This is how many years you would need to work to earn as much money as Elon Musk has now

Elon Musk is wealthy. Really wealthy. As of the Easter holidays, his net worth was estimated at $363 billion. That’s enough to buy a $6.15 tall latte at Starbucks in Manhattan every single second for the next 1,870 years - an epic coffee break if there ever was one.

But how long would it take the average American to earn that amount of money?

The answer: 5.5 million years. That’s long enough for one bunch of apes to split off from its cousins and end up inventing electric cars.

The average U.S: salary, according to the Social Security Administration is around $66,000 a year. Divide $363 billion by that and you get your 5.5 million-year figure. And that’s just earning the money. To actually stash that amount away would take far longer - and a lot of skipping $6.15 lattes (and probably avocados too).

Even compared to lifetime earnings, Musk’s fortune is beyond comprehension. The average American earns about $3 million over their entire career. That means Musk’s current net worth is equal to what 121,000 people will make in their lifetimes, combined.

Musk doesn’t have billions in the bank

Musk’s wealth isn’t cash in the bank - though he’s probably got a little bit of that too. His assets are mainly his ownership of the companies Tesla, SpaceX and xAI (which owns X, which was formerly Twitter). Because these assets are shares in companies, their value can fluctuate a fair bit.

In fact, Elon Musk was worth a lot more at the end of 2024: around $486 billion. But the value of his shares, particularly in Tesla, has since dropped by $120 billion.

A latte that breaks math

If you do have a few million years to spare, you could end up with a lot more than Musk has now, you just need the power of compound interest. It’s pretty simple - just skip one $6.15 latte and put it in the bank at 3% interest, compounded annually. Leave it alone for 5.5 million years, and you’d end up with a number so large, your bank’s calculator would melt.

In fact, it would be a number with 70,606 digits - a total that’s larger than the number of atoms in the known universe. Musk’s $363 billion? Chump change.

And here’s one of the few ever televised jokes involving compound interest, from the legendary British sitcom Red Dwarf:

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