The middle every year Bloomberg summarizes the richest people in the world in a list. The ranking will be led in 2024 by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who will accumulate a fortune of $200,000 million. However, in 2013, a man surpassed this businessman and others like him by several million. Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault or Mark Zuckerberg: Chris Reynolds.
Chris Reynolds, then 56 years old, was a PR manager and car salesman when a strange event occurred in his life. From one moment to the next he managed to stay on his accounts more than 92,000 billion dollars and surpassed Bill Gates, who was considered the richest person in the world at the time, in total78 billion dollarsaccordingly Forbes.
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How did Chris Reynolds become the richest man in the world?
It was June 2013 when Chris Reynoldsfrom Pennsylvania, USA, opened his PayPal account statement and was amazed at the number he found: $92,233,720,368,547,800.00. Baffled by the state of his account, he decided to take a screenshot of the figure while thousands of theories ran through his mind. “It was a very strange thing. “I don't know, I thought maybe someone was having fun,” he told CNN.
However, this amount didn't stick around for long as PayPal immediately contacted Reynolds and pointed out that the million dollar figure he provided was actually an error, so his account was reset to $0.
Chris Reynolds briefly became the richest man in the world. Photo: CNN
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After correcting the billion-dollar error, the PayPal company apologized to Chris Reynolds, who offered to make up for the bad moment with a donation in the amount and to the recipient chosen by the 56-year-old.
“This is obviously a mistake and we appreciate that Mr. Reynolds understood that this was the case,” the company said in a news release.
For his part, Reynolds, who said the most he ever had in his account was $1,000, revealed what he would have done with the money: “I probably would have paid off the national debt.”
PayPal apologized to Chris Reynolds for paying out more than $92 billion. Photo: USA Today
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It wasn't the only case
Although it may seem strange, Chris Reynolds He wasn't the only man to briefly enjoy the title of millionaire. In 2021, Darren James and his family discovered that there was a bank deposit in their bank account 50 billion US dollars.
“This isn't like a one-zero error or a two-zero error, it's someone who fell asleep because of the keyboard error. I was definitely excited. I was really surprised how it came about and I wondered if I had a rich uncle. “Who gave it to me?” James told CNN.
After four days, his account number was the same again and no longer read 25th richest man in the world.