What’s the most shocking bill you’ve ever got in the post? Personally, I’m still financially recovering from winter 2022, when a dalliance with an electric heater landed a fat £300 invoice on my doorstep. I write about videogames and subsist on coal soup, and there was Octopus Energy sending me a bill it presumably intended for Jeff Bezos.
Could be worse, though. I could be the guy at Google who had to open its $2.5 decillion fine from the Russian government (via The Moscow Times). Yes, that’s decillion, which is a one followed by 33 zeroes. That means Russia wants Google to pay it $2,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. The number in rubles is even more absurd: ₽2 undecillion, or two followed by 36 zeroes.
For reference, the World Bank estimates the sum total of world GDP last year at $105,000,000,000,000—or one hundred and five trillion dollars. In 2017 (a while back, but not so far back that the numbers will be radically different today), MarketWatch generously valued the sum total of anything you could conceivably call ‘money on Earth’—including cryptocurrencies, above-ground gold supply, and funds invested in financial products—at several quadrillions.
If you take out all the stuff that isn’t actually money (so all the crypto, gold, and financial nonsense) that becomes a paltry $90.4 trillion. Regardless of which estimate you go with, $2.5 decillion is many orders of magnitude bigger. Almost incomprehensibly big. In other words, Russia wants more money from Google than actually exists on Earth.
Meanwhile, Google made $307 billion in revenue last year. If it tried to pay the fine using all that money—something it very much could not do even if it wanted to—it’d be a bit like trying to pay off your mortgage with a dime and two cents.
You may wonder how Google came to owe this ungodly sum to the Russian state. Per RBC it’s because, erm, YouTube blocked some Russian channels. In 2020, pro-Kremlin media channels Tsargrad and RIA FAN (part of the Patriot Media Group formerly headed by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a stalwart Putin ally before he attempted to launch a coup last year and subsequently exploded in mid-air) won lawsuits against Google after the latter blocked their YouTube channels. The punishment? Daily penalties of ₽100,000, which doubled each week.
Like grains of wheat on a chessboard, the fines soon hit such phenomenal levels of exponential growth that it became impossible for any entity on Earth—or even every entity on Earth all together—to pay the total off. Fortunately for Google, I think it never had any intention of doing so anyway. The company ceased advertising in Russia after it invaded Ukraine in 2022, while its Russian subsidiary was declared officially bankrupt last year. If Google ever wants to do business in Russia again, I suspect the corporation and the Russian government will have to find some kind of accord to sweep the fine under the rug. Either that, or Sundar Pichai needs to start checking under the couch cushions.
