Featured Image Credit: Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images
A jaw-dropping YouTube video has revealed the true scale of Elon Musk's fortune after he offically became the world's first ever trillionaire.
With Tesla's eye-watering executive pay package and SpaceX shares surging following its blockbuster IPO, it feels like it was only a matter of time until Musk would make financial history.
After this weekend, the tech mogul's estimated net worth now sits at approximately $1.11 trillion, according to Bloomberg and the whopping figure places him in an entirely different category from every other wealthy person on the planet, including the likes of Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and LVMH chief Bernard Arnault.
A BBC report found that Musk's wealth trajectory took off sharply after 2020 as the value of his two biggest companies, Tesla and SpaceX, climbed rapidly.
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And there is no sign of his wealth slowing down as, since SpaceX went public, his net worth continues to grow with the company's shares having surged by a fifth.
For most people, a trillion dollars feels pretty unimaginable, but thanks to a YouTube video by Big Data Factor, the difference between a billion and a trillion dollars is laid out in a simple illustration.
It starts with a single $100 note, the most counterfeited banknote in the world. From there, the video climbs through the milestones that most people use to measure financial success.
A $100,000 stack represents the six-figure salary 'long seen as a marker of financial success'. So if you find yourself here, you've done very well.
Climbing up to a million dollars, the video shows the weight of around 10kg (22lbs) and represents around 92 years of work for the average person. At $100 million, the video shows the cash neatly fitting on a single pallet and explains that the money would be enough to buy a private island.
Then comes a billion - a figure that feels impossibly distant for most people, especially as the video states this figure could be achievable by putting away $100 a day for 27,000 years.
And then, finally, a trillion. The video shows ten rows of pallets stacked high, each containing $100 million. To put it in spending terms, 'it would take you more than 2,700 years to spend a trillion dollars if you spent 1 million dollars every day.'
Viewers were shocked by the illustration of large sums of money, with one viewer writing in the comment section: "I think I already knew this, but the visualization of it blows my mind."
"This scale is inconceivable by normal humans when the government talks about money," another added.
A third user commented: "Damn, I guess I’d better start spending a million dollars a day if I’m ever going to becomes a trillionaire."
