.

You would think of a million dollars as a large pile of cash. Actually it’s just about a suitcase full of $100s. Quite disappointing, but still I wouldn’t throw it away. If you happen to find one just give me a call.

A pallet of one hundreds would contain about 100 million dollars.

You’re looking (above) at the most expensive piece of art ever made, the “One Billion Dollar” artwork from artist Michael Marcovici. This work of art is just as the name suggests, 1 billion dollars made with $100 USD notes stacked on 12 standard palettes. The best thing about this piece of art is that, if you own it, you can sell it to yourself by just grabbing the notes. Awesome.

Now we’re getting into the big numbers, consider increasing the height of the previous palettes a bit more so that they fit into 10 palettes instead of 12, you can now shove 4 billion dollars into a 40 feet container by loading 40 palettes in it.

If you ever wondered how much cash can be smuggled out of the country in a single 40 feet container, the answer is 4 billion dollars. Maybe a bit more if you get rid of the wood from the palettes. Notice Paris Hilton right by the side of the container for size comparison.

Still the richest person in the World with assets around $56 billion, this is Bill Gates fortune translated into $100 bills. In the form of Containers… that’s about 14 of them.

Or Pallets in a stadium.

This is what a trillion looks like, 250 containers loaded with $100 notes. Awesome, I know. Notice Paris Hilton still standing there at the right side.

On a bigger scale, a standard Maersk Line container ship with 700 containers, holding 2.8 trillion dollars inside. That’s about twice the United Kingdom Annual Gross National Income. Paris Hilton is still standing there at the front of the ship, she won’t let go of the money.

If you were to grab every piece of currency currently under circulation (not counting bank vaults and reserve banks), just pocket money, mattress money or as economists call it, the M0.

The above is what you would gather. 22 trillion dollars, 7 ships with a total of 4900 containers full $100 notes. Every pirate’s dream comes true. Heck I would turn into a pirate too.

And finally, all the money in the world, including monetary funds, deposits and bank reserves. There’s another know lady for size comparison, the huge block is composed by 1024 pallets in each direction and stacked 156 times.

The total is 640000 pallets making the grand total a hefty 64 trillion dollars.