Last month I ridiculed a cocaine-ruined money launderer who tried to jack the Feds for a $15 trillion tax refund. That number was so large as to be preposterous — more than the European Union’s $14.8 trillion gross domestic product. Or, looked at another way, enough money to buy 18.8 trillion orders of Taco Bell triple layer nachos with enough left over for 73 billion cheesy double beef burritos and several million caramel apple empanadas for dessert.
This month we’ve got a number even more inconceivable: $23,148,855,308,184,500. That, according to MSNBC, is how much Visa erroneously charged several of its credit card customers.
| In New Hampshire, Josh Muszynski said he swiped his debit card at a gas station to buy a pack of cigarettes and when he later checked his account online found that he had been charged the 17-digit number — a stunning $23,148,855,308,184,500.
In North Texas, Jon Seale saw the same 17-figure bill on his credit card statement, presumably for a meal July 13 at a restaurant owned by celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck, NBC affiliate KXAS TV reported. “For that amount of money, I could actually own Wolfgang Puck himself,” Seale said. |
That’s about as under as statements get. For $23,148,855,308,184,500 — or more than $23 quadrillion — Seale could have bought a lot more than Wolfgang Puck. The celebrity chef makes $16 million a year, according to Forbes. Puck would have to work for nearly 1.5 billion years for Seale to see a return on his Puck purchase. So what else can you get for $23 quadrillion?
- Visa, 463,000 times over. The credit card company has a market cap, or total stock market value, of about $50 billion.
- More than 17,000 iPhone 3GSs for every single person on earth.
- 857 billion fully-loaded Toyota Priuses (Prii?). That’s more than 2,700 Toyotas for every person in America, or about 125 of the hybrids for every single person on earth.
- The new $1.5 billion Yankee Stadium — the most expensive sports venue ever built in the USA — 15.4 million times over. That’s nearly two Yankee Stadiums for every single person in New York City.
- Every team in the NBA, more than 2 million times over. So buck up Kansas City residents. You may not have an NBA franchise of your own, but for $23 quadrillion, each of the 2 million residents of the Kansas City area could buy every team in the NBA…if there were 2 million NBAs.
- America’s $11.6 trillion national debt, nearly 2,000 times over.
Visa attributed the astronomical overcharge to “a temporary programming error” and a “technical glitch” that affected “fewer than 13,000″ transactions. MSNBC reported that a “Visa representative said affected customers will have any overdraft fees removed.” Phew.
(Photo: Halcyon/Flickr)