U.S. oligarch Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire on Friday after his company SpaceX went public in the largest initial public offering ever. Musk is worth $1.1 trillion, thanks in large part to his stock in both Tesla and SpaceX.
Musk becoming a trillionaire is an incredibly dark milestone for humanity. In a world where millions of people are suffering from treatable illnesses and starvation—often as a result of Musk’s own actions—there is one guy who holds more wealth than most of us can even conceptualize.
How wealthy is Musk now?
It can be difficult to put such staggering numbers in perspective.
At $1.1 trillion, Musk is worth about $704 billion more than the second-wealthiest person in the world, Google co-founder Larry Page, who’s worth $296 billion, according to Forbes. The gap between Elon Musk and Larry Page ($804 billion) is larger than the entire GDP of Ireland ($779 billion).
Google co-founder Sergey Brin is worth about $273 billion, according to Forbes, making him the third-wealthiest person in the world. The gap between Elon Musk’s wealth and Sergey Brin’s wealth is $827 billion, roughly what it would cost to fix the national debt, according to Fortune.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is the third-wealthiest on the Forbes list of richest people, at about $247 billion. That’s a gap of $853 billion, roughly the combined net worth of the 10 wealthiest people in 2020.
Oracle founder Larry Ellison currently sits at number four on the Forbes list of wealthiest people, with $228 billion. The gap between Ellison’s wealth and Musk’s net worth is about $872 billion. If you spent $1,000 per day every single day, it would take about 2.4 million years to spend that amount of money.
Dell founder Michael Dell is currently just under Ellison on the Forbes billionaires list at $227 billion. If you have even a single dollar to your name, your net worth is closer to Michael Dell’s than Dell’s is to Elon Musk’s.
Facebook founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is worth $196 billion. The gap between Zuck’s net worth and Musk’s is a whopping $904 billion. The median U.S. home price is currently about $436,500. You could buy 2.07 million homes with the money in that gap.
Nvidia founder Jensen Huang is worth $178 billion, making him the eighth-wealthiest person, according to Forbes. The gap between his net worth and Musk’s now sits at $922 billion. That amount of cash could buy you over 92 million horses for your personal flight attendants. Or settle over 3.6 million claims with those employees (at $250,000 a piece) after they accuse you of sexual harassment.
Bernard Arnault, the CEO of luxury goods company LVMH, and his family are worth about $156 billion, meaning the gap between their wealth and Musk’s is $944 billion. That’s nearly the entire GDP of Taiwan, which is currently at $976 billion.
Legendary 95-year-old investor Warren Buffett is worth about $144 billion, making him the tenth-wealthiest person in the world, according to Forbes. The gap between Buffett’s wealth and Musk’s is now $956 billion. As Bloomberg notes, Musk is worth about seven Warren Buffetts.
Where did the money actually come from?
SpaceX is currently trading at $173 per share at the time of this writing, up significantly from the IPO price of $135. The company is now the sixth-largest by market cap, behind Nvidia, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon. And while nobody knows what will happen to the stock, every penny that it goes up contributes to Elon Musk’s enormous wealth.
Musk was worth $24.6 billion as recently as 2020. But he managed to see his wealth climb tremendously, in large part thanks to government contracts. The trillionaire’s companies have been built on at least $38 billion in government funding, according to the Washington Post, including loans, subsidies, and tax credits. And yet he still promotes the libertarian myth that he somehow exists outside of America’s oligarchic system.
No matter how many ways you try to put these numbers in context, it’s still difficult for any human to comprehend the kind of money and power Elon Musk now possesses. Another way to look at it: If you gave someone $1 million every day since the birth of Jesus Christ, they’d have about $741 billion, not including any interest. Elon Musk is much wealthier than that. (Sen. Rick Scott, a Republican from Florida, recently used this stat to complain about the national debt.)
Elon Musk and charity
There simply aren’t enough hours in the day for anyone to “earn” a trillion dollars. And yet Musk doesn’t believe in giving money to charity, insisting that his creation of private companies is its own kind of charitable giving.
Back in 2021, the head of the UN World Food Program asked Musk to donate $6 billion to save 42 million people from starvation. Musk declined.
At the time, that $6 billion was just 2% of Musk’s wealth. Today, it’s just half a percent. We won’t hold our breath waiting for the newly minted trillionaire to save millions of people from unnecessary death.
What money can’t buy
No matter how much money you have, it won’t make you a good person or fulfill you in any profound ways. And it can’t make people like you.
Only 36% of Americans say they approve of Elon Musk, with 48% saying they disapprove of him, according to the latest polling. It will be interesting to see how those numbers fluctuate as his net worth goes up or down with the price of SpaceX stock.
Then again, it’s hard for mere mortals to imagine even the difference between $100 billion and $1 trillion. The numbers are simply too large.
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