Asteroid Mining Speculated To Produce World’s First Trillionaire, Publicly Speaking

For decades, whispers of secretive families or even private individuals actually having trillions of dollars have been going around conspiracy theory circles. In terms of public information, however, immensely wealthy people have only been placed on the billions tier and often below the $100 billion mark, at that. Asteroid mining has recently been speculated to change that, with analysts already predicting the prospect to produce the world’s first trillionaire.

This new speculative detail came via a report by Goldman Sachs, which predicts that the first trillionaire will get their money by essentially mining space rocks. With rocket technology getting to the point where traveling to space is becoming cheaper and less cumbersome, and asteroids thought to hold vast riches of valuable minerals, the biggest challenge is more about psychology than technology.

“While the psychological barrier to mining asteroids is high, the actual financial and technological barriers are far lower. Prospecting probes can likely be built for tens of millions of dollars each and Caltech has suggested an asteroid-grabbing spacecraft could cost $2.6 billion,” the report reads.

In terms of pure technical analysis, mining an asteroid would actually present considerably fewer obstacles to private companies than mining on Earth. There are no environmental safety constraints to consider, for example, and there’s no need to get a permit from the local government to mine in space.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that taxation and paperwork will be completely off the table. In comparison, though, companies will basically have more freedom to operate as they see fit when they are out hacking asteroids to pieces for valuable metals.

As Value Walk notes, NASA has identified about 12,000 asteroids that can be potentially mined for resources in the Solar System’s asteroid belt alone. Any one of them can make a person trillions of dollars in profit, especially with some precious minerals becoming scarce here on Earth. There are higher concentrations of those on space rocks than there are on this planet, as well.