Money can buy lots of things but not happiness |
A trillion is a thousand billion and a thousand billion is a million million. No wonder such numbers turn us mere minions a bright shade of vermillion.
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Apologies for the Dr Seuss-style rhyming. But a little absurdity feels appropriate because a trillion is such a ridiculous number.
How ridiculous? It would take 10 million years on the average Australian annual salary of just over $100,000 to accrue $1 trillion (and that's without the tax office taking its slice).
In the week since Elon Musk became the first trillionaire in history after his SpaceX company debuted on the Nasdaq exchange, pundits have been treating that incomprehensible number as though it tells us everything.
Unfortunately it tells us next to nothing.
How wealthy is Musk? Financially, extraordinarily so. His paper fortune is greater than the economic output of most countries. But does such a phenomenal sum indicate if he is rich as well as wealthy?
Capitalism does not distinguish between those two words so we use both terms interchangeably. Yet wealth and richness represent vastly different things.
Who is richer? The entrepreneur with a $100 million fortune who rarely sleeps or sees their family, lives in a high state of anxiety, checks their share portfolio every 15 minutes and trusts no one? Or the retired carpenter who spends his mornings playing golf with mates and afternoons teaching his grandchildren how to hammer nails and tie fishing knots?
I've had many encounters with the ultra-wealthy. Not one struck me as content. Some regarded philanthropy as a responsibility. But to a fault they considered life to be a race where the winner made it to their deathbed with the most possessions.
I couldn't help but compare them to the richest person I've known. He lived in a thin-walled Housing Commission home and regarded a plate of poached eggs and a cup of tea sweetened with honey as a feast.
My grandfather was a Depression-era kid who grew up in a series of dilapidated rentals without a father. He worked in a glass factory, never flew in a plane, had no shares and was too old to drive by the time he could afford a car.
But he possessed a rare quality in a world where billionaires are ranked with Olympic-style medal tallies. He understood a concept many of us struggle to comprehend: that little can still be enough.
When is "enough" - a word almost obsolete these days - "enough"? Psychologists have been asking that question for decades. They always find money has the greatest impact when it relieves hardship. After that its effect weakens because enough, it turns out, is never enough for most of us.
If Musk's fortune was distributed equally, everyone on earth would receive about $120, an amount that would make a difference to the hungry and homeless. For the rest of us it would barely register.
Reaction to Musk becoming history's first trillionaire has been as complicated as the man himself, ranging from sycophantic admiration to the open hostility of activist groups posting signs in London declaring: "If you have a trillion dollars in a world where children are starving, you're not a visionary, you're just a c..."
That statement, broiling with resentment, sounds churlish; the equivalent of someone jealously scratching a gleaming Lamborghini. But as the gulf between the wealthy and the poor grows, it is also understandable.
Whatever you........