We’ve all had the dream of one day, out of nowhere, having life absolutely resolved with a bank account so big it seems infinite. That, obviously, has never happened with such magnitude, but for an instant PayPal fulfilled that fantasy for a poor sucker.
And it turns out that the banking platform for global transactions, cornerstone of the empire and business history of Elon Muskfor a period of time, accidentally put a credit balance of USD $92 quadrillion into the account of one of its users.
But this was too good to be true, and like any digital platform, it is always possible to reset errors, which in the end ended up resetting the real balance of the account.
The curious thing here is that, thanks to this ruling, for a moment, PayPal made history, since it created, albeit by accident, the first quadrillionaire of the 21st century.
How PayPal made one of its users a billionaire for an instant
According to a report from USATodayChris Reynolds, a 56-year-old from Pennsylvania, United States, suddenly, out of the blue, noticed the figure of USD $92,233,720,368,547,800, when he read his monthly statement by email from the service.
Finding that data in his inbox and verifying that it was an official email from the real PayPal service notification account, he immediately logged into the app. Only to discover that the error had been corrected and the astronomical balance in his account had been removed:
“At first I thought I owed quadrillions. It was a big surprise. Good fortune motivated me to be really generous.”
It was what Reynolds said, who, realizing the fortunate but fleeting incident, decided to make the news known, which led to this coverage that became a donation to a political organization as if he had really had the money in his account.
The subject recounts that if he had actually received the money, he would have first paid off the US national debt and then bought his local baseball team, the Phillies.
PayPal addressed the mishap for its part with an official statement: “This was obviously a mistake and we appreciate that Mr. Reynolds understands that it was.”
As a thank you for that understanding, PayPal has offered to make a donation to Reynolds’ charity of choice.