KEY POINTS
- Elon Musk has accumulated estimated earnings of $226.5 billion in the past ten years
- The Tesla CEO earns $43,093.61 per minute and $718.22 per second
- Musk’s annual income is 230,701 times higher than the national average household income
Elon Musk saw a meteoric rise in wealth in the past decade due to his groundbreaking ventures in electric vehicles and space exploration and his visionary approach to renewable energy.
Musk, the world’s richest man according to the real-time billionaires list of Forbes, has a net worth of $234.9 billion.
Of that massive wealth, Musk has accumulated estimated earnings of $226.5 billion in the last ten years. In 2014, he only had a net worth of $8.4 billion.
With the total amount of money he has made in the past decade, Musk earns approximately $22.6 billion annually, $1.8 billion per month, $62 million per day, $2.5 million per hour, $43,093.61 per minute and $718.22 per second.
At $718.22 per second, the 52-year-old billionaire earns 99 times more than the workers with a federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.
Musk’s average annual income is also 230,701 times higher than the national average U.S. household income in 2021 at $97,962.
Musk has come a long way before becoming a successful businessman and one of the richest people in the world.
At the age of 12, Musk sold his first software, a BASIC-based video game called “Blastar.”
After completing his education, Musk migrated to the U.S. and co-founded Zip2, a software company that aimed to change the newspaper industry by providing business directories and maps for newspapers.
The venture proved successful, attracting major clients and ultimately leading to its acquisition by Compaq for a staggering $307 million.
In 2002, Musk founded SpaceX, a private aerospace company with the audacious goal of reducing space exploration costs and eventually colonizing Mars.
While SpaceX’s journey got marred with setbacks and near bankruptcy, the company is already worth $127 billion after a funding round in May 2022.
Musk’s space aviation company has also become the first privately funded company to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station.
Musk is also the chief executive officer of Tesla, an electric vehicle company that aims to revolutionize transportation by providing sustainable, high-performance electric cars.
His visionary leadership made Tesla a leader in the electric vehicle industry, and the company is now worth $813.2 billion as of June 26, according to Macrotrends.
Musk’s latest venture is Twitter after he purchased the social media company with a price tag of $44 billion in October 2022.
However, his Twitter takeover became controversial after he fired several executives and laid off thousands of the company’s employees.
According to CBS News, in the 12 hours since Musk ascended to Twitter’s ownership, researchers from Montclair State University saw a massive spike in hate speech.
The research team said they had monitored 4,778 hate-filled tweets on the day Musk took ownership of Twitter, far from 84 hostile tweets an hour in the week leading up to his acquisition.