A $1.9B-a-character tweet

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At the moment a bogus AP report of blasts at the White House was tweeted, the market capitalization of the constituent stocks of the S&P 500 stock index, widely followed by professional investors, stood at $14.6 trillion. The index fell nearly 1% in three minutes as traders reacted to the social media hack. That wiped out $137 billion of the index’s value — at 71 characters, almost $2 billion a character — before prices bounced back once it was clear the tweet was false.