Oops! PayPal, the online money-transfer company, has accidentally credited a man in Delaware $92,233,720,368,547,800, making him by far the richest man in the world.
Chris Reynolds, 56, said he was shocked when he received his monthly statement via e-mail from PayPal last week, with an ending balance of $92 quadrillion, over a million times richer than the world’s richest man, Carlos Slim.
“I’m just feeling like a million bucks,” Mr Reynolds was quoted as saying by the Philadelphia Daily News. “At first I thought that I owed quadrillions. It was quite a big surprise.”
Mr Reynolds said he has been a PayPal customer for about 10 years and uses it to buy and sell items on eBay, including vintage car parts. He said he usually spends no more than $100 a month using PayPal.
After absorbing the initial shock, Mr Reynolds logged on to PayPal’s site and saw that his balance was listed there as $0.
If the prodigious account credit were true, Mr Reynolds — who with his wife owns Reynolds Ink, a public-relations firm —said he would pay down debts with the money.
“I’m a very responsible guy,” he said.
“I would pay the national debt down first.”
PayPal has admitted the error and offered to donate an unspecified amount of money to a cause of Mr Reynolds’ choice.
“This is obviously an error and we appreciate that Mr Reynolds understood this was the case,” CNN quoted PayPal as saying in a statement.