What Elon Musk could buy if his $46 billion Tesla pay package came in cold, hard cash
Money may not buy happiness, but it can buy a whole lot of other things. Few people know that better than Elon Musk. the world’s richest person. He may soon be able to buy a lot, lot more.
The entrepreneur currently leads six companies, including aerospace company SpaceX, brain-computer interface startup Neuralink, and electric vehicle maker Tesla. As of June 7, his net worth is floating around $210.6 billion, according to Forbes. But On Thursday, June 13, Thursday, Tesla shareholders will vote on whether or not to approve Musk’s 2018 compensation plan, struck down by a judge earlier this year. If investors re-approve the plan, it could pave the way for Musk to buy up to 304 million Tesla shares.
That plan is currently valued at $46 billion and is — by far — the largest executive compensation plan in U.S. corporate history, blowing everyone else out of the water. But that’s in terms of stock, which is cool and all, but you can’t just shop at Costco or Walmart with shares.
So let’s do a thought exercise — just for fun! Here are some things Elon Musk could buy with $46 billion in cold, hard cash (spoiler alert: It’s a lot).
Donuts
Elon Musk is many things. One of those things is a donut lover.
The Tesla CEO has gone on the record revealing that he eats a donut “every morning.” That’s a lot of donuts. But how many could he buy with $46 billion?
Well, it depends on where he’s getting them.
A chocolate glazed donut donut at a Krispy Kreme outlet in Austin, Texas, — near Tesla’s gigafactory — costs $2.29 before taxes. With $46 billion, that would come out to more than 20 billion donuts or, more specifically, 20,087,336,244 donuts.
At a Dunkin’ location in Brownsville, Texas, a donut costs $1.45 before taxes. If Musk hypothetically spent $46 billion on donuts from Dunkin, he’d have more than 31 billion donuts or, more specifically, 31,724,137,931 donuts. Somewhere, Ben Affleck is very jealous.
Elon Musk — No, not the man
Everyone can be at least a little forgetful. And what better way to jog your memory than reading a 688-page book about yourself?
If Elon Musk wanted to buy a lot of copies of Elon Musk by biographer Walter Isaacson, he’d have...well, a lot of books on his hands. Or, to be a little more precise, at publisher Simon & Schuster’s preferred price of $35 a pop, more than 1 billion books (1,314,285,714).
Diablo IV (Ultimate Edition)
Elon Musk really likes Diablo IV, the latest role-playing dungeon crawler video game in the series. He’s even streamed himself playing it several times. But if he, say, wanted to buy a new copy and start totally fresh, he could do that.
The “Ultimate Edition” of Diablo IV usually goes for $99.99 a pop, a solid $30 premium on the base version of the game. If he so chose, Musk could buy more than 460 million (460,046,004) copies of the game.
Not-A-Flamethrower
A couple of years back, Elon Musk’s The Boring Co. had an idea — let’s sell some flamethrowers. Between January 27, 2018, and February 1, 2018, the company sold 20,000 “Not-A-Flamethrower” models to customers. That earned The Boring Co. a cool $10 million in revenue in about 100 hours, The Verge reported.
But, say Musk wanted to do that again but distribute them for free because it sounds fun. In that case he could equip 92 million people with flamethrowers. That’s the equivalent of arming everyone in California and Texas and 79,000 people in Florida.
Annual passes to Disney World
Almost everyone likes Disney World, especially if they’re a parent, even if they have a less-than-stellar relationship with Disney CEO Bob Iger. Elon Musk has a lot of kids, but let’s stick with the youngest of his 11 children.
Assuming he shelled out the cash for the priciest annual pass — the $1,449 Disney Incredi-Pass — he’d need at least four tickets, plus three more for himself and their mothers. Luckily for him, $46 billion can buy more than 31 million annual passes.
A Neuralink brain chip
Neuralink has the ambitious task of not only catching up with older rivals but surpassing them. But it’s advancing somewhat smoothly, with approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to implant its experimental brain chip on a second patient.
The cost of such a procedure — including exams, parts, and labor — is reportedly about $10,500, although insurers are likely to push the price to around $50,000. At the base price, $46 billion could buy more than 4.38 million of the treatment, or 920,000 at $50,000 each.
The Cybertruck
It really shouldn’t be a surprise that the chief executive of Tesla likes his cars. That extends to the Cybertruck, Tesla’s electric pickup riddled with issues and challenging to get rid of.
Musk has long praised the Cybertruck, which he introduced in November 2019 as a concept vehicle and finally began delivering four years later. At least 3,878 Cybertrucks have been sold to customers like Alexis Ohanian and Jay-Z. Assuming production ramped up, Musk could buy a lot of the $102,000 trucks — specifically, 449,943 of them.
A present from the SEC
The Tesla CEO is a major fan of social media — not that that’s always a good thing. In August 2018, he got himself into a bit of trouble with U.S. regulators.
“Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured,” Elon Musk wrote on Twitter at the time.“Shareholders could either to sell at 420 or hold shares & go private.”
That tweet raised many questions — namely, who would fund his sudden push for privatization — and triggered suspicion from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and shareholders. Subsequent lawsuits and settlements left Musk and Tesla each paying a $20 million fine.
That was big hit at the time, but Musk could more than easily pay that fine off now. Forty-six billion dollars of extra cash could fund 2,300 penalties.
The entire (MCU) Iron Man trilogy
Elon Musk is a bit of a comic book nerd. He even starred in the second movie in Marvel’s Iron Man trilogy as himself. But what if he wanted to buy the entire trilogy and hit the re-do button?
Why not? Combined, the Iron Man trilogy had a budget of about $540 million, according to IMDB. Musk could make those movies 85 times over with a $46 billion check.
A single Twitter
Like it or not, there’s one thing everyone can agree on about Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter in 2022 — it was incredibly expensive. Thanks to corporate shenanigans, bartering, and lawsuits, Musk was stuck holding the bag for a $44 billion deal.
Financing that deal required him to sign agreements with Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and Barclays for $25.5 billion in loans. Musk also had to put up some of his shares in Tesla as collateral, while the remainder was funded in cash split between himself and a group of hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds.
But a $46 billion cash infusion would’ve changed all that. It’s just enough to buy a single Twitter and have enough spending money left over to drastically change a lot of peoples’ lives — given that the average American considers $19,800 a life-changing amount of money.