How Much Money Does Elon Musk Make a Day? Elon Musk’s Daily Income in 2024
Elon Musk has become a wealthy man. But how wealthy? It's pretty impressive, let me tell you.
Author:
Jane Tumar
Editor:
Derek Sall
Fact Checker:
Deepti Nickam
9 mins
April 18th, 2024
Advertiser Disclosure
If you were the first human being on Earth (roughly 300,000 years ago), working tirelessly every day from the dawn of time, making a reasonable $1,350 a day—you’d barely reach Elon Musk’s net worth by now.
Elon Musk wasn’t the first human on Earth (even though he aims to be the first one on Mars).
Imagine how much he must be making a day!
In this article, you’ll find out:
What Elon Musk’s daily earnings are.
How we calculated them (two ways).
How he’s making his money (hint: not from a salary).
How much money Elon Musk has been losing daily (and why).
The quick answer—Elon Musk makes $39.4 million per day. This is based on his $146.5 billion net worth that has largely been created in the last decade. This means that Elon makes $275.8 million a week—or 258 thousand times more than the median American weekly earnings of $1,070.
Not as wealthy as Elon, but still looking for exclusive investment opportunities? We first recommend Crowdstreet which boasts an 18% return as of late (detailed review here). But if the $25,000 minimum investment is a bit too rich, then turn to the next best option, Yieldstreet.
Elon Musk’s Daily Income: How We Calculated It
Calculating Elon Musk’s wealth is not as simple as it may seem. Elon Musk became a billionaire in 2012, when he debuted at number 634 on the Forbes billionaire list with $2 billion. It took him just under ten years to climb up the long ladder to the top.
But Elon Musk’s private wealth is, well, private—so his net worth involves some estimations and approximations (we relied on Forbes and Bloomberg's expertise).
1. Elon Musk’s average daily income over a decade
First we looked at the average of Elon Musk’s net worth over the last decade—conveniently, Elon Musk made his first (and second) billion in 2012.
We then subtracted his net worth in January 2013 from his current one ($146,500,000,000 – $2,600,000,000), and divided it by ten.
It turns out that, on average, Elon Musk has been making $14,390,000,000 a year—that’s $39,403,066.81 in a day.
2. How much money does Elon Musk make per day in a pandemic?
If you look at how Elon Musk’s net worth has been changing over the decade in the graph below, you’ll notice that it had plateaued for seven years—before skyrocketing in 2020.
We thought we’d count Elon’s wealth during the new normal of these pandemic years (using the same strategy as above and January 2020 as the starting point).
We learned that Elon Musk made$106,666,666.67 a day in the pandemic.
Fun fact—Elon Musk doesn’t earn a traditional salary. He makes his money almost entirely from stocks— which means he can sometimes gain (or lose) incomprehensible amounts of money in a day.
The most Elon Musk made in a day was $36 billion on October 25, 2021 (source) (after Hertz had ordered 100,000 Teslas, and the company’s stock catapulted)—the largest daily jump in fortune in history. (Imagine that only 30 people in the world have a net worth bigger than what he made that day.)
How Much Does Elon Musk Lose per Day?
That’s a trick question—depending on when you’re reading this, chances are Musk lost more money yesterday than 99.9% of people would make in their entire lives. (On February 22, 2021, he lost about $15.2 billion).
His net worth has been in a free fall since October, 2022—the month he closed his deal with Twitter after six months of will-they-won’t-they drama. (That rom-com quickly turned into a horror flick, as Musk began to mass fire employees and introduce questionable new features to the site.)
Tesla’s investors are not happy with Elon’s Twitter antics—the car maker’s stock lost over $700 billion in value in 2022.
Liquid net worth doesn’t have anything to do with water—liquid assets are either cash or investments you can convert to cash quickly. So the question is—how much cash does Elon musk have?
Elon Musk is actually poor (now that’s a sentence you’d never thought you’d read). Well—cash poor. For a billionaire. (By his own admission, his liquid assets are very low.)
He had to sell some of his Tesla shares to buy Twitter—and the $20 billion in cash he got for them were still not enough to cover everything.
Bloomberg said in their breakdown of Elon Musk’s wealth that he currently might have no cash at all (bad news if you’ve just served him lunch, expecting a generous tip).
How much does Elon Musk make an hour?
Elon Musk makes, on average, about $4.5 million an hour—that’s around 620,670 times the federal minimum wage.
How much stock does Elon Musk own?
This is Elon Musk’s stake in his companies (according to Bloomberg, Forbes, and Barons):
Tesla—14%
SpaceX—48%
Twitter—82%
The Boring Company—90%
Neuralink—67%
What percent of Tesla does Elon Musk own?
Elon Musk has been selling Tesla’s shares left and right since November 2021. Even though he already got rid of $36 billion worth of stock, he still owns about 14% of the company (around 23% with exercisable options).
What is SpaceX’s net worth?
Forbes says SpaceX reached a valuation of $127 billion in May 2022 (which is a fancy way to say its value went up four times in the past three years). There were reports in November that SpaceX began selling shares at $85 (up from $70). They’re trying to hit $150 billion now.
How much did Elon Musk sell Paypal for?
The world of tech is spinning so fast, you might have forgotten that Elon Musk co-founded PayPal (or rather X.com, as it was called in 1999).
He sold it to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion in stock—and since his share was 11.75%, he made $175.8 million on that deal. (He then invested most of that into SpaceX, which he founded the same year.)
Elon Musk bought the domain X.com back from PayPal in 2017—for sentimental reasons, and to create an “everything app” that Twitter (allegedly) would be a part of.
How much did Elon Musk make in 2021?
Elon Musk made around $112 billion in 2021—which seems like an astronomical amount until you realize that he made $135 billion the year before. Truly, some men are from Mars.
Budgeting while ensuring you don't compromise on quality can seem daunting. Whether filling your pantry, updating your wardrobe, or keeping up with the latest tech, smart shopping strategies are crucial for keeping your finances in check.
Truthfully, this title should actually be “How to Make a Million Dollars in 10 Years Without Going Into Debt", but that is just getting a little too winded for my liking. It’s true though!
You might vaguely remember your psychology teacher talking about Maslow. He pointed at a picture of a triangle as you nodded off in the back of the school room.
When there’s only so much money to go around, there are often multiple savings goals competing for your money. Think of the young professional who’d like to get a more reliable car, buy a house, and save for retirement. Or consider the young family that’s saving for college, retirement, and a bigger house.
Dreaming of waving goodbye to the daily grind five years ahead of schedule? The road to early retirement is paved with more than good intentions; it requires a meticulously crafted strategy with surprising twists. It's not solely about what you should be doing—like diligently saving a portion of your income or investing wisely—but also about what you need to stop doing.
Storyteller by day, data enthusiast when she has free time, Jane is a meticulous researcher and has been working as a content writer for the past 3 years. With a degree in Computer Science and Literature, she has a wealth of experience to bring to her finance writing.
Storyteller by day, data enthusiast when she has free time, Jane is a meticulous researcher and has been working as a content writer for the past 3 years. With a degree in Computer Science and Literature, she has a wealth of experience to bring to her finance writing.
Derek has a Bachelor's degree in Finance and a Master's in Business. As a finance manager in the corporate world, he regularly identified and solved problems at the C-suite level. Today, Derek isn't interested in helping big companies. Instead, he's helping individuals win financially — one email, one article, one person at a time.
Derek has a Bachelor's degree in Finance and a Master's in Business. As a finance manager in the corporate world, he regularly identified and solved problems at the C-suite level. Today, Derek isn't interested in helping big companies. Instead, he's helping individuals win financially — one email, one article, one person at a time.
Deepti is a content writing and marketing professional with 5+ years of experience in the B2B and B2C sectors. She has written about several subjects, including finance, project management, human resources, and more.
Deepti is a content writing and marketing professional with 5+ years of experience in the B2B and B2C sectors. She has written about several subjects, including finance, project management, human resources, and more.
.jpg)
.jpg)
