Google’s Russian fine is 23,809,523 times the amount of all the money that exists on Earth.

No, Russia did not impose Google a fine of $23 million. It fined Google the equivalent of 23,809,523 times. all the money what exists on Earth. According to The Moscow Times, the Kremlin fined Google $2.5 million. That’s 2,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or for the nerds among us, 2.5×10.²¹. Yes, I had to unpack the scientific notation to understand the number.

In perhaps the grossest example of understatement ever, The Moscow Times claims that Google is “unlikely to pay the incredibly high fine,” noting that Google’s parent company, Alphabet, reported revenue of only Last year this figure was $307 billion. I guess when it comes to fake numbers that have no right to exist, 307 billion actually doesn’t seem like that much.

The burning question is: why? State media, of course. In response to Russia’s massive invasion of Ukraine. YouTube blocked several Russian news accounts, including Channel One, Moscow Media and Public Television of Russia. A Russian court ordered Google to restore the accounts and imposed a fine of $1,029, or 100,000 rubles, for each day Google kept the channels private. According to RBC, this number doubled every week while Google turned off the channels.

Since then, things have clearly picked up, with exponential growth manifesting itself in the most unpleasant way, creating the monstrous figure that Google now owes, according to the Russian government. That money will, of course, never materialize, given that it is astronomically larger than the roughly $105 trillion that makes up the entire planet’s gross domestic product (GDP), but its penalty will only grow over time. Google clearly has no interest in paying you and probably never plans to do so.

In fact, Google has almost completely pulled out of Russia, with the company’s Russian subsidiary filing for bankruptcy more than a year ago.

However, Russian media, which originally sued Google, are trying to force the company to pay some kind of fine. RBC reports that Russian media companies have filed lawsuits against Google in Spain, South Africa, Turkey and Hungary to seek a Russian fine, and earlier this year South Africa granted a motion to seize Google’s assets in the country. Google responded with lawsuits in the United States and the United Kingdom to limit these Russian lawsuits to, well, Russia.