Elon Musk may have the biggest personal fortune ever recorded, but last week a Nottingham woman briefly appeared to outdo him by an unimaginable margin — all because of a matcha latte purchase.
In a bizarre twist, small business owner Sophie Downing glanced at her receipt after paying with a gift card and discovered she’d apparently become the world’s first quadrillionaire.
The receipt suggested the Nottingham, England, resident still had an eye-watering £63 quadrillion ($85 quadrillion) remaining on what was meant to be a £10 Christmas voucher for cafe chain 200 Degrees Coffee.
To put that in perspective, it’s 63 followed by 15 zeros — 63,000 trillion. On paper, that would make her around 100,000 times wealthier than Musk, and roughly 670 times bigger than Earth’s entire GDP.
The only downside, at least as she understood it, was that this staggering “fortune” could only be spent on coffee and pastries.
“I thought it was really funny. I’ve never seen anything like that before,” the 29-year-old told the Nottingham Post, as she described the barista’s stunned reaction when he realized what the till was displaying.
Downing said: “The guy at the till was really confused. His face was just like ‘what?”
Instead of keeping the card or flagging it as an error on the spot, she said he simply returned it to her despite the figure showing on the register. She explained: “This massive number came up on the till. He said ‘I’ve never seen it before but it’s fine for you to keep it’.
“I didn’t clock it until he gave me the receipt. I thought ‘surely not, that’s actually crazy’.”
Curious whether her accidental status had “stuck,” Downing — who runs a hair removal business in the city associated with the Robin Hood legend — returned the following week to check the balance again. She said it had barely moved.
“Maybe they have scanned the wrong thing. It looks as though they have scanned the barcode which has turned into the balance,” Downing reflected. “I could go in and clear everything off the shelf but I don’t want to take the mick.”
As absurd as the number is — equivalent to around 41 trillion years of work at the US federal minimum wage of $7.25 — the real-world impact of a misread gift card balance (especially one limited to caffeinated purchases) is far less dramatic than it looks on a receipt.
And as Downing herself summed it up: “It would be better if it was a different gift card.”