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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.
Jane Tumar
Author: 
Jane Tumar
Derek Sall
Editor: 
Derek Sall
Deepti Nickam
Fact Checker: 
Deepti Nickam
9 mins
April 18th, 2024
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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).

See related questions and answers:

How Much Does Elon Musk Make a Day?

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.

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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.

Want to start building up your wealth? Try our budget templates to optimize your money management.

FAQ

What is Elon Musk’s liquid net worth?
How much does Elon Musk make an hour?
How much stock does Elon Musk own?
What percent of Tesla does Elon Musk own?
What is SpaceX’s net worth?
How much did Elon Musk sell Paypal for?
How much did Elon Musk make in 2021?

Sources

SOURCES

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Contributors

Jane Tumar
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 Sall
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 Nickam
Fact Checker
Deepti Nickam
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.
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