Shortly after the end of the Revolutionary War, a German businessman arrived in New York City and started a trading business with the local Native Americans. By 1800, John Jacob Astor had built the largest fur trading empire in America, not only trading with his business partners in England, but also with China via his west coast subsidiaries. This entrepreneurial pioneer rapidly accumulated wealth, amassing a fortune that not only made him the first multi-millionaire in American history, and when adjusting for inflation, one of the richest people to ever live, but allowed him to forge a legacy that includes libraries, New York City neighborhoods, and even a German football club, bearing his name.

Over 100 years later, prolific industrialist John D. Rockefeller became the first billionaire in 1916. And now, in the early part of the 21st century, a few wealthy individuals are nearing a twelve digit net worth. This begs the question: How many years until we get our first U.S. dollar trillionaire? It seems like such a huge number, and the top earners are still so far away. Even the largest publicly traded company, Apple, is several hundred billion dollars below one trillion. But according to sources, we may not be far off from this milestone. In fact, The Independent believes the first trillionaire is alive today. Other news outlets agree that the thirteen figure barrier will be broken soon, with Bill Gates being the frontrunner in the race.

But can we predict when it will happen? By building off of long term economic trends, we can get a rough estimate. One popular way to measure the true value of someone's wealth is to compare their total net worth to the Gross Domestic Production (GDP) of the United States. This will give us their value as a percentage of the nation's overall economic production. Forbes has made this easy because they've been tracking the net worth of the richest individuals since 1987. We can compare this data to the historical GDP numbers and look at the "Worth-to-GDP" ratio of the richest persons for each year.

Not exactly a steady line, is it? The net worth of the top earner can fluctuate based on the successes of their investments and the industries they're involved with. As you can see, during the late 90s, Bill Gates's value skyrocketed to nearly 1% of the U.S. GDP. This level quickly normalized due to the collapse of the first dot com bubble, as well as the establishment of his philanthropic organization the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Using this relatively small sample size we see that, on average, the richest person is worth around .38% of the GDP. So at what GDP level would .38% yield us $1,000,000,000,000? Turns out that astronomical (or should I say economical?) number is $263,157,894,736,842. The Centre for Economics & Business Research predicts the U.S. GDP will be at $33.9 trillion by 2030. PricewaterhouseCoopers says $38 trillion by 2050. Neither of these numbers are close to our $263 trillion mark, but we can use these projected growth rates (I'll take the average) to guess when we will hit this mark.

Clearly these are rough estimates. We have no way of knowing what will happen in the future, especially in the financially confusing times we live in, where the Federal Reserve has drastically expanded its balance sheet, the IMF claims that pre-2008 growth rates are a thing of the past, and the income inequality gap continues to rapidly widen. But according to these predictions, the first trillionaire may be a 22nd century milestone. Although, I've added a "best case" scenario to account for a situation similar to what we saw during the dot com boom. Bill Gates was deeply embedded in the tech world at that time, and Microsoft dominated the PC market share, creating vast amounts of wealth for its visionary chief executive. It's not unreasonable to predict such a thing happening again. This means that the country's GDP level would only need to be $100 trillion for an especially lucky person to accumulate one trillion dollars, or 1% of the GDP, like Gates did in 1999. This makes a late 21st century trillionaire possible given the right series of events.

So is the first trillionaire alive today? Well, for starters, it's doubtful that Bill Gates is our man. A more likely candidate would be Mark Zuckerberg, who at 30 years old is already worth over $33 billion, but even he will be nearing centenarian status by the time the money supply is large enough for a trillionaire. It will most likely be a next generation innovator, probably still unborn, destined to follow a profoundly American path first paved by Astor, then Rockefeller, Ford, Buffett, Gates, Zuckerberg and many others in between, shaping the next century of economic progress and in the end, finding themselves rewarded with the seemingly impossible sum of one trillion U.S. dollars.