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Bezos and Musk have it deeply wrong.
The problem isn't that we need a trillion people to have more Einsteins or Mozarts.
The problem is we don't nurture and protect the ones we have.
Stephen Jay Gould wrote: "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops".
This is a nonsensical way of thinking, but I couldn't help but make a rough estimate.
Assuming that, to be a recognized Mozart in the 18th century, you'd need to be male and live in Europe, that gives you a pool of about 60 million people.
Scaling that up to 8 billion, that means that if we were to keep the population constant, but promote equity and opportunity, we'd have a 133 Mozarts running around.
@petergleick Not as many, and quite a distant dream, but still more likely to work than a trillion-person population on a single planet.