Trillionaire Number Two

“Oh man, he beat me to it!” my roommate Bryan exclaims as he lounges on the living room couch. 

“Who beat you to what?” I ask, startled by his sudden outburst.

He stops scrolling his phone and looks up at me. “Elon Musk. He just became the world’s first trillionaire.”

“Elon beat you to becoming a trillionaire?”

Yes. But no worries, I’m going to be trillionaire number two.

“Yeah, sure,” I snort. “Man,‌ you barely have two nickels to rub together.”

“Not for long,” he retorts.

“And how’s that?”

He picks up a notebook and pen on the coffee table and scribbles on the page. He holds up the notebook to my face and shows me what he wrote. 

$ 0,000,000,000,000.00 

“See,” he smirks, I have all the zeros. I only need a “1” to replace the “0”in front and I’ll be the next trillionaire! 

I roll my eyes. “Man, that’s so lame.” 

“Just wait and see, bro. I’m smarter than Elon. If he can do it, then so can I. He flashes a smug grin and returns to scrolling on his phone.

He’s right in a way; it is a trillion dollars, but it’s only numbers on paper, not real assets or cash. I bet the odds are less than a trillion-to-one that he could ever reach that fanciful goal. Because replacing that “0” with a “1” will be more difficult than traveling from Earth to Mars on one of Elon Musk’s spaceships.