PayPal makes US exec world’s richest man – for a while

When Chris Reynolds of Delaware, Pennsylvania, opened his June PayPal e-mail statement last week, he was stunned. The online money transfer agency had credited his account with a humongous $92,233,720,368,547,800 – or $92 quadrillion, and a few billion in change.

This would have made PR executive Reynolds - who also sells auto parts on eBay in his spare time – by far the richest man in the world. Rich, as in more than a million times richer than Mexican telecom mogul Carlos Slim, who is worth $67 billion.

If only, he might well have thought. ''I'm just feeling like a million bucks,'' Reynolds was quoted as saying by the Philadelphia Daily News. ''At first I thought that I owed quadrillions. It was quite a big surprise.''

So he logged online, and reality hit back. His account balance read $0 - the correct amount. "It's a curious thing. I don't know, maybe someone was having fun," Reynolds said.

PayPal admitted the error and offered to donate an unspecified amount of money to a cause of Reynolds' choice.

"This is obviously an error and we appreciate that Reynolds understood this was the case," PayPal said in a statement.

Before this incident, the most Reynolds ever made on PayPal was "a little over $1,000" selling a set of vintage BMW tires on eBay.

So what would the would-be quadrillionaire have done with all that cash?

"I probably would have paid down the national debt," he said.