What would the $540M jackpot buy?

The Mega Millions jackpot is now officially a world-record-breakin​g $540 million, and it's bound to get even bigger -- $600 million has been mentioned as a possibility -- before Friday night's drawing. People have lottery fever -- big time.

"It's spiraling out of control," California state lottery spokesman Elias Dominguez said. "This is uncharted territory."

Sure, if you take the lump-sum option, you'll get only $389 million. Otherwise, it's 26 annual payments of about $20 million (the forced-discipline option we'd pick if we were the lucky winner). And then there's 25% for federal taxes and also maybe state and local taxes, depending on where you live.

But for the fun of it, let's just imagine how much money $540 million really is.

Here's a visual: If you walked down the street and found a dollar bill on the ground every 10 feet, you'd have to walk the circumference of the Earth 41 times to pick up all 540 million of those bills. Please don't ask how long that would take. (Post continues below.)

There are other ways to look at this. Imagine your buying power. CNN's Jack Cafferty provided some help:

• It's your salary for 5,400 years if you earn $100,000 a year.
• You could buy a thousand $500,000 homes. (Or if you're looking for more spectacular homes, WANE.com, in recognition of the $540 million prize, has a slideshow of mansions, a private island in the Bahamas, supercars, and other expensive items now within your budget.)
• "Or if you paid half of your winnings in taxes and invested the remaining roughly $270 million in tax-free municipal bonds earning 3%," Cafferty wrote, "you would garner about $8 million a year in interest."

KOMO News provided other ways to visualize just how rich you'd be with $540 million. Among them:

On very rare occasions when I feel like splurging, I can come up with a $5-plus drink at Starbucks. But with $540 million, it's triple venti caramel macchiatos on the house! You could buy over 98 million of the drinks -- or one for everyone in the state of California, New York and Texas and still have enough to buy two of them for all your friends in Washington state plus if you were feeling generous, one for everyone in Oregon too.

Or, you could buy 1.3% of Starbucks, the company.

Live in Yakima, Wash.? The jackpot is big enough for you to buy 12 million of your closest friends premier passes to the Spring Barrel Tasting at wineries between the Yakima Valley and the Tri-Cities.

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Let's hope these suggestions keep you in the sharing mood. It's likely that if you win, you're not going to get the whole pot for yourself. As more people buy tickets, the likelihood of multiple winners increases. The Wall Street Journal says:

… up to a certain point, higher jackpots mean higher expected payouts. But after a certain point, the risk of multiple winners overwhelms the higher jackpots, and the expected payout goes down.

More on MSN Money:

• You just won $540M – now what?
• Mega Millions office pool? Be careful
• The lottery: An 'investment' for fools
• What if you won the lottery?
• You won the lottery! Now what?
• I won the lottery -- and I'm keeping my job