A 56 year PR company boss got a shock when he received his PayPal balance via email. He’d turned into the richest man in the world with $92,233,720,368,547,800 to his name.
That’s a big number, but it turns out to be quite easy to say – it’s a quadrillion dollars (and change). Sadly when he logged into his PayPal account his balance was zero, which is what he’d expected it to be.
To put it into perspective the total GDP for the entire world was only around $71.83 trillion in 2012. That’s under a thousandth of what the massive PayPal account balance was.
Of course if the guy had been in the UK it wouldn’t have sounded quite as impressive to be a billiardaire (one up from a billionaire. Due to our different names for large numbers he’d have had to stick another nine noughts on the end to be considered a true English quadrillionaire.
PayPal have apologised and promised a small donation to the charity of their customer’s choice. We don’t know how small the donation will be, but we’re betting they won’t make a mistake and send the a quadrillion dollars, even PayPal don’t have that much money.
