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stated on November 17, 2024 in Threads posts:
“Elon Musk has $180 Billion and there are 8B people on earth. If he gave us each $1B he’d still have $172B left.”
true false
Elon Musk arrives before President-elect Donald Trump speaks Nov. 14, 2024, during an America First Policy Institute gala at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. (AP) Elon Musk arrives before President-elect Donald Trump speaks Nov. 14, 2024, during an America First Policy Institute gala at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. (AP)

Elon Musk arrives before President-elect Donald Trump speaks Nov. 14, 2024, during an America First Policy Institute gala at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. (AP)

Sofia Ahmed
By Sofia Ahmed November 18, 2024

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

If Your Time is short

  • X owner Elon Musk’s net worth is $314 billion, according to Forbes.

  • The world population is roughly 8 billion.

  • Mathematically speaking, the most Musk could give everyone in the world would be $39.25.

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.

This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)

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.

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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.

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

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