Musk Lost $371 Billion

All he has to do is cut expenses by a mere $1 million a day, and maintain that cut for the next 1000 years. Start brown-bagging that lunch.

Regarding Musk as the world's first trillionaire (if only for a moment for now) makes him in one sense the richest man of all time; but, that's in large part a function of our societal wealth today which is greater than it was yesterday and at any time in human history. I have no idea who the wealthiest man human is or was, but here's quick first pass at a way to look at it. In the early twentieth century, John D. Rockefeller was for some period of time the wealthiest man in the world. His wealth peaked in 1913 at $900 million, while in 1913, the United States GDP stood at $15 billion dollars. This meant that Rockefeller's wealth was 6% of the nation's GDP. At least for a awhile Musk's net worth was over a trillion. Using your figure of the peak being $1.32 trillion and the U. S. GDP in 2025 of $30.77 trillion, his net worth was 4.3% of U. S. GDP. So by this one probably flawed method Musk's relative net worth was significantly lower than that of Rockefeller.

Musk's wealth has a benefit to the country based on the benefits of his investments to the country - space, telecommunications, etc. He has certainly been willing to risk his money on productive investments. Otherwise, I am unconcerned about his wealth as it doesn't directly affect me -- I am more concerned about my own family rather than him.

Drat! If only congress had passed that trillionaire tax a few days sooner!

tigerlily (View Comment):

So by this one probably flawed method Musk’s relative net worth was significantly lower than that of Rockefeller.

Unfortunately, it is indeed flawed.

The problem is that GDP is not a measure of net worth, but rather of production, so you can’t find someone’s net worth relative to that of Americans as a whole by using it.

You are missing the data you would need, which is the total of Americans’ net worth at the same point in time as given for Musk or Rockefeller.

The results you calculated—6% for Rockefeller and 4.3% for Musk—actually equal…

…the fraction of a year that it would take American residents as a group, at the then-current time rate of production, to produce the same amount wealth as the person’s net worth (not accounting for consumption of fixed capital.)

So what you actually figured out by using your equation could be said this way:

Rockefeller's net worth the day it peaked equaled the worth of 22 days of Americans' total production at the time. Musk's on the day his peaked equaled the worth of 16 days of Americans' total production at the time.

Not a very meaningful comparison perhaps, since there were a whole lot more people in the second case, and each of them were on average a whole lot more productive of wealth.