Citigroup mistakenly credited a client’s account with $81 trillion when it meant to send only $280, eventually spotting the input error only after two employees had missed it, the Financial Times reported this morning.
While no funds actually left Citi — because a transaction worth 543x Citi’s entire market cap unsurprisingly wouldn’t go through the bank’s systems — and a third employee caught the incorrect payment 90 minutes after it was made last April, the US bank disclosed the “near miss” to the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Still, this marks the 10th near miss worth $1 billion or more that Citi has seen over the past year, according to the FT.
For context, $81 trillion is enough to buy the entire US stock market (~$60 trillion), with enough spare to buy China’s entire stock market (~$16 trillion), if you felt like it. You’d be more than 200x wealthier than Elon Musk, the world’s richest person with a net worth of $353 billion, per Forbes.
You could pay off the national debt ($36.5 trillion), and, if you got hungry afterwards, you’d still have enough leftover to buy yourself and everyone else on Earth 300 pizzas each.