How much land area would $700B cover?

by Thomas Beutel

OK, this is pretty trivial, but I was wondering how much area would be covered by 700 Billion dollar bills if they were all laid next to each other, say in a big rectangle. Let’s play a game of powers-of-ten to get there.

Given that each dollar bill is 2.61″ wide by 6.14″ long, seven of them would be about 112 square inches. That’s about the area of the front of 9×12 song book.

$70 is about 7.8 square feet. A comfortable sofa for three.

$700 is about 78 square feet. I’d say that’s the size of the shadow your car makes, if you drive a subcompact.

$7,000 is about 779 square feet. Some one bedroom apartments in Lancaster are that big. Or small, depending on your tastes.

$70,000 is about 7790 square feet. A house that size might be considered decadent.

$700,000 is about 77,900 square feet. You would need to rent space at the Cancun Center to have enough floor space to lay down that many dollar bills.

$7,000,000 is just about 779,012 square feet. Now you are looking at the Charlotte Arena, and presumably you would need to enlist the help of a few friends to place that many bills.

$70,000,000 is 7,790,125 square feet, or around 180 acres. That’s a good size for a decent vineyard, but the vines probably wouldn’t appreciate being covered by money.

$700,000,000 is quite a bit of money, and would cover about 2.79 square miles. That’s the size of the 23508 Zip Code in Norfolk, VA.

$7,000,000,000 is usually shown as $7B. But it looks much more impressive with all those zeroes. That many dollar bills would cover 27.9 square miles, about the size of Centennial, Colorado. Centennial officially became a city in 2001.

$70,000,000,000 would cover 279 square miles, or the entire city of Memphis, Tennessee.

And finally we get to $700,000,000,000. That’s 2794 square miles. Or slightly less than Delaware and Rhode Island put together.