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. [UPI, Philly.com, IBTimes via Circa]


Image by: Michael Hession