Within the next decade, we’ll likely see something truly grotesque: humanity’s first trillionaire. And sure, the word “trillion” gets tossed around in budget talks and national debt debates, but when you really stop to consider what it means, it starts to sound like a bad joke told at the end of a dying empire.

Let’s do the math. A million seconds equals about 11 and a half days. A billion seconds? 31 and a half years. But a trillion seconds? That’s a whopping 31,709 years! That means if Adam from the book of Genesis started counting one number per second the day he was created—about 5,786 years ago according to the Hebrew calendar—he’d be less than a fifth of the way to a trillion. That’s how big this number is. Our brains simply can’t comprehend it.

Now imagine not counting, but owning that number in dollars. A trillion dollars in wealth concentrated in the hands of a single person. You couldn’t physically spend it all if you tried. You couldn’t even lose it if you tried. It’s not just obscene; it’s absurd.

And yet, here we are. We have billionaires racing to become trillionaires while the planet burns, workers starve, and the poor sleep in tents outside their glittering headquarters. They’ll tell you they “earned” it through innovation or brilliance, but no one earns that much. You don’t work your way to a trillion; you extract your way there. You squeeze it out of underpaid labor, tax loopholes, monopolized markets, and a global economy built to funnel wealth upward.

If the story sounds familiar, it should. We’ve heard it before, in Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Remember Smaug, the dragon who slept atop mountains of gold while the people throughout Middle-earth assuredly starved? This is what billionaires and trillionaires are. Modern-day Smaugs, hoarding their treasure while the world beyond their Lonely Mountain burns. The fires consuming us are not mythical. They’re the wildfires of climate collapse, the flames of inequality, the smoldering ruins of quaint communities gutted by corporate greed.

And the irony? These dragons often fashion themselves as philanthropists. They’ll toss a few million here or there toward a charity—mere crumbs compared to the mountains they sleep on—and expect applause. But as Tolkien understood, you don’t fix the problem by waiting for the dragon to grow a conscience. You fix it by redistributing the gold and by ensuring that no one creature ever sits atop that much while others starve below.

Our moral imagination simply isn’t built to understand numbers this large. We can visualize a thousand apples, maybe even a million dollars. But a trillion? It’s beyond human capacity. And that’s precisely why it’s so dangerous. When wealth reaches that scale, it becomes abstract, detached from the real suffering that produced it. It’s no longer money but power. And absolute power, as the old saying goes, corrupts absolutely.

There is no ethical justification for someone possessing billions, let alone trillions. Not when millions go without healthcare. Not when children are hungry. Not when working families can’t afford rent. A trillion dollars is not a personal achievement; it’s a social failure, a moral indictment of a world that worships dragons.

So as the first trillionaire rises from the ashes of a burning planet, remember that they are not a symbol of human progress. They are a symbol of our collective delusion. They are Smaug, clutching their gold while the world outside their mountain dies. And unless we reclaim the treasure—the wealth, the resources, the dignity stolen from the many to enrich the few—there won’t be a world left to save.

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