Elon Musk is rich, but not rich enough to give everyone on Earth $1 billion. That claim is False.

X owner Elon Musk’s net worth spiked after President-elect Donald Trump won the U.S. election. If Musk were to redistribute his wealth, how much money could he give to each person in the world? The answer is much less than a popular social media post claimed.

"Elon Musk has $180 Billion and there are 8B people on earth. If he gave us each $1B he’d still have $172B left," read a Nov. 17 Threads post with more than a thousand likes. We saw others sharing the same claim.

Sadly, that’s just bad math. And it’s not the first time we’ve seen this kind of miscalculation about Musk. Fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, has also been the target of faulty arithmetic.

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Musk is the world’s wealthiest person, with a net worth of $314 billion, according to Forbes. And the world population is about 8 billion, per the U.S. Census’ International Database.

Featured Fact-check

John Duncan

stated on December 1, 2011 in Washington Report newsletter to constituents.

"Fewer than 10 percent of those in the House are what anyone would classify as wealthy."

Some basic math shows that to give $1 billion to every person in the world, he would need $8 quintillion:

$1,000,000,000 x 8,000,000,000 = $8,000,000,000,000,000,000

If Musk started with $314 billion and handed $1 billion to each person, he’d have enough to enrich only 314 people.

If Musk were to use his wealth to give an equal amount of money to every person in the world, he would be able to spend $39.25 per person:

$314,000,000,000 ÷ 8,000,000,000 = $314 ÷ 8 = $39.25

We rate this claim False.