WIRED and Neal Agarwal Launch 'Spend Elon Musk's Money' Visualization
WIRED has teamed up with Neal Agarwal, the mind behind Neal.fun, to introduce 'Spend Elon Musk's Money,' a 3D web experience where users can utilize Musk's trillion-dollar wealth to buy everything from Big Macs to aircraft carriers. This project is a follow-up to 'Spend Bill Gates' Money' and includes a $100 billion counter. Agarwal noted that the 3D feature aids in understanding the scale of purchases, emphasizing physical items due to the scarcity of real-world options over $100 million. He encountered technical hurdles, employing visual techniques to create a 3D effect. The tool monitors spending and presents items in a physical context. Since he was 19, Agarwal has operated Neal.fun, contrasting the open web with closed app ecosystems and welcomes ideas for new items.
Key facts
- WIRED partnered with Neal Agarwal to create 'Spend Elon Musk's Money,' a visualization allowing users to spend Elon Musk's trillion-dollar fortune.
- The project is a sequel to 'Spend Bill Gates' Money,' which launched with Neal.fun and featured a $100 billion counter.
- Items available to purchase include Big Macs, aircraft carriers, and the Las Vegas Sphere.
- The visualization is 3D to help users see the physical scale of purchases, unlike the original 2D version.
- Agarwal faced technical challenges rendering large quantities of 3D models, so he used visual tricks to simulate 3D.
- The Big Mac price increased from $2 in the original Gates game to $6 in the new Musk version.
- Agarwal has run Neal.fun since he was 19, describing it as a catalog of his interests in visualizations, science, and game mechanics.
- In Infinite Craft, players crafted enough Japanese words to play the entire game in Japanese, an emergent behavior Agarwal did not anticipate.
Entities
Artists
- Elon Musk
- Neal Agarwal
- Bill Gates
Institutions
- WIRED
- Neal.fun
- SpaceX
- Tesla
- Neuralink
- The Boring Company
- Apple
- Club Penguin
- Discord
Locations
- Las Vegas
- United States