In June 2021, a student named Christopher Williamson (known online as Deveon Suchsu) bought, just for a laugh, a little-known meme coin, #RocketBunny, for only $20. He went to sleep easily, and when he woke up in the morning and checked his crypto wallet #coinbase , his heart almost stopped.
A sum flashed on his balance: $1 411 054 705 575 (more than $1.4 trillion).
Christopher instantly became the richest man on the planet, surpassing Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos combined. He immediately called his mom, screaming that they now owned half the world, and tried to transfer some of the money.
Of course, it was a technical glitch on the crypto exchange’s side. Due to a coding error, the coin’s price was displayed incorrectly. But the most interesting part started when Christopher tried to contact technical support.
Instead of simply zeroing out the balance, the CoinBase wallet system froze his account. And when Christopher demanded an explanation, the exchange’s algorithms decided that since he had a virtual trillion in his account, he must pay… a transactions tax and a commission worth several billion dollars—something the student, of course, didn’t have.
His account was frozen “until the circumstances were clarified,” making him the richest bankrupt in the world.
While technical support was silent, Christopher decided to have some fun. He started tagging Elon Musk on Twitter with questions like: “Elon, I bought a cup of coffee for 5 billion—could you spot me a few bucks?” or “CoinBase guys, I’m ready to buy your exchange right now—just unblock the ‘withdraw’ button.”
In the end, the exchange took several weeks to manually fix the bug and restore his balance back to the original $20. During that time, the guy managed to give dozens of interviews, become a meme star, but still couldn’t buy even a pack of chips with his “trillions.”