This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.
Numbers are too big now. Just before Halloween, Nvidia made headlines for becoming the first $5 trillion company in history. A week later, Tesla’s shareholders approved a pay package for Elon Musk that could be worth about $1 trillion in a decade. At a certain point, figures this large become uncomfortably meaningless. A million dollars is a lot of money. A billion dollars is a heck of a lot—so much that if you had it, you’d be a billionaire. Now try to imagine how rich you would be if you were pulling in $8 billion every month for the next 10 years, as Musk is effectively about to do. It’s impossible. “The numbers are so big, they are hard to comprehend,” Jeff Sommer recently wrote in The New York Times. And he’s the paper’s finance columnist.
Sommer was referring to the stock market, which has been on an outrageous tear, with the gains concentrated among a tiny number of unfathomably valuable companies.
Continue Reading on The Atlantic
This preview shows approximately 15% of the article. Read the full story on the publisher's website to support quality journalism.