Even a fantasy game like Skyrim won’t let me be a trillionaire

The news that Elon Musk has become the world’s first trillionaire, which seems like something the world definitely doesn’t need, got me thinking: have I ever even played a videogame that let me be a trillionaire? I’ve definitely racked up millions of dollars or coins or other make-believe currency in a few games… but trillions?

I honestly couldn’t think of any game I’ve played that let me accumulate that sort of unfathomable wealth. Heck, the only game I can think of off the top of my head that even dealt in billions is Balatro, where my high score is a mere 48 billion—but that’s chips, not dollars.

While I was pondering this, I booted up Skyrim to see if it was even possible to give myself one trillion dollars. And wouldn’t you know it? The fantasy world of Skyrim, which includes ancient dragons, evil necromancers, steam-powered robots, lizard-people, elves, and werewolves—doesn’t allow trillionaires.

Inspired by many of the real world’s richest men, I wasn’t about to earn my trillions in Skyrim: I was just going to use a cheat and add it to my account as if it were an inheritance or a loan from daddy. I used a classic Skyrim console command many of us know by heart: player.additem.

I typed player.additem 0000000f (that’s the item code for gold, also memorized), then added a 1, then carefully counted out the correct number of zeroes. It took a while!

1,000: thousand
1,000,000: million
1,000,000,000: billion
1,000,000,000,000: trillion!

That’s a lot of zeroes, innit? Probably more than any one person should have, huh?

But I did it. I typed player.additem 0000000f 1000000000000.

I didn’t become a trillionaire. Instead I lost 2,147,483,647 gold. Da hell?

That didn’t sound right. Maybe a trillion gold simply couldn’t be displayed in my wallet? Skyrim came out back in 2011, a blissful time when probably no one even considered that a trillionaire might someday exist. So I ran into the nearest shop (The Bee and Barb in Riften) and tried to buy a single bottle of Alto Wine for 19 gold from Keerava.

Nope. No mistake. Giving myself a trillion dollars had put me over 2 billion dollars in debt. I loaded up another character and tried it again. Same result.

I googled a bit, confused as to why some people are allowed to have a trillion dollars and some are not. Smarter people than me already know: in Skyrim, gold is a 32-bit signed integer, which means its max value is 2,147,483,647 (1 bit is used for positive/negative, the other 31 for the value). Apparently, if you go over that value by a few hundred billion, or maybe even just one, the number flops from positive to negative.

So there you have it! Even in a fantasy world where you can become a vampire and cat-people exist and you can change the weather by yelling at it, you can’t be a trillionaire. I wish our own world made that much sense.