Mount Everest Compared to a Single Flea: The Wealth Gap Is Larger Than You Think

If Mount Everest represents Musk's earnings in 2024, then people making $50,000 earned a single flea in comparison. No, the math is not wrong.

CNN recently reported that Elon Musk was just “awarded [a] $29 billion pay package from Tesla.” That’s an outrageous amount of money, but how much is it really? The fact is that our brains aren’t good at comprehending big numbers.

Consider that 1 million seconds is the same as roughly 11 days. What about 1 billion seconds? The answer is 31 years. What about 1 trillion seconds? This equals about 316 centuries. That amount of time would take you back well into the Pleistocene, not long after our Neanderthal ancestors went extinct.

Now reflect on the fact that the top 1% in the US has a combined net worth of around $49 trillion. How does one even begin to wrap their head around this? One way is to break larger numbers down into smaller sums that we do have some intuitive grasp of. For example, $1 million strikes us as much larger than it sounds when one writes it as a sum of:

$100,000 plus $100,000 plus $100,000 plus $100,000 plus $100,000 plus $100,000 plus $100,000 plus $100,000 plus $100,000 plus another $100,000.

Try reading that out-loud right now (if it won’t bother those around you). Doing this makes clear that one million dollars is a huge amount of money. If your yearly expenses are $100,000, then $1 million would cover an entire decade of living.¹

Musk Is Much Wealthier than You Think

To make things more concrete, consider that in 2024, Elon Musk brought home a staggering $203 billion. Let’s say that the height of Mount Everest represents this amount of money. Now imagine someone who earned $50,000 in 2024. How tall would their salary stand next to Musk’s Mount Everest of earnings? You might guess “the height of a skyscraper, such as the Burj Khalifa in Dubai,” since Mount Everest is much taller than the Burj Khalifa but the Burj Khalifa is still quite tall.

But that is not even close to accurate.

So, perhaps you reduce your estimate to “the size of a large house,” but this would still be way off. In fact, $50,000 compared to $203 billion amounts to roughly 0.084 inches — about the size of a common flea. Mount Everest compared to a lowly flea. That’s the difference between what you and Musk would have made in one year alone. (Try the math for yourself!)

An image of Mount Everest with a flea at the base of the mountain. You can’t see the flea because it’s so tiny.