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.
