Thinking tool: Pick up the trillion-dollar bill

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Adam Jones

Two economists are walking down the street and come to a $20 bill on the ground.

One turns to the other and asks "Why aren't you picking up the $20 bill on the ground?" The second replies, "There can't be a $20 bill on the ground. If there was, someone would have already picked it up."

The first economist agrees, and they carry on walking.

Banknotes scattered across a road, with several people standing over them - nobody picking them up

Thousands of smart people work on making trading markets efficient, and ~5 million for-profit businesses are founded every year. This should produce fairly efficient markets.

However, these markets are still inefficient enough that Jane Street, a single quantitative trading firm, pulled in $10.1 billion of net trading revenue in one quarter. They followed it with $39.6 billion across 2025.1

Far fewer people work on making the "doing good" market efficient, and the number starting focused non-profits is tiny. And the potential stakes are much larger than short-term profits in financial markets.

So if there are billion-dollar opportunities in heavily optimised financial markets, expect potentially trillion-dollar opportunities in doing good.

Smaller versions of this exist inside organisations and in day-to-day life, where people are either too distracted to notice the bills or don't want to pick them up.

So there are often trillion-dollar bills on the ground waiting to be picked up. Don't be too surprised when you find a great idea nobody's acted on - and do spend time hunting for these 100x opportunities.

In tech, I often see people chasing shiny new technologies or hard problems have far less impact than those who roll up their sleeves and do the schlep work.

Back at Palantir, I remember a colleague joking: "We were brought in to solve the world's most important problems. It turns out that means arguing with government IT departments". They were right.

If something seems too good to be true, still ask "why hasn't anyone done this?". That does screen out some mirages, as you discover previous attempts. But if you can't find a good answer, often there genuinely isn't one - so consider pursuing it.

This is part of my thinking tools series. Also consider:

  • Hunt for 100x opportunities: Often when deciding what to do, the best option is much much better than the average one
  • Run the experiment: the cheapest way to check whether the bill is real is often to just try picking it up

Footnotes

  1. Worth noting this is trading revenue, not profit, and it was an exceptional year driven by tariff volatility. But the direction holds: a few hundred people captured more trading revenue than banks with tens of thousands of staff. ↩