The world gains a new billionaire every 17 hours—and this timeframe only keeps getting shorter.
Meanwhile, the US federal minimum wage is still a pitiful $7.25 an hour. It would take a minimum-wage worker over 15,000 years to earn a billion dollars (provided they work 168 hours a week and don’t have any expenses). Just how much do you have to make to get there in a decade or less? Elon Musk has an answer to this question.
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What’s Elon Musk’s hourly rate?
How we’ve counted it using three different methods.
The answers to your burning questions, and some Elon Musk trivia.
See related questions and answers:
How Much Does Elon Musk Make an Hour
The quick answer—Elon Musk makes around $1.6 million per hour. This is based on his net worth that rose by $143.9 billion in the past decade until early 2023. That’s 220,690 times the federal minimum wage. That number’s even higher if you look at the pandemic years, or adjust his income for a 40-hour work week.
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Elon Musk: His Salary per Hour and How We Calculated It
Billionaires are humans just like us—except for the number of zeroes in their accounts. Their wealth is usually tied to the stock market—so their net worth can go up and down with it.
That’s why they can sometimes gain or lose hundreds of millions in a day. You can figure out a billionaire’s net worth in many ways (no, not necessarily by stalking them) when most of their assets are private—as is the case with Elon Musk.
We’ve used data from Forbes and Bloomberg to see how much the new CEO of Twitter makes in an hour (when he’s not busy reinstating and banning Kanye).
1. How much money Elon Musk makes an hour (ten-year average)
Elon Musk’s fortune was an unremarkable (well, for a billionaire) $2.55 billion a mere decade ago—and yet he opened champagne last New Year’s Eve boasting a net worth of $146.5 billion.
We probably won’t ever know if it was a bottle of Dom Pérignon or Krug. But knowing those two figures, we can find out the ten-year average— Elon Musk has been making roughly $14,390,000,000 a year.
Divide that by 365, and there you go— You get a stellar$39,403,066.81 a day. That’s $1,641,794.45 an hour (if you want to rage about the federal minimum wage a bit longer).
2. Elon Musk’s hourly earnings during COVID-19
The pandemic was special in every way possible. Many of us got poorer. The rich got richer (why is it almost never the other way round?). And Elon Musk became the richest (source) of them all.
His fortune went through the roof in 2020, so (being nosy by nature) we’ve decided to check how much he made during the pandemic.
We used the same method as before—only this time we counted from January 2020 when Elon Musk’s net worth was $29.7 billion. Yup, during the COVID-19 outbreak Elon was making $4,444,444.44 an hour. (Why aren’t his money-making talents just as contagious?)
3. What’s Elon Musk’s hourly wage?
Elon Musk claims he works “morning to night, seven days a week”. While you’re wondering if engaging in Twitter spats still counts as work, let’s not forget that Elon doesn’t earn a traditional salary—he makes money from stocks.
Isn’t it fair to say then that his “working hours” would be those of the US stock markets?
There are around 252 trading days in the US—and the markets are open from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. If we go by this, Elon Musk has worked 13,860 hours in the past decade (252 days x 5.5 working hours x 10 years). His hourly wage would then be $10,382,395. That’s $1.4 million times the federal minimum (now you can rant even more).
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