Zillion-Dollar Bill

"It was a strange collection, like Billy Bones’s hoard for the diversity of coinage, but so much larger and so much more varied that I think I never had more pleasure than in sorting them. English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Georges, and Louises, doubloons and double guineas and moidores and sequins, the pictures of all the kings of Europe for the last hundred years, strange Oriental pieces stamped with what looked like wisps of string or bits of spider’s web, round pieces and square pieces, and pieces bored through the middle, as if to wear them round your neck—nearly every variety of money in the world must, I think, have found a place in that collection; and for number, I am sure they were like autumn leaves, so that my back ached with stooping and my fingers with sorting them out."

— Jim Hawkins, Treasure Island

A MacGuffin of great monetary value (though normally never specifically stated), so great that it could make anyone or any community rich and prosperous, and will never go hungry again. Naturally, it's almost always destroyed, lost, or otherwise gotten rid of at the end of the plot. The monetary value may be an example of Eleventy Zillion.

Not to be confused with Ridiculous Exchange Rates.

Compare Impossibly Cool Wealth. In the future, such a bill would be worth nothing thanks to Ridiculous Future Inflation. An example of Artistic License – Economics on the few occasions it can actually be used in the story, as it would immediately destroy any economy it was introduced to in a realistic setting — if anyone would actually take it, which smarter writers will often use as a plot point. Compare to A MacGuffin Full of Money. At the opposite end of the scale from Worthless Currency.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Lupin III, "I Left My Mind in San Francisco": The MacGuffin of the episode is a microfilm of a process that can artificially create diamonds, at a very low cost. Lupin wants to destroy it, because the film would make all of the other diamonds people had worked hard for by mining (or just stealing) completely worthless.
• In Trigun the astronomical bounty on Vash the Stampede's head makes him a walking Zillion-Dollar Bill. As a result, even well-intentioned people try to kill him.

Comic Books

• Disney Ducks Comic Universe
  • In one comic, Scrooge arranges for a coin to be worth skyrillions of dollars (by purchasing every other coin for the double of its value and dumping them in the ocean). He then finds that the only one who has enough money to pay for it is himself.
  • In another story, Scrooge's fortune becomes so astronomically large that all the money in the country is located in his money bin. The government confiscates all of it, and hands him a zillion dollar check, which he quickly discovers is completely worthless due to no one being able to make change. Since Scrooge owns roughly every store in the country, the money shortly comes trucking back, and Scrooge ends up using the check to repair a draft.
  • In several other stories Scrooge comes upon some kind of incredibly valuable object (such as a giant jeweled Mayan calendar). As usual, the treasure is virtually always lost forever, even though the status quo wouldn't have been changed in the slightest if Scrooge had kept it for his museum.
    • Usually he loses the treasure because it actually belongs to the local government or some obscure tribe whose ancestors made it.
  • One story has him compete with Rockerduck for such a bill at an auction. Things get heated, with Rockerduck placing a final Whammy Bid, and Scrooge taking the loss remarkably well... until he reminds everyone that the bids passed the bill's actual value long ago (Rockerduck's final bid was double the bill's value).
• In a Richie Rich story, the kid tries a different kind of monetary security as he arranges for a literal million dollar bank note. Sure enough, some crooks steal it, but find they can't break it since no one takes the item seriously and they chase away the crooks continually. Eventually, they give up in despair, mail the bank note back to Richie with a note saying "If there is a reward for this, please send it in nickels, dimes and quarters."

Film — Live-Action

• The Million Pound Note, adapted from the Mark Twain short story mentioned below, features... well, just look at the title.
• At the end of How to Marry a Millionaire, Tom Brookman peels a $1,000 note off an impressively thick bankroll for the purposes of picking up the tab at a cheap restaurant. He tells the waiter to "keep the change". That $1,000 note? Add an extra zero for how much it'd be worth today... and there's lots more where it came from.
• One-Eyed Willy's treasure in the movie The Goonies. Most of the treasure is lost completely, but the handful of gems that Mikey manages to hold onto is enough to save the kids' neighborhood from being turned into a country club. The Novelization reveals that due to US and International Maritime salvage law applying when Mikey took the gems off of One-Eyed Willy's ship, he's now the legal owner of it and all the treasure still on it when it was rescued later, putting this trope into effect when the proceeds from the recovery helped develop the neighbourhood immensely.
• The million-year capsule in In Time.
• In The Mighty Quinn, a local beach bum comes across a suitcase filled with $10,000 bills, part of a bigger murder mystery the police chief Quinn is investigating.
• The eponymous treasure from National Treasure. True to the trope, the people who find it decide that it's too big for any one nation and end up donating/selling everything to museums around the world. The one percent finders fee they received was still enough to make them all incredibly wealthy, though.
  • Lampshaded when they find one of the first clues, a pipe: Riley asks, "Is it a billion-dollar pipe?"
• In The People Under the Stairs, the handful of gold coins Fool steals from Man and Woman is apparently enough to pay for his mother's operation, and pay their rent "till the year 2000". This is 1991, by the way...
• The wrecked plane full of cash in A Simple Plan. Of course, in this case it brings those who find it nothing but misery and ends up being burnt so the police cannot trace any of the serial numbers back.
• There's a short film where the currency is your own life. You work for more life and spend bits of your life to buy things, the basic currency being hours or minutes. The Heroine eventually marries and gets rich and rewards her friends with a necklace, each bead of which is several months or years, but they fight over it and it breaks. It had people playing poker machines and gambling for more life. That's right, people were wasting their lives gambling.

Literature

• Captain Flint's treasure in Treasure Island. When the bulk of the treasure is finally found, it takes several days to sort out the coins and gold bars and load all them onto the ship.
• The eponymous dragon in Peter F. Hamilton's Fallen Dragon. In a subversion, the small community benefiting from its advanced technology attempts to hijack a starship to return it to its own kind. In a brilliant sucker punch, the dragon is as valuable to its own kind as a single sperm is to us.
• The low-budget version appears in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. In 1920s Chicago, an unemployed stockyard worker is given a hundred-dollar bill by a rich drunk. (This is about as much money as the hero could make in a year.) But he has no other money with him, and he'll freeze to death if he tries to walk home. In desperation, he goes into a bar to stay warm until the banks open in the morning. They won't let him stay without buying something, so he uses the bill to buy a 5-cent beer. The bartender gives him 95 cents in change, and everyone else enjoys a big laugh when he tries to convince them that he's been cheated.
• Mark Twain wrote a story called The Million Pound Bank Note in which a man lost in England is given a million-pound note by a pair of very rich and very eccentric brothers he has just met. He can't spend it, since no one can make change, and if he tries to exchange it at a bank, he'll almost certainly be arrested on suspicion of theft. However, by simply showing it everywhere, he's able to borrow money and open lines of credit. It turns out the whole thing was a bet between the brothers on whether a person possessing only that bank note would be able to survive. It was made into a classic film in 1954. It was also made into a Donald Duck story. Also done in the 1994 movie A Million to Juan.
• At the beginning of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by R.A. Heinlein, Mike gave a janitor a paycheck for $10,000,000,000,000,185.15 as a joke. It was determined to be a "computer error" and the check was declared invalid.
• The Pearl, by John Steinbeck. The eponymous gem is worth more than its impoverished finders can imagine spending in a lifetime. More problematic: the locals offer only insultingly low bids for it, knowing that they can sell it for an obscene markup in urban markets that the finder can't easily reach.
• The Portrait of Madison in Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novel The Long Goodbye. Terry Lennox carries around a $5,000 bill^note Adjusted for inflation, US$ 5,000 from 1953 are the equivalent of almost US$ 48,000 in 2020 money. as "mad money", and before his death he gives it to Marlowe as thanks for all his help. Marlowe spends the rest of the novel refusing to spend it, feeling he hasn't done anything to earn it. In the end, he gives it back to Lennox, reports of whose death were deliberately exaggerated, when they say goodbye for the last time.
• Edgar Allan Poe, of all people, wrote a short story about the discovery of a process that could change lead into gold. Unusually, the story is explicitly about the economic disaster such a process would cause.
• In Queen Zixi of Ix, the royal purse-bearer wishes for a bag of money that never runs empty, and it is granted. Interestingly, when the fairies return and revoke the foolishly-made wishes, this is one of the wishes they do not revoke, as it "assured the future prosperity of the kingdom of Noland".
• Mysterious Artifact of Death "St. Michael's Sword" in Riptide.
• In Terry Pratchett's proto-Discworld book Strata, money is defined as time - each bill is worth extra years of life. The biggest bill is the Methuselah (named after the longest-lived Biblical personality) which few people have ever seen. The book also features a bottomless purse, which continually spits out bills which are not technically counterfeit, but which have serial numbers that haven't been used yet.
• In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo's mithril coat is said to be more valuable than "the whole Shire and everything in it." That's probably because the only mine in the world where mithril can be found has a bit of a Balrog problem, is infested with goblins, and has a giant man-eating octopus-monster-thing at the gates.
• The Twenty One Balloons takes place in a balloon-mad society located on an island containing a large number of sizable diamonds. They sell the smaller ones in limited numbers to fund everything without collapsing the market. Too bad the island in question is Krakatoa and it's right before the eruption... (In the introduction Dubois mentions several similarities between the book and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" and his conclusion that there are very few sensible things to do with a very large diamond.)
• In Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, due to Ridiculous Future Inflation, trillion-dollar bills (depicting Ronald Reagan) are considered small change, and billion-dollar bills (depicting Ed Meese) are occasionally used as toilet paper, although the FBI discourages this as the bills clog the plumbing. To circumvent the utter insanity of operating with those kinds of numbers, various corporate nation-states introduced non-inflated currency such as Kongbucks, and the Japanese yen is occasionally used as it has not been subjected to hyperinflation.

Live-Action TV

• Done more subtly and realistically on Corner Gas. Brent Leroy receives a hundred dollar bill he suspects may be counterfeit (and doesn't know how to check) from a customer, and for the rest of the episode tries to pay for things, knowing that no one will go to the trouble of changing a hundred dollar (possibly fake) bill for a two-dollar cup of coffee. The "Sorry I only have this hundred" free ride ends when someone at his table happens to have five twenties to trade him and the bartender gladly accepts one of them as payment faster than Brent can invent an excuse for not breaking his hundred. "It was good while it lasted."
• Doctor Who: In "The Long Game", the Doctor gets a metallic stick out of a future ATM that he gives to Rose and Adam as spending money. It later turns out to have "unlimited credit" on it.
• Gilligan's Island: In "The Sweepstakes", Gilligan wins a million-dollar sweepstakes and is invited to the Howell's country club. After feeling lonely he issues IOUs to the others so they may also attend. He quickly misplaces the wining ticket and they all get evicted.
• Averted in a The Mary Tyler Moore Show episode: throughout the episode, Ted Baxter avoids repaying five dollars to Murray Slaughter by offering to repay Murray IF he can make change for a hundred dollar bill. At episode's end, Murray announces he can make change for the hundred dollar bill — pulling out a heavy bank bag — in pennies!

Music

• Cab Calloway's "Hey Now":
  I was walkin' up the street, actin' big and bold
  But deep down in my pockets I had no gold
  Was lookin' kinda sad when, before my eyes
  Was a million dollar bill that must've fell out the skies!

Mythology

• In The Kalevala — which is a book filled with Finnish myths — the skillful blacksmith Ilmarinen forges a device that gives its owner three things to guarantee wealth and health in one's family: Salt and grain so that food will never run out and gold so that there will always be money. When it's ready, he offers it to Pohjan Akka (who is an evil witch) in exchange for her beautiful daughter he has fallen in love with. This device — called The Sampo — later becomes the MacGuffin that everyone wants. And like every Zillion-Dollar Bill, it is accidentally destroyed, when it falls into the sea and breaks into pieces during the battle for it.

Radio

• Parodied in The Goon Show episode "The Million Pound Penny", in which Neddy Seagoon owns a penny that has been left a million pounds in a relative's will. Not surprisingly this ends in disaster.

Tabletop Games

• In 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, where the value of gemstones was determined at random, a tiny but genuine chance existed for the DM to roll up gems worth many millions of gold pieces. Just how an adventurer is supposed to sell off such incredible gems in your average medieval village was not addressed. ^note  Possibilities include: exchange it for permanent credit, find a really, really good gemcutter, trade it with a dragon, who might be able to make change or incorporate it into magical items.
  • This gets mentioned in The Intercontinental Union of Disgusting Characters, and slaughtering unfortunate centaurs, who have a high chance of dropping gems of such value, is how the titular characters become disgusting. It doesn't help that in this edition you also gain experience proportional to the money you receive...
  • Some old modules had massive jewel-encrusted gold statues that showed up as decoration in various dungeons. Due to their size and mass they couldn't be removed by ordinary means, but there are a few stories of creative parties figuring out how to successfully carry one out and suddenly being wealthy enough to buy a modest-sized kingdom.
• Less extreme than most, but still noteworthy; the talent, the largest denomination of Jade currency in Exalted is enough to pay the wages of a large army all on its own. This may not seem like much, but considering the general financial and communication capabilities of the setting, it's pretty major. Portrayed fairly realistically; the talent is so valuable that it is hardly ever used in transactions, mostly appearing just in accounts ledgers and resting in bank or personal vaults securing somebody's finances (although the fact that a single talent is several square feet large and weighs almost 70 pounds helps).
• The Milton-Bradley board game called "Life" has currency denominations going up to $100,000. The $20,000 bill features a portrait of "G. I. Lovemoney".
• Parodied in the MAD board game, which featured a $1,329,063 bill. Granted, you could only get it if you landed on a certain square and your name was Alfred E. Neuman - but maybe it's for the best, as the object of said board game is to lose all your money.
• The Star of Africa from the Finnish board game by the same name. You can find plenty of jewels in the game and cash them in for money that helps in getting ahead, but the Star of Africa is the only diamond, and effectively priceless; it can't be sold as such, but taking it back to one of the starting cities wins the game.
• The board game Big Money plays this trope quite literally, having bills in denominations of $1 zillion, $5 zillion, and $10 zillion.

Video Games

• In Fallout 2 and part of Fallout 3, the player has to look for a device called a G.E.C.K. (Garden of Eden Creation Kit) - a briefcase-like object containing a computer, seeds and chemicals - with the ability to make any earth magically sprout life.
• In Borderlands, the Vault is literally said to contain infinite wealth (along with advanced alien technology, fame, power, and women), so the Vault Keys serve as a Zillion-Dollar Bill. And you can even sell them, although the fact that the Vault really contains Sealed Evil in a Can significantly devalues them by the time you do so.
• In Day of the Tentacle you manage to make the Edisons fabulously wealthy by obtaining the back royalties Lucasarts owes them for Maniac Mansion. Naturally, the money must immediately be spent to buy a giant diamond to repair your time machine.
• In the Destroy All Humans! series, DNA/Cortexes serve as this. The Furon race literally depends on their own DNA for survival. They eat it, drink it, and trade it for money. And in DAH!3, your DNA collection can go up into the billions. Since Pox and Crypto are the ones responsible for collecting it, they are the wealthiest, most important people of their race. Until they screw it up.
• In EarthBound (1994), you are at one point given ten thousand dollars in cash and later an extremely valuable diamond, both of which you must use shortly afterwards to get the band known as the Runaway Five out of a bum contract. You'd think they'd have learned their lesson the first time.
  • At least they return the favor during a Hopeless Boss Fight. IF you didn't get killed during the fight...
• In the game Evil Genius, one of the loot items you can steal is a million dollar bill (The game is set in the '60s). Since it's too big to actually spend, it sits in your base, cheering up your minions.
  • This makes more sense than the in-game explanation that the bill isn't actually real money, but some odd PR stunt by the US President. Maybe the designers thought the players wouldn't understand.
• A well-known video game example is the "Chest of Gold" from King's Quest I. No matter how much gold came out of it, it can never be emptied. No clue what that would do with inflation, but anywho...
  • Also, no clue why neither that chest nor the Shield of Invulnerability show up in any of the future King's Quest games, where they would certainly have been useful (though possibly Game Breakers). As the trope states, it is lost, destroyed, or otherwise, except that this happens off-screen and is never mentioned again. The third treasure (the mirror) does reappear, serving a role in starting off the plots of the future games.
  • To acquire a high score in the game, the player must, among other things, track down a couple hidden treasures with no purpose other than monetary value. Since Graham ends up with the Chest of Gold at the end of the game anyway, one can wonder what the point of those treasures were.
• In Leisure Suit Larry 2: Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places), you win an actual million-dollar bill in the lottery. After some troubles converting it, you do indeed carry an indefinitely large amount of cash for the rest of the game.
• In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater the Philosopher's Legacy is a microfilm containing bank information for $100 billion US; more than the real-world US budget at the time. Justified, as it is a slush fund created by all the Allies pooling their resources to fight the Axis. The Legacy is recovered and distributed between three world powers; most of it eventually falls into the hands of the Patriots.
• Monkey Island
  • In Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, you start with, well, not an actual bill, but so much gold, diamonds and treasure you are extremely wealthy and prosperous. Of course, it gets stolen the next minute...
  • In The Curse of Monkey Island, early on you can find a bag of wooden nickels...and later on you can cash in your life insurance policy in exchange for a lot of money (virtually all of which will be spent playing poker).
    • The joke here is that the thieves won't accept a "lot" of money for the diamond, saying "We can't give it to you for anything less than an awful lot of money."
• In one of the stages in Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness the main enemy is the incredibly wealthy. As such, the smallest denomination of money they drop is a twenty thousand dollar bill. They also rob an ATM of quite a large sum of money, which, given that Tycho interrupts the machine as it is giving an exact figure of the account they are attempting to rob, is more or less a drop in the bucket.
• Sam & Max Save the World introduces the character of Bosco, a paranoid convenience store owner/inventor who charges ludicrous amounts of money for his simple inventions (such as a tear gas gun that's just a salad chopper strapped to an airgun that you're meant to shoot onions out of). The trope is avoided at first, though Bosco does accept things like food stamps and arcade tokens in lieu of cash, until eventually you sell the deed to America to Canada for a trillion dollars... delivered in the form of a handful of billion-dollar bills. Obviously, no matter how much money you have, the only in-game use for it is to buy Bosco's inventions. To make things even better, Bosco reveals that he only asks for so much money because he never actually expects them to be able to pay for it, and is just trying to see how much he can get away with. To list the types of payment accepted by Bosco:
  • $10,000 in a dollar-sign bag
  • $1,000,000 in food stamps
  • $10,000,000 in arcade tokens
  • $100,000,000 from the US Federal budget
  • $1,000,000,000 through an online transaction
  • $100,000,000,000,000 (one hundred trillion) in Canadian trillion dollar notes (they've even got Celine Dion on them!)
    • Subverted in Reality 2.0. Sam and Max are prepared to hear the ridiculous price for a wooden sword, and are surprised when Virtual Bosco is willing to sell it for the reasonable price of five gold coins.
• The "zillion-chip piece" (poker chips are the universal currency) in Twilight Heroes only drops on April Fool's Day and sells for... 1 chip.
• One of the items you need to find in Zork Zero is a million zorkmid bill.
• Averted in the Sega Genesis Tiny Toon Adventures game. Buster sets off to find a giant pirate treasure. He gets it and he gets to spend it, building an amusement park for himself and his friends.
• Adamantine in Dwarf Fortress; a single sword or piece of jewelry made from it can buy out an entire merchant caravan. Considering it can be used to make Absurdly Sharp Blades and Nigh-Invulnerable armour that weigh about as much as styrofoam this is very much justified, even if your dwarves didn't have to brave the "Hidden" Fun Stuff to get their hands on some.
• The table Billion Dollar Gameshow of the pinball videogame Pinball Fantasies, in which the final prize is 1.000.000.000 dollars.
• Gold coins in Wurm Online. It's almost impossible to actually spend a whole one in-game^note Wurm uses the usual Gold–Silver–Copper Standard, and one silver coin is worth 1 Euro (about US$1.30) so the few players who actually own one keep them around as status symbols.
• In Parasol Stars, a Bubble Bobble sequel/spinoff, one of the special items that can be obtained is a giant 100,000-yen coin. Downplayed in that it's worth much less than the other examples on this page, but it is still worth 10 times as much as the most valuable actual yen banknote and 200 times as much as the most valuable yen coin. Unlike the far more common 100-yen coins that give 100 points and add one arcade-style credit, the giant coin gives 100,000 points and maxes out the number of credits at 99.
• The gold bars found near the end of the Fallout: New Vegas expansion Dead Money are worth a ridiculous amount of money - more than any merchant has available. ^note There are some merchants who will let you buy and sell at cost under certain circumstances, such as the Great Khans' armory, so you could exchange a bar for a ton of guns and ammo instead, and sell those later. You're also not supposed to take the bars - the whole point of DM is to "let go" of your greed and desires, and the bars are so heavy that you can't escape the vault before it explodes. Unless you're a very clever player.

Web Original

• This Cracked article has an illustration of an "All The Dollars" bill, which features Theodore Roosevelt as the president portrait. The picture is captioned "Where the hell am I going to break this?"
• Retsupurae did this during the later parts of their 4-part Earnest Goes To Anime videos with the bitcoin gag.

Western Animation

• Parodied in the Animaniacs direct-to-video movie Wakko's Wish, where a ha' penny gets this role. However, the town of Acme Falls has fallen on such hard times, all it takes is two of them to save the town from soul crushing poverty and restore it to "as close to perfect as possible". It would be perfect, but... the mime. THE MIME. It really was just one coin of low value, but the stimulus this generated in the local economy created a snowball effect, restoring consumer confidence - all according to real life economic principles!
• Referred to in an episode of Jonny Quest: Yellow Peril Zinn has found a way to create gold; the heroes have to destroy the method not only to keep him from using his ill-gotten gains to fund his evil network, but also to prevent the collapse of the global economy should the secret become open knowledge.
• In the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, the turtles dread the thought of an alien turtle race moving to Earth: they are a benevolent race, but they also have the technology to create gold effortlessly (in fact, they use it mostly as a building material).
• The Simpsons had "The Trouble with Trillions", where Homer finds out that Montgomery Burns had a trillion-dollar bill in his possession. It was originally printed by the American Government to give to the governments of Europe to pay for damages from WWII, but Monty stole it. It's not quite a zillion dollars, but it's enough, at least as Lisa said for some dune buggies.
  • In the episode "Mr. Plow", Homer gets rival plowman Barney Gumble to spend the day dragging his plow up a mountain with the promise of a ten thousand dollar bill. When asked which president is on it, he claims, "All of them. They're having a party. Jimmy Carter has passed out on the couch." ^note The actual ten-thousand dollar bill features Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, and hasn't been in circulation for decades.Barney is so impressed that he leaves immediately, abandoning his hot tub with Linda Ronstadt.
  • Downplayed or arguably parodied in "The Regina Monologues", where a $1,000 bill was enough to be a spectacle among the town, raising $3,000 itself just from admissions.
• An episode of the original 1960s Spider-Man had the Vulture ransoming the city for two million dollars in the form of two one million dollar bills.
• The 2017 Ducktales reboot's episode Glomtales! shows Mark Beaks dabbling in cryptoeconomy by creating the "Beakscoin", which is allegedly "worth more than every dollar in the world combined". The Beaks coin does play a part in the plot since it contributes in helping Flintheart Glomgold winning his bet against Scrooge.

Real Life

Pre-20th Century

• During the Tokugawa era in Japan, there existed a large gold coin called Ōban with a weight of 165 grams of ~85% gold, equivalent to ten Ryo — a monetary unit corresponding to the cost of one Koku (or ~220 liters/200 kg) of rice, an amount consumed by a person in a year. Thus, Ōban was basically the equivalent of 2 tons of rice. Today its worth in the gold alone would be ~$7,000, or, given the current bulk price of quality Japanese rice of ~$5 per kilo, $10,000.
• In the ancient times, there was the talent. Its actual value depends on interpretation; one time it was the amount of silver needed to pay the entire crew of a warship for a month, or 33kg or more of gold. Either way, the message is clear: it's a boatload of money.

20th/21st Centuries

• Large denomination bills for the world's major economies have fallen out of use since the mid-20th century despite long-term inflation eating away at a given bill's purchasing power chiefly for two reasons — large denominations make it easier for criminal enterprises to use them for illicit transactions, and the introduction of electronic money transfer.
  • Between 1929 and 1945, the American government printed paper money in denominations going up to $10,000 bills that were actually released into circulation, and $100,000 bills used for interbank transfers (and exclusively for the twelve Federal Reserve Banks at that). See this article at Wikipedia. The U.S. Treasury also stopped producing large bills to make it difficult for criminals to move large sums of cash. $1,000,000 in $100 bills weighs about 20 lbs. and takes up over 600 cubic inches of space - not something you can easily hide when passing through security. A 2018 research paper by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago estimated that 80% of all U.S. $100 bills are outside of the U.S., a significant amount in the hands of organized criminals because it is a commonly-accepted currency in a denomination just high enough to be reasonably portable, but just low enough so as not to arouse excessive suspicion when spent.
    • That being said, the old $500, $1,000, $5,000 and $10,000 bills are still legal tender in the USA, meaning that you could use them, assuming the receiver knows they're legitimate and doesn't try calling the authorities... but you probably wouldn't want to do this anyway, as like most cases of discontinued currency, they command much higher values than face as numismatic collectibles.
  • The Bank of Canada last issued C$1,000 bills in 2000; the $100 note is the current highest Canadian denomination.
  • Presumably, this is why South Korea never bothered to create higher denomination banknotes after the period of inflation during the 90s Asian Economic Crisis. Up until 2009, the highest South Korean note is for 10,000 Won, worth about $15 USD; even the new 50,000 Won bill is worth less than the highest denominations of other major economies.
  • Germany before the Euro had 500 DM and 1,000 DM notes, the latter equivalent to €511 on changeover day. The €500 note existed to please Germany due to the loss of these higher values; the originally slated higher denomination bill was the €200 note. The European Central Bank stopped issuing new €500 bills in 2019.
• The British treasury printed nine £1 million banknotes after WWII. They served as aid payments to Europe after the war. According to Old Money (and The Other Wiki), they still do print notes of values £1 million (giants) and £100 million (titans) - but they serve to guarantee banknotes issued by Scottish and Northern Irish commercial banks, and never enter consumer circulation.
• The trillion dollar coin idea, a proposal to solve an impended debt ceiling crisis by minting a $1 trillion platinum coin, exploiting the fact that by law the US Mint can make platinum coins (and only platinum coins) with any face value it sees fit and without regard to the bullion value of the platinum. All other types of coins are strictly regulated by acts of Congress, but for whatever reason the Mint was given carte blanche to do as it pleases with regard to platinum. Ultimately, Congress backed down from its threat to let the debt ceiling be breached, and nothing more has been heard of the hypothetical $1 trillion coin.
• In 2007, the Royal Canadian Mint created a single gold million dollar coin, a scaled up version of their Gold Maple Leaf bullion coin simply referred to as the Big Maple Leaf, purely as a demonstration of their ability to make gold coins with greater purity than anyone had achieved before. Since it was meant as a showpiece rather than actual currency or even bullion, they actually made it with what was at the time roughly a million dollar's worth of gold, and thus the coin weighs in at a whopping 100 kg and is similar in diameter to a large pizza. Since then, demand from a few ludicrously rich investors led them to make 5 more of the $1 million coins and sell them (one was put on display at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto). One of the five private copies was later stolen from the Bode-Museum in Berlin and is presumed to have been melted down.
• Australia decided to up the ante in 2011 with their Australian Gold Nugget series. Already producing a 1 kilogram gold coin with a face value of A$3,000 and the diameter of a hockey puck, they produced a 1000 kilogram coin, with a face value of A$1 million, but a bullion value (at that time) of A$53 million. It is 800mm in diameter and 120mm thick, larger than a manhole cover.
• During the 2008 financial crisis, Mitsubishi agreed to bail out Morgan Stanley with a capital infusion of $9 billion; such an amount would ordinarily have been wire-transferred, but banks were closed on Columbus Day and Morgan Stanley was literally hours away from collapse, so Mitsubishi sent a courier with a physical check for the amount. According to Andrew Sorkin's Too Big to Fail, the Morgan Stanley executive who accepted the check nearly had a nervous breakdown (despite being fully briefed in advance on what he was receiving), and had to walk very carefully into the firm's Wall Street offices to deposit the check in the secure vault. This example might have been listed under Giant Novelty Check, except that the check was neither oversized nor a gag.

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