Skip to content

Elon Musk’s $1 Trillion Payday Dwarfs Germany’s Entire Economy

A single trillion dollars could buy half of Germany’s top companies—or give every person on Earth $121. Yet Musk’s payday makes it feel small. How did we get here?

This picture shows a monitor and a keyboard and we see a book and few papers and a mouse on the...
This picture shows a monitor and a keyboard and we see a book and few papers and a mouse on the table and we see couple of coins and a toy car.

What is a billion really? Here's how everyone understands it - Elon Musk’s $1 Trillion Payday Dwarfs Germany’s Entire Economy

A trillion dollars is an astronomical figure that's hard for humans to grasp. It's equivalent to 31,688 years of Elon Musk spending one dollar every second. To put it into perspective, this amount could buy half of Germany's DAX-listed corporations, cover Germany's 2024 federal budget more than twice, or purchase the most expensive villa in Germany 25,000 times.

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, could potentially receive shares worth a trillion dollars if he meets certain performance targets. This is more than 3 times the annual turnover of Volkswagen, Germany's largest company. However, no German company founder has the potential to reach or exceed an annual turnover of 1 trillion euros in 2024.

The human brain finds it challenging to comprehend such large numbers. For instance, one million is just 0.1 percent of one billion, and one billion is still 999 billion short of a trillion. If distributed equally, a trillion dollars would give each of the 8.2 billion people on Earth approximately $121.

A trillion dollars is a colossal amount, far beyond the reach of most individuals and companies. It's a figure that stretches our understanding of wealth and highlights the vastness of the global economy.

Read also:

Latest