Include the Messy Bits

This week, Elon Musk became history's first trillionaire.

A trillion dollars. 1,000 billion dollars. It sounds like some number Dr. Evil came up with.

1 million seconds is about 11 days, and 1 billion seconds is 32 years. 1 trillion seconds is 32,000 years.

If you spent one million dollars every single day, it would take you approximately 2,740 years to spend a trillion.

If you stacked $100 bills in a pile, would reach 678 miles into the sky. In $1 bills, it would reach the sun.

The entire annual gross domestic product of Switzerland, a prosperous, developed nation of nine million people, is roughly one trillion dollars.

Elon Musk now holds the financial equivalent of a country's annual productivity, alone.

In the United States, it would take approximately 14.5 million Americans earning the median salary to reach $1 trillion in a year.

It is a functionally incomprehensible number. And now that we've tried to feel it: what does this actually mean?

Not about Musk, specifically. I'm not interested in the morality of the man, at least not presently. What I'm interested in is what this moment reveals about money, the stories we've built around it, and what we've quietly given up in pursuit of it.

Money is a very good lie.

We don't often talk about it this way. But money — all of it, in every form it has ever taken — is a collective fiction. A story we've agreed to tell each other, generation after generation, with enough conviction that it holds.

When early humans needed a way to exchange value, they used what was around them. Beads. Shells. Salt. Fine minerals. Gold. Each system worked not because the object had intrinsic value, but because enough people agreed that it did. When the shells ran out or became too cumbersome, they switched to something else. When gold became impractical to haul, they invented paper slips printed with numbers, meant to represent gold sitting in a vault somewhere. And then, when even gold became a constraint, humanity abandoned the pretense entirely and started creating money out of thin air.

This is not a conspiracy. It's just how money works.

And Elon Musk becoming a trillionaire is, in a strange way, a reminder of this. Because a trillion dollars did not exist in the world before it was needed. At the peak of the Gilded Age, John D. Rockefeller was the wealthiest person on earth with a fortune roughly $340 billion in today's dollars. Cornelius Vanderbilt: around $185 billion. The legendary Mansa Musa, the 14th-century Malian emperor whose 1324 pilgrimage to Mecca was so lavish that it crashed gold markets across North Africa for over a decade, is often cited as the wealthiest individual in all of recorded history with a fortune loosely estimated at $400 billion in today's equivalent.

None of them were trillionaires. Not because they weren't powerful or influential, but because the concept didn't exist yet.

The number grew because we needed it to. We did what we always do and created more.

Which means — and here’s the good news — you could be the world's second trillionaire! 

The money is out there. There is no ceiling. The supply of currency is, in the most literal sense, infinite.

So why don't more of us feel that way?

Most of us move through life treating money like a fixed pie: a resource divided at some point before we arrived, and our only job is to claim our slice. When we don't have enough, we feel small. When someone else has more, we feel cheated.

The joke is that the entire emotional architecture of how we relate to money is built on a premise that isn't actually true.

I am not naive. Rent is real. Medical bills are real. The car getting towed, the account hitting zero — those consequences are real, and they matter. But the story we tell about what that number means about us, our worth, our intelligence, our standing — that part is invented.

And when I look at what it actually costs to accumulate money at the scale of someone like Elon Musk, I find myself asking a different question than most people seem to.

Not: How did he do it?

But: What did it cost him?

Elon Musk self-reports working between 80 and 120 hours a week. He has said, in his own words, that he works "every waking hour."

Every waking hour. Of an adult human life.

Electric cars and rocket ships are genuine contributions to the world. But when we hold someone up as having figured out something the rest of us haven't, we should be honest about what their life actually looks like and decide if that is something we want for ourselves.

There's a scene in The Devil Wears Prada 2 that has been living in my head. Anne Hathaway's character is offered the chance to write an exposé on Meryl Streep's character — the ruthless, brilliant, successful editor at the top of her field. At the end of the film, Meryl Streep doesn't try to stop her. She instead says: Write the book. But include the messy bits. I want people to know there is a cost.

The research on this is not subtle. Study after study—including the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest-running investigation into what makes human lives go well, spanning over 80 years—arrives at the same conclusion: the quality of our relationships is the single greatest predictor of a long, healthy, satisfied life. 

Not income.
Not status.
Not the net worth figure.

The people who are happiest in old age are not the ones who accumulated the most, but the ones who stayed connected.

The Greeks had a concept called thymos, loosely translated as the human need to be recognized, to have your dignity acknowledged, to be seen as worthy.

The political philosopher Francis Fukuyama wrote about a specific variant: megalothymia, the desire not just to be recognized as equal, but to be recognized as superior. To win the comparison. To occupy a position others cannot.

I think this explains more about the pursuit of extreme wealth than any economic theory does.

Because at a trillion dollars, you are no longer solving a practical problem. No human being needs a trillion dollars to live well, to do meaningful work, to provide for their family, to experience beauty, or to be loved. At a trillion dollars, you are keeping a score that only you are counting, winning a competition that exists entirely within your own ambition.

Thymos is not inherently destructive. The desire to be recognized, to leave something meaningful behind, to matter are deeply human impulses. They've driven art and science and civilization.

But when thymos curdles into megalothymia, when the recognition we crave becomes contingent on being above rather than among, something shifts. The pursuit stops being about creation and starts being about position.

And position, by definition, cannot satisfy you. Because someone is always close behind.

So here is where I want to land.

If money is a story, and extreme wealth is a competition with no finish line, and the research keeps pointing us back to the same handful of things — what actually constitutes wealth worth building?

As someone who is on the search to build lasting, meaningful wealth, I think about this in three categories:

1. Your body. 
   Your health is a long-term asset in a way that a bank account isn't. You can lose a fortune and rebuild it. You cannot rebuild a body you've spent decades neglecting. The human organism was not designed for 120-hour work weeks, chronic sleep deprivation, or sustained stress loads. We know this. Our biology tells us this constantly. And yet, we celebrate people who override it as though they've discovered a secret, rather than mortgaging themselves against a debt that will eventually come due.

2. Your relationships. 
   The people who know you, who choose you, and who show up are not a soft benefit of a well-lived life. It is “the thing.” Social isolation carries mortality risks comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Connection is the foundation of the infrastructure.

3. A life that feels like yours. 
   This one is harder to quantify, but most of us know it when we feel it. It's the difference between a life you're building and a life you're performing. Between going through the motions and taking full creative control. Between pursuing something because you want it and pursuing something because you think you’re supposed to.

These assets don't show up on any balance sheet. No market tracks them. They compound quietly, invisibly, over decades.

And no one writes a piece about you on every major news channel.

But they are available to you right now. Not after the next milestone. Not at the next income threshold.

Right now.

What Elon's trillion actually teaches us.

Elon Musk becoming the world's first trillionaire is, in its way, a strange gift.

Not because it's inspiring or because it proves that “anything is possible for anyone willing to grind hard enough.” But because a number that large—a number that no human being could spend in ten lifetimes—finally makes the fiction visible.

At a certain scale, money stops being a resource and becomes an abstraction. And when you see it clearly as an abstraction, you can finally ask the real question: if money is a story we've collectively agreed to tell, what story do we actually want to be living?

The ancient Greeks had a word for the well-lived life: eudaimonia. Often translated as happiness, it's better understood as flourishing, living fully in accordance with your deepest nature and highest capacities.

They didn't spend much time on the first trillionaire.

They spent their time on you. On the texture of your days. On whether you were living toward something true.

That seems, to me, like the right place to spend ours.

Until next time, live uninterrupted.

~ Coleman