The scale of Elon Musk's wealth is surprising. That's how much he could give away to anyone in the US
On Friday, with the long-awaited debut of SpaceX on the American stock exchange, the attention of the financial world once again focused heavily on Elon Musk.
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The billionaire officially crossed the barrier that had previously remained in the sphere of theory – he became the world's first trillionaire. The American “Newsweek” emphasized in its Friday analysis that the scale of such a gigantic fortune is extremely difficult for us to imagine. To bring this financial phenomenon closer to readers, journalists decided to translate abstract numbers into specific, although still hypothetical, purchases.
Your own city or a cash injection for citizens
As “Newsweek” calculated, if Elon Musk decided to directly and equally distribute his trillion dollars among all households in the United States – the number of which is estimated at about 128 million – each of them would receive a significant amount of approximately PLN 7.8 thousand. hole. (almost PLN 30,000). Such a one-time cash injection would dramatically change the financial situation of millions of American families.
The total value of all apartments and houses in a metropolis such as Chicago is hundreds of billions of dollars. In practice, this means that for your trillion dollars Musk could theoretically buy up every residential property in a major American city. Most astonishingly, there would still be hundreds of billions of dollars in reserves left in his account after making this transaction. Market experts confirm these unusual calculations.
“For this amount, he could buy over 2 million houses in the US” – points out Alex Beene, an analyst from the University of Tennessee at Martin.
On a macroeconomic scale, the fortune of the head of SpaceX compares with the financial potential of entire countries and powerful government institutions. The value of Musk's fortune is fully comparable to the annual GDP value of a medium-sized developed country, such as Switzerland.
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A trillion dollars alone is also responsible approximately two months of uninterrupted operation of the United States government. “It could finance annual defense spending, which is typically the largest item in the federal budget,” Alex Beene points out.
However, if the entrepreneur wanted to invest in transport infrastructure, the above-mentioned amount would allow him to theoretically finance it construction of several dozen most modern airports around the world.
SpaceX's space debut
This sudden and unprecedented jump in asset value is a direct result of SpaceX's spectacular stock market success. In one of the largest initial public offerings (IPO) in history the company sold 555.6 million shares at a price of $135 to large investors. per piece.
This allowed for obtaining approximately USD 75 billion from the market. cash. This result translates into a total valuation of SpaceX of between $1.75 and $1.77 trillion. The company immediately became one of the largest public companies in the world.
However, “Newsweek” tones down excessive enthusiasm and reminds us of the key specificity of modern fortunes. While Musk is technically a trillionaire now, the vast majority of his wealth is tied up in shares of companies like Tesla and SpaceX, not real cash. A billionaire does not have the possibility to freely and immediately liquidate such a huge package of shares.
