Eine Billion Dollar is a 2001 novel by German writer Andreas Eschbach. Its plot revolves around a young pizza driver from New York City, who inherits a trillion US dollars from one of his ancestors who lived in 16th century Florence. With the money comes a prophecy that he must use it to give humanity back its lost future. The title is correctly translated into English as "One Trillion Dollars", as it refers to the long scale use of the word billion (10), which is called a trillion in the short scale. Plot John Salvatore Fontanelli, the son of a shoemaker in New York who works as a pizza driver, is one day invited to the Waldorf Astoria by an Italian lawyer, where he is informed that he inherited a huge fortune simply by being the last male descendant of a wealthy Italian merchant living and working in 16th century Florence. This merchant put a rather small amount of money in a bank account some 500 years ago. Through the magic of compound interest, this sum has now grown into the equivalent of roughly 1,000,000,000,000 US dollars. In one fell swoop, John Fontanelli has become by far the richest person in the world, his net worth being bigger than the GDP of most countries. Yet, his ancestor has charged his heir with the task of using the inheritance to give back mankind its lost future. After some hither and thither, he accepts the role assigned to him by his ancestor and tries to better the world socially and ecologically. On the advice of his mysterious new consultant, Malcolm McCaine, he founds a huge corporation called Fontanelli Enterprises and strategically invests the inherited fortune in a diversified group of projects to grow his power and influence. Starting with the hostile takeover of ExxonMobil, John Fontanelli's orders now decide the fate of other companies, currencies, and even complete countries' economies. With the passing of time, John recognizes that all this will not ultimately lead him to success in mastering his assigned task. To get a better picture of the future development of mankind, he sets up a gigantic and secret scientific project, which uses complex computer models to simulate different future scenarios. When the sobering result is finally announced, Fontanelli and McCaine differ about the correct approach to save humanity from its obvious self-destroying development. McCaine leaves Fontanelli, thinking that mankind is