Get ready for the thrill of the trills

On the face of it, it's just three more zeroes. But the jump from billionaire to trillionaire-that's 1 followed by 12 zeros-is a psycho-fiscal fantasy leap. Going by Informa Connect Academy's 2024 Trillion Dollar Club report released last week, trillionaires will start rolling out in another three years. The trills are, of course, today's most familiar billionaires. The first scheduled to go past the post is, of course, Elon-bhai, whose current $251 bn is supposed to inflate to $1 tn in 2027. If no airship disrupts his trajectory, Gautam-bhai is second in line, scheduled to turn a trill in 2028. That same Olympic year-rather aptly in LA-Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Indonesian energy-mining king Prajogo Pangestu are supposed to join the club, with the third richest bloke today, Louis Vuitton boss Bernard Arnault, and the Meta-physical Mark Zuckerberg scheduled to join the fray in 2030.

While it was a big deal when John D 'For He's a Jolly Good' Rockefeller became the world's first billionaire way back in 1916, today billionaires are a dime a dozen-about 2,781 dollar billionaires exist today. A trillion dollars buys pretty much the same things that a billion dollars can buy for a normal super-loaded. But those three extra zeroes provide that extra cushion, not so much financial, but psycho-spatial, to loftily look down from.