PayPal just made 56-year-old Chris Reynolds a quadrillionaire. Yes, a quadrillionaire. For a little while, anyway.
When Reynolds opened his monthly email account update on Friday, he was pleasantly surprised with a balance of $92,233,720,368,547,800—922,337,203,685,478 times more than the $100 or so worth of transactions he usually does per month on PayPal. And very obviously some sort of mistake.
For the record, quadrillion is a real number. It's 1300 times more than the entire world's GDP, and trillions and trillions more than the $73 billion fortune of Carlos Slim, the richest man in the world. And though there are random financial clerical errors all the time, this 17-figure sum is just about the biggest PayPal flub we've ever seen. Unfortunately, Reynolds didn't get to keep any of his accidental quadrillions; by the time he logged into his account, PayPal had already corrected his balance. Back to the soup line.
When Reynolds opened his monthly email account update on Friday, he was pleasantly surprised with a balance of $92,233,720,368,547,800—922,337,203,685,478 times more than the $100 or so worth of transactions he usually does per month on PayPal. And very obviously some sort of mistake.
For the record, quadrillion is a real number. It's 1300 times more than the entire world's GDP, and trillions and trillions more than the $73 billion fortune of Carlos Slim, the richest man in the world. And though there are random financial clerical errors all the time, this 17-figure sum is just about the biggest PayPal flub we've ever seen. Unfortunately, Reynolds didn't get to keep any of his accidental quadrillions; by the time he logged into his account, PayPal had already corrected his balance. Back to the soup line.
Comment