Two Trillion Dollars

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Well in two years, Apple's stock has risen as much as it had in the previous thirty-eight, doubling in valuation to two trillion dollars. What on earth does two trillion mean? 2,000,000,000,000. On the short scale used conventionally in the US and in the UK since 1974, the trillion is a number that trips off the tongue easily enough, but is far, far bigger than you might imagine from such a compact little word.

As we're talking about dollars, let's use the greenback as our standard: the One Dollar Bill. This is a thin thing: .0043 inches thick. I'll stick with inches as we're talking American standards here and it's easier to visualise the final scale of our little calculation. A one hundred dollar wrap of bills would stand less than half-an-inch high. By extension then, a thousand dollar stack is just shy of four-and-half-inches tall. A million dollar pile would stretch to over three hundred and fifty-eight feet - eighty feet taller than the top of the dome on St Paul's Cathedral.

So far we've added three zeroes at a time to our number, so we'll stick with the increment. That makes the next number a billion: this yields a pile of cash a little short of sixty-eight miles in stature, stretching just into outer space by six miles. So where does our trillion take us? To around 67866 miles. That's Apple's first thirty-eight years - double that and you get 135,732 miles; over half the distance to the moon from earth. Makes you think, don't it? All that in pieces of paper forty-three-thousandths-of-an-inch thick.