What Does 35 Trillion Dollars Look Like?

There’s no reason at all I’m writing this. It certainly has nothing to do with national debt, that’s for sure. But, maybe you’re curious and you’d like an illustration anyway.

While I could use $1 bills for this to make the illustration crazier, I don’t think anyone picturing $35T would imagine it in $1s. So, while using $100s makes the stack 100 times smaller, I think you’ll agree it’s still sufficiently insane.

So…what would $35,000,000,000,000 look like in $100 bills? Well, we know that each bill is 0.0043” thick, so with that, it’s just simple math.

35,000,000,000,000, divided by 100 = 350,000,000,000

…multiplied by the 0.0043” thickness = 1,505,000,000 inches

…divided by 12, this = 125,416,667 feet

…which you can divide by 5280 feet to convert see that $35T in 100 dollar bills is a stack 23,753 miles high.

For perspective:

• The Space Station, orbiting at a distance of around 260 miles over our heads. This would be 91 stacks of $100s that reach the orbit of the International Space Station.

• Mount Everest is 29,032 feet tall. If you were going to count out $35T in $100s and your stacks were Everest-height, you’d need 4320 stacks

• 35 trillion seconds = 1.1 million years

Now you know why you’ll never see it written with all those zeroes.