How to Become the World’s First Trillionaire

Today's guest episode is voiced by Emico, a talented scriptwriter who has been working with Aperture for over two years now.

In 2018, Apple became the world's first trillion-dollar company. To this day, there are just five companies in the world worth over a trillion dollars. To put into perspective just how much 1 trillion is: a million seconds is around 12 days, a billion seconds is about 32 years, and a trillion seconds is more than all of recorded history—just under 32,000 years. In other words, you could never count that high.

It's no surprise that there are no individual trillionaires in the world. Becoming a billionaire is difficult enough, and coming up with creative ways to make money is getting harder and harder every day. Yet, as crazy as it sounds, the person who would be the world's first trillionaire might be alive today. It could be Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, or maybe even a random person working down the street—and you would have no clue whatsoever.

How come one individual could make that much money?

Same asteroid mining. In an interview in 2016, Neil deGrasse Tyson revealed the secrets to amassing Scrooge McDuck levels of wealth. You ready? Ready? You listening? It is likely that the first trillionaire will be the person who exploits the mineral resources on asteroids. The man is entirely correct.

Asteroid mining may soon switch from science fiction to reality, turning billionaires into trillionaires. NASA tracks the locations of thousands of asteroids and near-Earth objects, some of which are worth trillions of dollars. According to NASA, approximately 14,000 near-Earth objects come relatively close to Earth at some point during their orbit. Many of these nearby asteroids contain minerals and materials that hold value on Earth, and there's a seemingly infinite amount of them out there in space.

The asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter alone is estimated to contain upwards of 2 million asteroids larger than one kilometer in diameter and millions of smaller ones. Right now, mining an absurd amount of resources from asteroids and hauling them back to Earth is too expensive. But once the technology gets more affordable, the individuals who extract these resources will be the first trillionaires of our time.

Before we continue with our story, though, I want to take a moment to thank our sponsor for today's video: Brilliant.org, the best place to learn everything STEM related. Figuring out how much asteroids are worth requires a lot of math, which can be quite confusing. That was until I took Brilliant's foundation and advanced math courses.

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Back to you, Emico.

In 2015, an asteroid codenamed 2011 UW158 whipped past our planet at a distance of 2.4 million kilometers—about six times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. It carried more than 90 million tons of platinum in its core, as well as many other rare and precious materials.

Scientists estimate that this one-kilometer-wide platinum-rich asteroid is worth over 5.4 trillion US dollars. This single asteroid is worth more than the two most valuable companies on Earth, Apple and Microsoft, combined. But an even larger opportunity presented itself in 2013.

A 30-meter-wide asteroid named 2012 DA14 made a flyby of Earth that was a little too close for comfort. The asteroid came so close that it flew within the ring of geostationary satellites...