What’s the most shocking bill you’ve ever received in the post?Personally, in the winter of 2022, when a car with an electric heater delivered a hefty bill of £300 to my doorstep. We are still recovering economically. I write about video games and live off coal soup, but Octopus Energy sent me a bill that was supposedly addressed to Jeff Bezos.
However, it could be worse. I could be the Google employee fined $2.5 billion by the Russian government (via Moscow Times). Yes, that’s Desirion. 1 followed by 33 zeros. That means Russia wants Google to pay $2.5 trillion. The ruble figures are even more ridiculous. ₽2 andesillion, or two followed by 36 zeros.
For reference, the World Bank estimates the total global GDP last year at $105 billion, or $15 trillion. In 2017 (a while ago, but not so long ago that today’s numbers are very different), MarketWatch reported that there were tens of trillions of dollars invested in cryptocurrencies, the earthly gold supply, and financial products.
If you take out everything that isn’t actually money (i.e. cryptocurrencies, gold, all the financial nonsense), you end up with a meager $90.4 trillion. Whichever estimate you take, $2.5 billion is an order of magnitude larger. So big that it’s almost incomprehensible. In other words, Russia wants more money from Google than there is actually on the planet.
Google, on the other hand, made $307 billion in revenue last year. If I tried to use all that money to pay the fine, which I couldn’t even if I wanted to, it would be like trying to pay off a mortgage with 10 and 2 cents.
You may be wondering how Google came to owe this exorbitant amount to the Russian state. According to RBC, that’s because, uh, YouTube has blocked some Russian channels. In 2020, pro-Kremlin media channels Tsargrad and RIA FAN (Patriot Media, formerly led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a strong ally of Putin until he attempted a coup last year and then exploded in the air)・Part of the group won a lawsuit against Google. After the latter blocked his YouTube channel. What is the punishment? The fine is ₽100,000 per day and doubles every week.
Like wheat on a chessboard, fines will soon reach staggering levels of exponential growth, making it impossible for any organization on the planet, or even all organizations on the planet, to collectively pay the total amount. It’s now possible. Luckily for Google, I don’t think they had any intention of doing that anyway. The company stopped advertising in Russia after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and its Russian subsidiary was officially declared bankrupt last year. If Google wants to operate in Russia again, I suspect the company and the Russian government will need to find some kind of agreement to cover up the fine. Either that or Sundar Pichai needs to start checking under the couch cushions.
Note: Due to the sheer size of this number, the website heading appears to be broken. This meant that I had to manually disable the sidebar to display it properly. I think this is a feature, not a bug.
