If I were to make a deal with the devil, it would probably go something like this: I want to be the richest man in the world so I can buy all the coffee I want. The devil, who for some reason took the form of frigid Gen-Zer, would then say, “Okay.” In this way I would lose my soul, fully certain that I had been very wise and had protected myself against any possible loophole that Mephistopheles might try to exploit to spoil the deal immediately. (Which I never understood anyway. You already have my soul on vacation, why do you care if I have fun in the meantime?)
Fortunately, it seems that one woman in the UK has already made this particular Faustian bargain and revealed the devil’s little tricks to the world. Sophie Downing is technically a billiards player, but she can only spend her money at one specific café.
And not just a quadrillionaire worth £1, but a quadrillionaire worth £63, which is 63 with 15 zeros. And these are GBP. Converted to USD, it comes to roughly $85 trillion. For comparison, that’s over Elon Musk’s 100,000 (God, can you even imagine that?), which is over 670 times the size of the entire world economy. This means that she is opulent enough to invalidate the entire concept of money. If only the devil wasn’t in the details anyway.
As reported by the portal BBCthe immense majority of Downing’s fortune is held in gift cards. It was supposed to be a £10 gift card to a local cafe 200 degrees in Nottingham, but due to what the cafe calls an “administrative error” it was charged a balance of – and I’ll only say this once – £63,011,900,191,687,378.60.
Turns out it’s actually a gift card number that the barista incorrectly entered as the balance.
But before you cheeky monkeys get any brilliant ideas, the gift card balance has been corrected and issued by Downing, who says she had no intention of exploiting the error. Although she said she would like the gift card to work at the grocery store.
So let this be a lesson to all of you. If you decide to make a deal with the devil and trade your eternal soul for transient satisfaction in this mortal coil, just watch out, you can get everything you ever wanted and live happily ever after.
