The world’s number one positions are often fleeting. Look at the last few years when Bernard Arnault and Larry Ellison grabbed the top spot for a while. So did 29-year-old Sophie Downing in Nottingham. In fact, she momentarily became richer than world number one Elon Musk, who is worth around $850 billion. If that name is shocking, you fret not. It shocked Sophie too, and the barista as well, when a Christmas gift voucher briefly made her 100,000 times richer than Elon Musk, at least in theory.
Downing, who only wanted to put her £10 ( $14) gift card to good use for a matcha latte at her local coffee shop, 200 Degrees in Nottingham, was shown a remaining balance of more than £63 quadrillion ( $80 quadrillion). That is 63 followed by 15 zeros. It makes Musk look poor and is about 670 times the total of the world economy, yet sadly she could only spend the money on coffee and croissants. Of course, it took only a moment to discover the administrative error that caused it. The gift card number, not the gift card value, had been entered into the wrong part of the till.
The business owner told the BBC, “I’m just enjoying being the richest woman in the world on paper while it lasts.” That mix of shock, euphoria, and confusion was shared with the people at the branch, who seemed just as baffled. One of them remarked, “I’ve never seen that before,” as they handed her the receipt. It is a once-in-a-lifetime moment, a goof-up of the good kind that you wish to remember, and perhaps even manifest. Especially for a business owner who puts so much at stake beyond the nine-to-five to chase gratification and success. Obviously, Sophie shared the fleeting moment of being the world’s richest woman on paper with her partner. “You don’t ever see anything like that happening, so I sent it to my partner, and he thought it was really funny as well.”
The sharp business owner also admitted she would have preferred a £63 quadrillion gift card if it worked at the supermarket. To end this hilarious moment, she used the actual remaining amount left on her card on one more drink and put an end to the gift-card fantasy. And here’s the part that makes stories like this travel so fast. They are rare, but when they do happen, they briefly flip the script. For a moment, a regular person feels more powerful than the Bezos’s and Ellison’s of the world, even if the “power” lives on a receipt and can only be redeemed for caffeine.
It has happened before too. Back in 2013, PayPal accidentally showed a Pennsylvania man, Chris Reynolds, sitting on more than $92 quadrillion in his account, briefly making him the richest man on paper before the error was corrected. Different screen, same feeling. The universe hands you a number so absurd it turns ordinary life into a billionaire headline, if only for a moment.
How hard would Elon Musk have to work to dethrone someone worth $80 quadrillion?
As this story is all about wishful thinking and wild possibilities, it makes you wonder what the one man who pushed his net worth to a record-setting $850 billion would have to do to reach a benchmark this mammoth. The answer is, you cannot “work” your way there. Not in any human sense.
Even if Musk could somehow earn his entire $850 billion net worth all over again, every single year, he would still need around 90,000 to 100,000 years to catch up to her receipt. Which is exactly why the real truth here is that Sophie was not competing with billionaires. She was competing with the very concept of math.
