For a brief moment in time, Chris Reynolds, 56, a public relations executive from Pennsylvania, was the richest man in the world.
Reynolds’ glorious moment happened when he opened his June PayPal statement to find that he’d become a quadrillionaire overnight. That meant he was about one million times richer than Bill Gates, whose net worth is $72.7 billion.
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But the $92,233,720,368,547,800 figure that Reynolds’ balance briefly boasted was, unfortunately for him, erroneous. PayPal quickly realized the mistake and immediately changed Reynolds’ balance back to zero.
But even being a temporary quadrillionaire has its perks. “I’m enjoying a brief transit as an Internet meme,” Reynolds told The Christian Science Monitor on Wednesday.
To make up for the mistake, PayPal offered to donate an unspecified amount to a charity of Reynolds’ choice (though it’s hardly comparable, in all likelihood, to his newly-found-then-lost fortune).
But had the world’s first quadrillionaire been able to keep his fake fortune, he says he would have used it to “pay down the national debt,” which is more than $16 trillion. “That’s been really bugging me,” Reynolds told The Monitor. He also said he might have used some of his remaining money to buy the Philadelphia Phillies…if he “found a good deal. The rest of it, I’d invest.”
