FRACTURE

A few days ago, I saw a news headline claiming that Elon Musk had become the world’s first trillionaire. At first, I ignored it. After all, he was already the richest person in the world. Going from hundreds of billions to a trillion didn’t seem that extraordinary for someone like him—it was just a thousand times more. But the number “one trillion” is far larger than most of us can truly comprehend.

Imagine earning \$10 (about 1,000 taka) every second. Sounds absurd, right? You never spend a single cent—you simply keep saving \$10 every second. Most people in our country struggle through both childhood and adulthood just to earn \$10 a day when starting out, and now you’re earning that same amount every second. At that rate, after just one hour, you would have earned \$36,000. That’s already an incredible amount of money. Keep going for a full day, and you’ll have earned \$864,000. To accumulate one billion dollars, you would need more than three years of nonstop earning at \$10 per second. To reach one trillion dollars, you would have to wait approximately 3,215 years. 

Even if you somehow earned \$100 (about 10,000 taka) every second—an amount many people struggle to earn in an entire month—it would still take over 321.5 years to reach one trillion dollars. This perspective reveals a surprising fact about money: money is not really “real”—it’s an “illusion”. A few decades ago, becoming a billionaire was considered an almost unimaginable achievement. Today, even if you possessed \$500 billion, you still wouldn’t be able to surpass Elon Musk—you would only be halfway there.

By the way, even with \$500 billion, you’d still be closer to the second-richest person in the world than to Elon Musk.

Money is just printed paper—they can print more of it whenever they want. By itself, it has no real value. It’s merely a tool for exchanging assets. Money is practically endless, and whatever is endless can never be truly valuable.

Yet people still fight over money like animals. Why? Because that’s exactly what they want us to do: get distracted and fight over something that can be created, manipulated, and controlled, while they quietly collect the value we produce.

We spend our lives chasing numbers on a screen, competing in an endless race, while the real rewards are taken elsewhere.

They distract us with the bait and take what we leave behind.