Just How Much Is Elon Musk Worth?
A lot. A staggering amount actually. Like Scrooge McDuck would cream his pants at the site of a tenth of Elon's wealth.
By the estimates at the time of writing this, El Señor Musk is worth about $452.2 billion. At least according to the people over at Forbes that track this kind of thing on a big list of people ruining the planet that they have.. He's #1 in the world in terms of wealth by almost double the next leading person, Mr. Piss Palace himself, Jeff Bezos at a measly$241B. Let's just take a second to write that out real quick. That's $452,200,000,000.00. We haven't seen that many zeroes since our last modelling gig and those were only number on the check.
A One Man Nation
We here at Minimally Useful are all about putting things in perspective and we really love exaggeration. Unfortunately, none of these items are an exaggeration when talking about his wealth compared to the United Nations figures for countries GDP[source].
- His net worth is higher than the GDP of 162 nations or more than 83% of the globe.
- His net worth is just shy of being equivalent to Bangladesh (not included in the 162) who are ranked #33 overall by GDP.
- His net worth would take Turks and Caicos (those fancy islands with all the expensive resorts) saving all their production for 397 years to match Elon's net worth of today.
- His net worth would take Tuvalu (last place) 7,664 years of accumulating their GDP to match the net worth of this one man.
Even more impressive than the above list is that since November 2024, Musk has increased his net worth by more than $70B, which is more than the GDP of 108 countries. So Elon made more in 1.5 months than the countries of more than half the globe made in an entire year.
Bootstraps 101
Anyone worth their weight in gold plated, enriched uranium filled, plutonium boxes knows, you gotta pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you ever want to out earn half the nations of the planet. So what exactly does that look like to amass $452.2B. Well, let's throw some more soul crushing math your way.
The average income for a person in the US is $60,070 (in 2022). It would take that poor schmuck 7.5 million years of saving to accumulate the same as Musky. We're talking opening that account in the Miocene Epoch and never backing down from the grind for a day since.
Median income is for poor people though. What about someone making some bank. Earning a $10,000 per month, or $120k per annum for the more sophisticated math wizards among us, would take you about half the time of the median income. That's right, a practical flash of only 3.8 million years.
But what if you're not just some common middle class plebe. A real go getter that knows how to climb your way up a human pyramid. What about $10k per day? That comes out to $3.65M a year. We're talking CEO money now. But it would still take you 123,890 years to hit Elon Musk status. Good news is homo sapiens are now roaming the Earth. Bad news is that insured banking has not been invented yet.
Alright. What about $1M per day? That seems like enough to scrape by on right? Well, hate to break it to you, it'd still take you about 1,239 years to earn it. That's still looking to be about 17 lifetimes and let's be honest, with that kind of money, the lifespan is probably gonna take a hit, so you might want to bump it up a life or two.
To get the earnings into a single 73 year lifespan, you would have to make $16,971,289 per day. Better expressed as $707,137 hour. Even better expressed as $11,785 per minute or $196 per second. That's right. You could be making like $50k every time you saddle up to the porcelain throne to make a deposit. Talk about your time well spent. Every time you blink you'd be earning half a weeks pay for a minimum wage worker.
The Spendpocalypse
Alright, now that what it takes to get there and how many countries you're putting a monetary smackdown on is covered, what about the lavish ways in which you could spend it. Again, we've compiled a list in no particular order of what we would do with it.
- If you're buying some top tier, Bezos level cocaine, you're looking a buying about 2.3B kilos of Colombian snow. That's a brick as large as the HMS Lancaster with room for some cargo.
- On the topic of boats... The most expensive yacht ever made is the History Supreme clocking in at $4.8B. This beaut is alleged to be made of gold and other magic that somehow brings the price up to $4.8B that nobody else can explain. Maybe WE might have an idea but it doesn't quite have the same panache as the HMS Lancaster. Anyway, with Musk bucks you could buy 94 of these bad boys and that's assuming they don't give you a bulk discount.
- Maybe you don't want your own fleet of solid gold yachts though because that might look a bit tacky while cruisin' to your villa. Perhaps you'd rather buy some art. Maybe the alleged most expensive piece ever sold. This dandy called The Card Players by someone named Cézanne was allegedly sold to some dude in Qatar for $250-300M. Assuming the buyer Ahmed Ali Muskhamad, you could buy about 1,507 of these guys to decorate you living room or houseboat or whatever.
- Now you've got a yachts, art, and party favors, there's only one thing left to purchase. A humble abode at which you and your closest 300,000 friends can indulge yourselves. Looking up the most expensive house on the planet turned up a familiar place. Home of none other than the King of England, Buckingham Palace. Coming in a value of $4.8B, you can only afford about 8 dozen of these, but hey, you gotta live somewhere right?
Financial Advice
We will start by saying, nobody should ever trust us with money or listen to us. Ever. However, if you want a quick insider tip on how to reduce some of your day to day stress levels, might we recommend having just a 0.1% cut of Elon's net worth to alleviate your woes. If you can't manage that, you're definitely not getting invited to the next auction for the presidency or even a invitation to the next floating of the a craftly molded replica of the HMS Lancaster.