One Trillion Dollars

by Andreas Eschbach

  Turning his head slowly, John was speechless as he looked at the castle from one end to the other, which took a surprisingly long time. This place was larger than the entire block where his parents’ house, which he had grown up in, was situated. He wondered if anyone ever counted the windows.

  “Well, John?” McCaine asked with so such enthusiasm it seemed like he built the place with his own hands. “What do you say?”

  John turned around and looked back from where they had come from. “It’ll be a long walk to the mailbox, I guess? Especially when it rains.”

  The real estate agent looked shocked, but McCaine only laughed, and said, “Let’s go inside.”

  The entrance hall was big enough to play tennis in. Dead, pale-faced earls looked down upon them from huge oil paintings in golden frames.

  “The portraits of the ancestors are destined for a museum,” the agent explained. “So you should imagine this hall without them.”

  “Happy to,” John responded.

  The hallways were endless. Most doorknobs were dusty. The dining hall looked like the inside of a church.

  “Absolutely first class,” McCaine said.

  “A little gloomy,” John thought.

  The windows were tall but narrow and the electric lighting was a definite understatement.

  “One American historian reckoned this house was exactly ten times the size of the White House,” the agent told them, and then added, “I haven’t checked it myself yet.”

  McCaine nodded. John swallowed hard. They wandered through the different rooms. When they met again, McCaine took John off to the side and asked him in a low tone: “So what do you think? I think this is an appropriate estate for the wealthiest man in the world.”

  “It’s a castle? Isn’t that overdoing it a bit?”

  “Nonsense! All the top rock stars have something similar. Should I show you Mick Jagger’s estate? Or the one where George Harrison lives?”

  “But I think it’s so terribly … big!”

  “John,” said McCaine and looked him straight in the eyes, “you must learn to think big. This here is only the beginning. Look at it as an everyday matter.”

  Thus John Salvatore Fontanelli, wealthiest man in the world, bought an English castle dating back to the fifteenth century complete with nearly four square miles of land, servants’ quarters, stables, garden houses, forest pergolas, a gatehouse and a chapel. A consortium of construction firms went to work renovating the place. The head of the architectural firm in charge of the project would inspect every three days and then submit a progress report and discuss details. Enough of the work should be completed by Christmas for John could move in, he said.

  McCaine insisted that no costs were too spared to get the place as magnificent as possible. The ground floor of the north wing was to be converted into an indoor swimming pool, complete with whirlpool, saunas, steam baths, a massage room, and a winter garden with exotic plants. The stables were to be converted into garages for the luxury cars McCaine insisted John should buy — a Rolls Royce, a Jaguar, a Mercedes-Benz, and a Lamborghini — and there would also be an auto-repair shop. There would be around two hundred people employed to care for house and grounds. The task of hiring the personnel was given to Jeremy, who had put Sofia in charge of the house in Portecéto so he could fly to London. A Frenchman who had won several prizes was chosen as kitchen chef. He brought along his entire team, from gravy maker to vegetable slicer and was given an almost unlimited budget for the specialty equipment of the kitchen.

  A helipad was constructed complete with floodlights on part of the estate. During the following spring they found out that the noise of the helicopter was acceptable within the house. Only the ornamental peacocks, which they had brought in to strut around the flowerbeds, were irritated by the chopper’s noise.

  $22,000,000,000,000

  SUDDENLY JOHN’S LIFE was more stable than it ever had been before. He got up at six thirty in the morning, showered, had breakfast and at seven thirty the car was waiting to take him and a troop of bodyguards, which seemed to grow in numbers daily, to the office. They changed routes every day. This way he at least got to see different parts of London. The rest of his time he spent with the obsessive McCaine, whose mere presence seemed like a drug.

  Hordes of workers were dispersed inside the office building putting in new phone lines, computers, and security checkpoints, new flooring, a new heating system. They tore down walls here, put up new ones there, put up paneling or painted walls, put in marble where there had been teak and gold where there had been stainless steel.

  John found himself in a new office the size of a large apartment and had a vista of the city he could have charged admission for. McCaine got a similar one at the other end of the building. Between the two offices was a huge conference room that looked like it belonged in a James Bond movie. It had a table as large as a tennis court, figuratively speaking, a bunch of portable movie screens and projectors and Venetian blinds as well as plenty of other luxury details. It had more seating capacity greater than the Houses of Parliament. The rest of the floor had a reception area with large, leather easy chairs, glass tables, and large hydroponic plants, all to allow masses of people to wait in comfort before being allowed to see one of the bosses.

  Six beautiful secretaries would be busy at work to receive visitors behind a large reception desk made of snow-white marble. But there were no visitors yet, so McCaine had them write letters and make phone calls.

  Days turned into weeks and weeks into months, and John could almost physically feel his world changing. Signs were erected next to the elevators and stairs to help people get around. A personnel department was put in the floor below John’s office. The analysts and economists were assigned to the three floors below his. The rest of the building was still empty, but there were already plans for them. Deliverymen came daily to bring office furniture, and it was obvious that by the end of the year this place would be bustling. It was like a million ton freight train that started to move, very slowly at first, barely noticeable, but became unstoppable once it got up to speed.

  They had discussed getting John an apartment for the time being, but he had no desire to drive around with real estate agents so he decided to stay at a hotel. The suite he had there was large enough to allow him to delay moving into the castle for the moment, and, in any case, it was more luxurious. Even the breakfast got better after he made a small comment to the manager. Every day for the next week the chef would come out in person after the dishes had been cleared away to ask John if there were any improvements he might make. The pancakes became so fluffy, the coffee so good and the toast so crispy that John looked forward to breakfast when he went to bed.

  He had some more suits sent to him from Portecéto, but then he remembered McCaine’s words to think big, so he called the tailors who already had his measurements and had his wardrobe expanded here in London. No waiting for six weeks this time, but pronto! And oh what power money has! No one took longer than three days to deliver the suits, shirts, and other clothes directly to the hotel. No one bothered him with bills, it was all handled without John’s involvement, and it really didn’t interest him that much.

  The days that turned to weeks were filled with bustling activity without a break for weekends or holidays. McCaine dragged him to meetings, gave him plans, drafts of contracts, and endless lists of numbers for him to read through. John got balances and economic statistics, signed checks, purchase contracts, rent contracts, employment contracts, and a seemingly endless array of official documents. When John had time between all that he would sit behind his mighty desk and read newspapers, financial reports, and stock market reports, or he would read one of the books that McCaine suggested to him, on national economies, business economics, and ecology. Mostly he gave up after the first ten pages, but he tried not to let it show.

  For the most part, he didn’t get a chance to read longer than a half hour before McCaine had him summoned. John watched wit
h awe as McCaine used a whole battery of telephones at once. Employees would make brief oral reports, while he was reading something else, and then he shooed them away with new instructions.

  When John arrived at eight in the morning McCaine was already there. Even though McCaine never remotely suggested John should put in a similar effort, John couldn’t get help feeling guilty when he wanted to go back to the hotel at eight in the evening and McCaine was still in his office. He started to ask himself if McCaine ever went home at all.

  So the days went by and time marched on. France set off an atomic bomb on the Mururoa Atoll despite international protests. The former football star O.J. Simpson was found not guilty of murder after a sensational trial hyped up by the media. Israeli Minister President Yitzhak Rabin was shot during a peace demonstration. London fog became more common as the summer ended. It had been a long time since the reporters last stood waiting for John Fontanelli in front of the hotel with microphones and cameras, until the day arrived when things really started to get going.

  “Here are the first recommendations from the analysts.”

  “Ah,” John said.

  As McCaine let the stack of papers drop on the desk he added: “Which we will ignore for now.”

  The slapping sound that the papers made on the conference table reverberated for a moment. It was so quiet up there in the huge room that it seemed there was no outside world beyond the windows.

  “To do what instead?” John asked. He knew that McCaine was waiting for this question.

  “Our first company takeover,” McCaine explained. “It must be a bombshell … a real sensation … something that no one can ignore. Our first strike must rattle the whole world.”

  John looked at the papers that were compiled to make their first move possible. The large surface of the conference table shimmered in the morning sun like a black lake with no wind. And the papers were a rocky island in that lake. “You think we should buy a really big company?”

  “Yes, of course. But that alone isn’t enough. It must also symbolize something. It must be more than just a company; it must be an institution. And it needs to be American. We must take away a prime piece of real estate from the leading economic power in one fell swoop.”

  John concentrated. He ran the names of famous companies he knew through his head. They were all institutions, more or less, weren’t they? It seemed to be the goal of all large successful companies to become institutions. “You’re not asking me which one we should take. Are you? You already have one in your sights.”

  McCaine nodded slightly, placed a hand on the black lake. “As an American, who do you most associate with money?”

  “Bill Gates.”

  “Alright, that’s not who I meant. I’ve got someone on my mind from the previous century.”

  John thought for a second before a name came to him. “Rockefeller?”

  “Exactly. John D. Rockefeller. Do you know what the name of his company back then was?”

  “Wait … Standard Oil?” Was that ever mentioned in school? He couldn’t remember. He remembered reading about it once, and once he saw it on TV years ago. “Yes, exactly. The Standard Oil Corporation. That was the story. Rockefeller had a monopoly on the oil market, until the government passed an antitrust law and his company was split up.”

  “That is the popular version. The true story goes like this: John D. Rockefeller was charged with breaking the antitrust law in Ohio in 1892. But he avoided a court decision by splitting Standard Oil into separate components and distributing the parts in different countries. They were all companies that were still controlled by him and his staff. The courts effectively forced him to start the first multinational company.”

  “Okay, but so what? It doesn’t exist any more.”

  “Really? The Standard Oil Company of New York has been called Mobil Oil since 1966. The Standard Oil companies of Indiana, Nebraska, and Kansas merged between 1939 and 1948 to become Amoco. The Standard Oil Companies of California and Kentucky merged in 1961 and were re-named Chevron in 1984. The largest chunk of all was the former Holding, Standard Oil of New Jersey, which was changed to Exxon in 1972.”

  John stared at him and felt how his lower jaw moved down. “You want to buy Exxon!?”

  “Exactly. Exxon is in many ways the ideal candidate for the first blow. It is one of the five largest companies in the world, the second largest energy company after Shell, and is represented worldwide on every continent except Antarctica. Not to be overlooked, Exxon is one of the most profitable companies on this planet.”

  “Exxon …?” John felt his heart beat in his chest. “But can we afford it? I mean Exxon is gigantic.”

  McCaine pulled out a magazine from his paperwork and opened it to one page. “This is the Fortune Five Hundred list, a list of the five hundred largest companies in the world. The important thing to watch is the second last column, the net assets. You need to own fifty-one percent of net assets to control the company.” He shoved the list over to John. “Go ahead and do the math to see how far you can get.”

  John stared at the list with names like General Motors, IBM, Daimler-Benz, Boeing, and Philip Morris. He reached for the big calculator and started to add numbers together. He added only the billions and stopped when he got to the bottom of the list at number fifty, and he still had over six hundred billion dollars left over. “I can really buy half the world,” he mumbled.

  McCaine nodded like a teacher who is satisfied with the answer given by his stupidest student. “And when you have bought half the world, your money isn’t gone, it’s invested. That means it’ll start to really earn money, money that’ll allow us to buy the rest too.”

  It was one of those moments in life that remains in one’s memory forever, like the bright lights of a special firework display. John sat there and stared at the list with the light-blue and dark-blue columns with all the names and numbers. Numbers that now seemed puny when compared to the mighty, powerful number of one trillion, and then he started to understand, really understand what power he had been given. Now he understood what McCaine wanted to accomplish, understood the whole dimension of the plan and the irresistible dynamics that they were about to unleash. They would be successful because there was nothing and no one who could stand in their way. “Yes,” he whispered, “that’s how we’ll do it.”

  “Two weeks,” said McCaine, “and we’ll be in Texas.”

  John remembered something. “Does this mean that all the bigger oil companies stem from Rockefeller’s Standard Oil?”

  “Not all. Shell’s roots are in the Netherlands and England and had never anything to do with Standard Oil. Elf Aquitaine is French, British Petroleum, as the name implies, is British.” McCaine leaned forward. “But do you get the message here? Somebody else already tried to do what we’re going to do. Rockefeller’s problem was that he was too early. He really didn’t know what to do with all the power he had. If he lived today, then first of all it wouldn’t be possible to dismember Standard Oil, and second, he would know what has to be done. He would probably follow the same plan as us.”

  That same day Fontanelli Enterprises announced that it planned to acquire Exxon. The invested capital of Exxon was 91 billion dollars at this time, and it had net assets of 40 billion, divided among 2.5 billion shares that were owned by six hundred thousand shareholders. The current stock market share price was 35 dollars. Fontanelli offered 38 dollars per share.

  The chairmen of Exxon called together an emergency meeting as soon as possible to discuss the situation. It was a shock; the company’s performance was so good that everyone thought it safe from a takeover. No one thought that an investor could come along without worrying about a billion dollars here or there. They sat together with the largest shareholders and worked out how to buy back large number of shares to prevent the takeover. In the meantime the share price climbed continuously and even surpassed the 38 dollar mark when everyone understood that Fontanelli Enterprises had almost an endless amoun
t of money available. A sort of fever developed as investors tried to acquire shares because that crazy trillionaire from London would pay any price. It was just a matter of nerves some so-called stock market experts said, as the price climbed to 60 dollars per share.

  “If he really wants Exxon, he’ll pay the price.”

  London’s reaction was cool. The price had just reached 63.22 dollars when a message went around that made some break out in cold sweat as soon as they understood the consequences. John Salvatore Fontanelli, some supposedly well-informed sources reported, had supposedly said: “Then we’ll buy Shell.”

  The following day there were offers to buy shares of every major oil company.

  Everyone who had bought the over-expensive Exxon shares now panicked and tried to get rid of them. Unfortunately, the news had already made the rounds, and no one wanted to buy. The share-price dropped like a stone.

  McCaine watched the stock prices in New York’s Stock Exchange on his computer screen in London with the stoicism of a soldier in the trenches. “Now,” he said into one of his phones when the price had gone down to 32.84 dollars.

  Two weeks later Exxon employees all over the world were throwing away papers with the old letterhead to replace them with new ones that said: EXXON — a Fontanelli Enterprises Corporation.

  This time they made the headlines in all the newspapers across the globe. There was not a single TV channel that didn’t have the Exxon takeover as its lead item on the nightly news program. Had it been necessary to express the basic atmosphere in the business world with only two words, it would have been ‘pure horror.’

  All at once it was clear to even the slowest journalist what it meant to have a private fortune of one trillion dollars. In countless special reports, talk shows, discussions, and interviews around the world, people were saying exactly what McCaine had told John during their first meeting: that it was one thing when a large investment firm or a bank has hundreds of billions of dollars and another thing when a single person really and truly has the same sum.