Elon Musk hits a trillion

On any given day, Elon Musk is worth about a trillion dollars. His wealth is mostly tied up in shares of SpaceX and Tesla, but if he cashed out everything, his checking account would hit thirteen digits.

Our brains break at trillion

Trillion sounds like a short hop from billion, but it is in fact one thousand times bigger. Research shows the human brain has a very hard time comprehending the actual size and scope of large numbers.

Visualize it through spending

A better way to understand a trillion dollars is through what you can actually buy with it. WIRED partnered with Neal Agarwal to create an interactive tool that lets you spend Elon Musk's money on real items.

What is Spend Elon Musk's Money?

The visualization lets you spend Elon Musk's money on anything from Big Macs to aircraft carriers to the Las Vegas Sphere. It keeps a tally as you go, showing how far a trillion dollars gets you and displaying items you've bought in a physical space.

Meet Neal Agarwal

Neal Agarwal runs Neal.fun, a website he has been building since he was nineteen. It functions as a catalog of everything he is interested in: visualizations, science, and weird game mechanics, exploring what you can do with a website.

A child of the web

Agarwal grew up on the web, spending time on forums at age eight and more time in Club Penguin than in real-world walls. He is around the same age as the web itself, and finds it a privilege to work in a medium where so much remains undiscovered.

The web does things print cannot

Every medium has distinct things you can do with it. You can turn a book into a movie but it is not quite the same. This visualization cannot be printed in a newspaper, making the web uniquely suited to it.

“This visualization we're working on, you can't print it in a newspaper.”

Viral projects, unexpected uses

Agarwal's projects like The Password Game, Space Elevator, The Deep Sea, and Infinite Craft have gone viral. What excites him most is when people play and do things he did not expect or intend, like unlocking Japanese language in Infinite Craft within days.

Communities form around silly things

Around Internet Road Trip, a simulated road trip through Google Street View, a Discord formed where people backseat drove and argued over which city to visit next. People even started birdwatching within the game, showing the web's power to form communities.

Why not apps?

Agarwal made apps as a teenager but disliked that Apple and Google had to approve what he could put in them, with a week wait for approval and no recourse if rejected. A homepage where nobody can tell him what to do appeals to him far more.

From Bill Gates to Elon Musk

Spend Bill Gates' Money launched with Neal.fun itself. It showcased how much one hundred billion dollars was with a counter and purchasable items from Big Macs to the Mona Lisa. It was one of the biggest things Agarwal launched, and the point got across.

The trillion-dollar sequel

In twenty twenty-six, there is a trillionaire in the world, making it the right time to revisit the concept. The new visualization is three D, so you see the cars you are buying on screen rather than just a number, showing the empire of physical stuff.

Infinite space, infinite scale

The web is good at visualizing huge numbers because it has infinite space. The Deep Sea is a one to one scale of the ocean; if printed on paper it would be a mile long, but on the web you can keep scrolling to visualize these enormous numbers.

What can you actually buy?

Once you get to one hundred million dollars, there are only so many things on the market you can buy. The visualization includes the Las Vegas Sphere and aircraft carriers. At a certain point, what more could a person need, making the futility part of the fun.

Technical tricks for rendering

Agarwal initially wanted everything to be three D models on the site, but rendering a million monster trucks would freeze a laptop. He had to do a lot of trickery to get the three D effect without actually using three D models.

Inflation captured in prices

The Big Mac cost two dollars in the original Spend Bill Gates' Money and costs six dollars now. For anything with a direct parallel, the new visualization captures a real price jump, showing inflation over six or seven years.