Kit Roberts
Elon Musk has been approved for a deal worth $1 trillion by Tesla, making him the first person in history who could potentially become a trillionaire.
It's only just over 100 years ago that John D Rockefeller became the first billionaire in the world in 1916.
Since then, the number of billionaires in the world has rocketed, with there being 3,028 of them across the globe in 2025.
Collectively, those people - who are enough to fill just under one sixth of Madison Square Garden - command a net worth of $16.1 trillion.
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This makes those 3,028 people richer than the gross domestic product (GDP) of every single country in the world except for the USA and China, as well as richer than the combined GDPs of Germany, Japan, India, and the UK, which have the third to sixth largest economies.
So it's extraordinary that Musk, who already has a net worth of $482.2 billion, has had the compensation plan of one trillion dollars.
Before we calculate how much this is per person, let's get a sense of just how big a number one billion is, let alone one trillion.
If measured in seconds, a million seconds is around 11.5 days, while a billion seconds is 31.7 years.
As for a trillion seconds - that's 31,709 years.
If you had a trillion dollars and spent a million dollars every day it would take you 2,739 years to run out of money, and the average US citizen with lifetime earnings of $1.7 million would need 588,235 lifetimes to make $1 trillion.
And to give you one final sense of just how big a number this is, if we write out one trillion in numbers, it looks like this - 1,000,000,000,000. It's literally a million times a million.
So, if Elon Musk's net worth after the $1 trillion was split evenly among every single person in the world, how much would each person get?
There are currently around 8,231,613,070 people on Earth, meaning that if we take Musk's current net worth and add the new trillion, each person on Earth would get $180.06.
If it were confined only to Musk's adopted home in the United States, which has a population of just under 348 million, then each person would get around $4,259.
Musk doesn't have the trillion dollars right now, though.
Shareholders at Tesla approved a compensation plan which would see him have $1 trillion if he can meet a series of expectations. These include taking Tesla's value from $1.4 trillion to $8.5 trillion.
However, Musk's own reputation has already proven detrimental to Tesla, including his tempestuous relationship with President Donald Trump, as well as his public support for far-right parties.
So while the compensation deal is there, there's a long way to go yet.