Very few would doubt the spending ability of Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, whose wealth is about as baffling as his Twitter activity. But in real terms, how do you comprehend the massive amounts of money he brings in?

Especially following the recent announcement that car rental firm Hertz has given Tesla its largest-ever order, boosting shares by 15% and topping $1 trillion in market value.

We’d argue anything above £1 million is hard to quantify, so Musk’s £8 billion (and the rest) annual salary is near impossible to wrap your head around. But by breaking it down to the second, we’ve shone a new light on the tech trailblazer’s earnings and compared this with other high earners in automotive and business. 

Musk earns the average UK salary quicker than a kettle boils

Although he’s perhaps most associated with American carmaker Tesla, it’s not his only source of income. Musk also leads aerospace manufacturer SpaceX and founded a host of other companies, including PayPal. He earned more than $70 million alone when eBay bought the business in 2002.

With most kettles needing two and a bit minutes to ping, they take longer than he needs to earn the UK’s average salary of £29,600. With £275.77 hitting his bank account every second, it takes him just one minute 47 seconds to be exact.

It’s even more staggering when compared with the most ‘modest’ on our list, automotive influencer and TikTok star Supercar Blondie, who needs over a week to hit the same mark despite being a multi-millionaire.

Have a look at our interactive Earnings Calculator to see exactly how quickly the other high earners rake it in.

Musk earns over 40 times as much as his Apple counterpart

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, manages the average salary in just over an hour – ¬thanks to his £265 million salary. Even that pales in comparison to Musk’s earnings, however, with the head of Tesla earning more than 40 times as much every year.

In fact, add together the earnings of all the others and you’re still way off. The salaries of Whitney Wolfe Herd, Donald Trump, Tim Cook, Lewis Hamilton, Jeremy Clarkson and Supercar Blondie combine for just £1.5 billion – less than a fifth of what Musk gets a year.

The Tesla CEO could buy over 300K of his own cars every year

With the Tesla Model 3 currently coming in around £25,000, the eccentric entrepreneur could afford 319,092 of them – each year. That’s nearly 60 times the number of Model 3s in the UK right now.

He could also fund 176 SpaceX rocket launches, only 20-odd less than Nasa’s total crewed missions. Or, in terms of products we’re more familiar with, 31,450 UK homes.

Methodology

Using publicly available salaries, we broke the figures down to the second and compared against the UK and US averages. The custom figure tool compares user inputs with Elon Musk’s per-second earnings to calculate how long each figure would take him to earn.

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