It would take an average worker 3 Million Years to become the next Elon Musk

How long would a regular American employee take to make Elon Musk’s wealth? The answer is 3 million years! No, it isn’t a typo, and neither are you reading that statement wrongly. MoneyTransfers.com has presented data showing that it’ll take the average working American a gobsmacking 3M years to attain Musk’s wealth.

Musk is the wealthiest human being to have walked the earth today. According to Forbes Magazine, the Tesla CEO’s wealth as of 12th April 2022, stood at $262.6B. His meteoric rise up the billionaires’ list has seen him knock Jeff Bezos off that perch. Bezos’ current wealth stands at $176.9B.

An impossible cause

Elon’s current net worth means that he makes over $430M a day. That makes it impossible for the average American employee to work their way to his wealth level. Based on 2020’s OECD data, that worker would, on average, make $69,392 annually. They, therefore, would need to work for 3M years to get to Musk’s holdings.

The numbers become inconceivable when you consider the median income. A 2020 St. Louis Federal Reserve analysis put U.S. median personal incomes at $35,805. Working with this figure would more than double the duration it would take to match Musk’s net worth to 6.1M years.

A million years’ quest

On their part, Germans would have to work for almost a million years at $53,475 annually to match Dieter Schwarz’s fortune. The Owner of Schwarz-Gruppe is worth some $47B. His conglomerate owns Kaufland and Lidl supermarket chains, among others. 

Canadian crypto billionaire Changpeng Zhao is the nation’s wealthiest person. His ownership of Binance, the largest crypto exchange globally, has seen him amass a fortune of $55B at press time. His fellow average Canadian would have to work for 1.2M years to attain that feat.

Poland’s wealthiest man Michael Solowow is worth 27.3B Zloty ($6.372B). The nation’s average annual wage is 67,965 Zloty ($15,875). It would therefore take the average Polish worker 401.4 years to build up Solowow’s fortune.

How do the figures compare in low-income countries?

These figures are already astronomical by Western States standards. But they become starker in countries where low average incomes and significant wealth disparities are the norm. Such nations include India and China.

India’s wealthiest man Mukesh Ambani is worth some $91B. The mean annual wage in India is about $5,000. Therefore, it would take his compatriots earning the mean wage 17 million years to amass Ambani’s kind of fortune. 

Similarly, it’d take 15.3M years for a regular Chinese employee to raise the $66B that Zhong Shanshan is worth.