Is Elon Musk so rich that he could give every person on Earth $1 billion and still have $172 billion left over? No, that's not true: A post that says this on social media puts Musk's wealth at $180 billion, which means he'd be broke after giving just 180 people $1 billion. Forbes magazine estimates Musk's actual net worth at about $317 billion, which still would not be nearly enough for him to make all 8 billion people on Earth billionaires.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on Threads on November 15, 2024. It read:
Elon Musk has $180 Billion and there are 8B people on earth. If he gave us each $1B he'd still have $172B left.
This is how the post looked on Threads at the time of writing:
(Source: Threads screenshot taken on Thu Nov 21 15:02:50 2024 UTC)
The meme accurately states that Earth is home to 8 billion people, according to 2022 data from the United Nations (archived here). If Musk, the world's richest man, were worth $180 billion, he would run out of money after giving $1 billion to just 180 of them.
Forbes magazine estimated Musk's net worth at $315.7 billion at the time of writing (archived here), significantly greater than the amount cited in the meme. He'd still burn through all his wealth after giving just 315 people $1 billion, with the 316th having to settle for $700 million.
Musk would need $8,000,000,000,000,000,000, or $8 quintillion, in order to give $1 billion to every Earth inhabitant.
The Reflexive Property of mathematics (archived here) states that "a number is always equal to itself," according to Brilliant.com, a site that helps students with math and data issues. That means Musk would not be able to artificially expand his wealth to make everyone on the planet a billionaire.
Other Lead Stories fact checks of claims related to Elon Musk can be found here.
