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Jesus wept. Simple math, people. I like AI but stop using it because you are too lazy to break out a calculator and the sort of deductive reasoning you'd give an undergrad interviewing for his first internship.
Current spot price of gold is about $4,350/troy ounce.
An avoirdupois pound is 14.583 troy ounces, or $63,436.05. So $1B in gold would be about 15,764 lbs, or 7.88 tons.
There are cargo planes that can carry over 100 tons. So I don't know how you posed your question, but it is clearly not "physically impossible" for a cargo plan to carry billions of dollars.
(I don't know if the UAE has literal tons of gold on hand, or if that's how they'd transport cash. Supposing they have a vault full of US bank notes, each bill is about 1 gram so $1B in $USD100 bills would be 10M x 1 gram = 10 metric tons/9.8 tons. So whatever form the "cash" takes, yes, it's physically possible to carry billions in a cargo plane.)
The other guy's post claims it was a specific plane, not just any plane.
I did also assume usd but another poster helpfully pointed out that there are other currencies with bigger bills
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