How much is 265 billion dollars?

A few ways to quantify the unquantifiable.

A madman burning billions of dollars.

In case you didn’t hear, earlier this week, Elon Musk bought Twitter. Unfortunately for all of us, this is now the only thing we can talk about. The news is full of armchair psychologists trying to parse Elon Musk’s every motivation; Silicon Valley is full of newly minted management consultants offering their opinions about Twitter’s executive team; Twitter itself is full of amateur Constitutional law scholars, making up stuff about free speech. We’re drowning in takes.

Despite that, there’s one character in this story—the main character, in a way—that’s been almost entirely ignored: Elon Musk’s money. Yes, every story about him makes the obligatory mention that he’s the world’s richest person. But the scale of his fortune—$265 billion—is a number that’s nearly impossible to comprehend, the sort of thing that we gawk at but make no real attempt to truly understand. Most efforts to explain it are absurd “comparisons”—Elon Musk is worth more than all but 25 companies on the S&P 500! If you took 265 billion one dollar bills and laid them end-to-end, they’d stretch from here to Venus!—that are no easier to grasp than the original figure. I have no idea how to value S&P 500 component Fastenal,¹ and likening unfathomable amounts of money to unfathomable distances doesn’t help me much either. 

So, if we’re all going talk about Elon Musk as much as it seems like we’re doomed to do, we owe it to ourselves to better describe his most defining attribute. Here are some other attempts:

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If you made $10 million for every point Steph Curry scored in his entire career—banking $300 million from Wednesday night’s game alone—you’d still have less money than Elon Musk. 

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Jeff Bezos, the world’s second richest person, is worth $178 billion. If Bezos founded and entirely owned Southwest ($27 billion), United ($16 billion), Delta ($28 billion), and American Airlines ($12 billion), he’d also be worth less than Elon Musk.

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Speaking of airlines, in 2019, before travel was shut down by the pandemic, people flew just over a billion flights in the United States. The average airline ticket costs $260, implying that Elon Musk could afford to buy every commercial airline ticket in the entire country for a year.

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According to the World Bank, the poorest 583 million people in the world make, on average, about $1.25 a day. Elon Musk could personally pay all of these people—roughly seven percent of the global population—for a year. 

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During the Reddit-driven GameStop short squeeze in January of 2021, shares of GME rose thirty-fold, from $17 to over $500 at their peak. Keith Gill, the straw who stirred the entire frenzied drink, was the first Redditor to take a major position in GameStop. Through a series of high-leverage trades, he turned his original $53,000 investment into as much as $48 million. If Gill sold his GameStop position at its peak, reinvested all his earnings into another meme stock that went just as vertical as GameStop, sold that stock at its peak, and then put his resulting $44 billion of wealth into the S&P 500 (which averages a 7.5 percent annual return), he’s be worth $265 billion in 25 years. 

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I work out at an average-sized Crossfit gym.² By rough count, the gym has 2,800 pounds of plates, 900 pounds of bars, 1,100 pounds of dumbbells, and 1,100 pounds of kettlebells. Gold currently costs $1,900 an ounce. At this price, my gym could replace all of their equipment with weights made of solid gold for $177 million. With his money, Elon Musk could replace the weights of nearly 1,500 gyms with solid gold. There are 1,149 Crossfit gyms in all of Brazil. 

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Over the last fourteen years, Marvel Studios has put out 27 films that have cumulatively grossed $25.6 billion worldwide. If one person made every Marvel movie on their own, and pocketed every dollar of ticket sales from every film, they’d have to continue making movies, at the same pace and scale of success, for the next 130 years to be as rich as Elon Musk. Over that time, they’d need to make 252 more Marvel movies.

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There are roughly one million restaurants in the United States, and the average chain restaurant has 130 items on the menu. If you assume the average item costs twenty dollars, Elon Musk could order the entire menu from every restaurant in the country for more than three months. 

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The biggest California Powerball lottery prize is currently $454 million. Imagine you won this lottery. Now, imagine, you spent your entire winnings on 227 million $2 California Dreamin’ lottery scratchers, and every single one of them was a $1,000 winner—each ticket beating the 1-in-157,107 odds. You’d still be worth $40 billion less than Elon Musk. According to Google’s calculations, the odds of this string of events happening is one in infinity.

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The city of San Francisco takes up 47 square miles, or thirty thousand acres. An acre of forest contains about 170 trees, and trees have, by one estimate, about fifty thousand leaves. If all of San Francisco was a forest, and every leaf on every tree in that forest was replaced with a one dollar bill, the forest would contain $255 billion.

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Economists estimated that the global economy produced $84 trillion worth of goods and services in 2020. This averages out to $230 billion a day, suggesting that Elon Musk could, for one day, buy everything produced in the entire world.³

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In Monster, Nicki Minaj said she was paid “50K for a verse.” Last year, 432 major hip hop albums were released, rap albums have an average of 16.1 songs, and I’d guess the average rap song has three verses. If Nicki Minaj wrote every verse on every album in 2021—and was paid fifty grand for all of them—she’d make just over a billion dollars. For her to be worth as much as Elon Musk is today, she’d have to have been producing verses at this rate for the last 254 years, since 1768. Beethoven was born in 1770.

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The average life insurance policy in the United States pays out $168,000. If the governor of Maine took out a policy on every person in the state—and then murdered them all—they’d collect slightly less money than Elon Musk is worth.

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The cumulative salary of the entire NBA is $4.25 billion. If you garnish the wages of every player in the league, you’d be worth as much as Elon Musk in 62 years, in 2084. For comparison, Wilt Chamberlain made his NBA debut 62 years ago.

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About sixty tech companies went public in 2021, including Coinbase (valued at $86 billion), Roblox ($30 billion), Rivian ($67 billion), and Didi Chuxing ($73 billion). These companies IPO’d with a cumulative market cap of just over $750 billion dollars. If you founded all 62 of these companies, and managed to retain a very respectable ten percent equity stake in every company, you’d be worth $75 billion dollars. To be worth the same amount as Elon Musk, you’ve have to repeat this feat for two and half more years, founding and taking public a total of 218 companies.

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In Office Space, several of the characters develop a scheme to shave fractions of a penny off of every financial transaction processed by Initech, their soulless corporate employer. Suppose you masterminded your way into an engineering position at Visa, and applied the same salami slicing malware to their payment processing system. If you were able to shave half a cent off of every transaction, you’d collect about $1.2 billion a year from the 232 billion transactions Visa processes every year. To be as rich as Elon Musk, you’ve have to run this scheme for 220 years. 

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According to this random set of calculations on Quora, we see about 3 million faces in a lifetime. Americans have a median net worth of $121,000. That means, if you’re an American and in your thirties, Elon Musk is probably worth about the same as the combined net worth of every person you’ve ever seen in your entire life. 

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$265 billion is less than the market capitalization of Coca-Cola.

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While we're here, I do have one final, brief thought on this whole circus. There is a plain and obvious problem with Elon Musk owning Twitter: One man will have taken complete control of the major artery of mass political communication and elite discourse. He can, if he so chooses, browse fifteen years of politicians’ DMs. He can, if he so chooses, resurface fifteen years of deleted tweets. He can, if he so chooses, put his finger on dozens of invisible scales that tilt the global discourse in whatever direction he prefers. He may not—as his supporters like to say, he has other companies to run. But the vault is his; he can make do with it as he pleases; and if he does, we’re unlikely to ever know.

Proponents of the deal ignore this clear danger because, I suspect, they like Elon Musk. Yes, he’s one man who bought the digital nuclear codes, but he’s their man. Better those codes be in his hands than owned by a board they don’t respect, or a few thousand employees whose imagined values they don’t like.

I don't like Elon Musk. I don't like the blind eye he turns to the racial discrimination and bigotry happening on his watch. I don't like his dumb middle school jokes. I don't like his idea of fun, and I don’t want a maximum amount of it in the world. 

But even if I attempt to put that aside, I don’t like a private citizen, accountable to no one, buying an enormously influential piece of our social infrastructure. Some things—nuclear weapons, access to the pictures on every iPhone on the planet, the entire world’s Chrome browsing history, Gmail’s servers—shouldn’t be for sale.⁴ 

If you disagree—as Ted Cruz does—cover Elon Musk with a Rawlsian veil of ignorance. Suppose someone conquered the infinite odds of the California Powerball, and outright bought YouTube, Instagram, or iMessage. Suppose this unknown buyer—a retiree in Modesto, a teenager in Portland, Joe the Plumber, AOC, Tila Tequila,⁵ Ronan Farrow, Vladimir Putin, anyone—now has unfettered access to the knobs that drive public debate, and to a decade of your personal communications, like, say, Ted Cruz’s likes and DMs. Do you support the deal? 

There are only two answers. You can either support people’s right to spend money how they please—you know, free speech—and accept the anonymous purchase, or you can object to it, on general principle, because no one person should be entrusted with that power, no matter how many lotteries they win. 

The only other option is to just admit that you like Elon Musk, that you like the idea of him being in charge, and that nearly everything else is a rationalization for rooting for your guy.

1. We’re all trying to make fancy tech companies, and Fastenal is out here building a $33 billion business on…I don’t know, tape and screws?

2. Unsubscribe here.

3. And, honestly, I’d sell him a day’s worth of work if it meant that, after that one day, he was out of money and we never had to hear from him again.

4. Yes, most of these are owned by private sector companies, and employees and executives could, in theory, go spelunking through these things just as easily as Elon Musk could at Twitter. But boards and public companies provide a mix of shared accountability and collective disorganization that make it much more difficult for one man to bend the world to his whims. 

5. Who apparently became a Nazi?