10 things Elon Musk can — but probably won’t — do with $1 trillion

It’s official. Elon Musk is now the world’s first-ever trillionaire, after his rocket ship company SpaceX’s record-shattering $2 trillion debut on the NASDAQ last Friday.

With a mind-numbing net fortune of $1.4 trillion that is growing by the day, Musk is now worth more than the entire economy of Switzerland. He is more than 13 times as wealthy as Bill Gates, and if you are anywhere near middle class, he is over 11 million times wealthier than you. He’s rich enough to collectively purchase every seat for every single World Cup match, every stub in every city on Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, and every ticket at every Broadway show for the next 10 years or so, while barely making a dent in his gargantuan fortune.

One significant caveat here: The vast majority of Musk’s wealth is wrapped up in equity in his companies, not in cash, in much the same way most Americans’ wealth is tied up in their homes. While the dollar figure has 12 zeros attached, there’d be no way for Musk to convert all or even most of it into cash, Scrooge McDuck-style, without tanking the value of the companies. (In the case of SpaceX, he’s legally barred from selling any stock for 366 days after the IPO.) Don’t feel too bad for him, though: Billionaires — sorry, trillionaires — like Musk tend to borrow most of the money they spend, rather than selling off their investments, which doubles as a nifty way to avoid paying taxes.

In other words, even if Musk doesn’t actually have a trillion dollars sitting in a vault, he still has reasonable access to an obscene amount of money, enough to easily outspend any political campaign in the US, or — as he joked on X on Monday — install the volcano lair he’s always dreamt of.

On the eve of becoming a trillionaire, Musk told Peter Diamandis, head of the Xprize Foundation — one of the few charities Musk has ever appeared to give significant support to — that he doesn’t really believe in money anymore, that AI will soon “make so much stuff” that virtually everything will be freely available, and everyone will eventually just get a universal basic income that they can spend on whatever they need.

For now, though, money is still our main means of exchange for goods and services, and Musk has access to more money than he could ever spend. And that means he has an opportunity to share his ballooning fortune.

Unfortunately, Musk is a notoriously terrible philanthropist.

Though he once pledged to donate away most of his fortune, Musk gives only a miniscule fraction of his net worth to charity each year, much of it funneled through a secretive charitable foundation that was fined three years in a row by the Internal Revenue Service for hoarding cash. The (only comparatively) far less well-off Gates has given away over $100 billion, or over 20 percent of his wealth, to charity so far, while Musk had given away less than 1 percent prior to becoming a trillionaire.

And while he is prone to the occasional lofty promise — to solve world hunger, fix the Flint water crisis, or cover TSA workers’ salaries during the last government shutdown — he never made good on any of those vows. Instead, he spent much of last year taking a chainsaw to lifesaving USAID programs, the loss of which has since been linked to hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world.

It seems unlikely that becoming a trillionaire will make Musk soft. Nonetheless, if Musk really cares about humanity there are a few things he could do:

1. Pull hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty

According to an analysis released last year, it would cost just $318 billion annually to put an end to the worst form of poverty worldwide.

By distributing just over one-quarter of his net worth, Musk could ensure that one-eighth of the world’s population had enough food to eat each day, a safe shelter to sleep in, and water that’s clean enough to drink. At his current level he would still have about a trillion to spare, and at the rate his wealth keeps growing, it’s likely he could keep up the effort for years to come.

2. Pay off all medical debt in the United States

About one American in three has a past-due medical bill, the kind of entirely involuntary, often predatory debt that can quickly turn a cancer diagnosis into a bankruptcy. The roughly $220 billion Americans owe in medical debt today drives families into food insecurity, and leaves many avoiding care in the first place for fear of unpayable costs.

Though Musk insists the robots his companies are developing will soon replace surgeons and revolutionize access to medical care, he could start improving American health care by simply covering the bill.

3. Bankroll universal preschool

Many American parents spend tens of thousands of dollars every year — often upward of 15 percent of their income — on childcare costs. But as my colleague Anna North often writes, momentum has been growing for universal preschool programs, which — when implemented well — can have major benefits for kids and working families.

The price tag for building such a program nationally? About $351 billion over 10 years, according to economists at the University of Pennsylvania, including the construction of new facilities. At that rate, Musk could pay for over three decades worth of it.

4. Climate-proof the world

Roughly half of the world’s population — 4.1 billion people — lives somewhere at risk from the most hazardous effects of climate change, including heat waves, droughts, and rising sea levels. Many of those people live in low- or middle-income countries that can’t afford the kind of cooling systems, flooding protection, and irrigation strategies they need to stay safe.

The annual cost of making sure that every country can adapt to these new extreme weather realities? $1.2 trillion, or just about all of Musk’s net worth.

A few years ago, Musk pledged to sell off $6 billion worth of Tesla stock to support the World Food Program if it could offer him an exact accounting of its claim that such a donation could bankroll an end to the most severe forms of global hunger. Within days, the WFP responded with a detailed plan on how to use $6.6 billion to feed 42 million on the brink of starvation. Musk, though, never followed through.

In reality, putting an outright end to world hunger would cost considerably more than $6 billion. Even so, the United Nations believes it would cost just about $93 billion annually to end global hunger by 2030, a total cost of $465 billion or just about a third of Musk’s net worth.

6. Research cures for cancer and other diseases

If you want a cure for cancer, a vaccine against dementia, or just about anything else worth discovering, then you need to fund scientific research. In 2023, the US invested about $993 billion in research and development, which includes new medical breakthroughs.

With his wealth, Musk could more than make up for the billions in federal science funding that the Trump administration cut last year, potentially leading to breakthroughs that might otherwise stall out.

7. Bring everyone clean drinking water

Over 4 billion people around the world lack access to safe drinking water at home, which puts them at risk for dangerous waterborne diseases such as cholera and dysentery.

Giving people safe drinking water and sanitation services involves building better pipes, filtration systems, and well networks. It would cost about $114 billion per year to bring clean water to everyone in the world, according to the United Nations. Musk could fund that effort by himself for a decade or more.

8. End homelessness in America

Musk could easily pay for decades worth of housing solutions to the nation’s homelessness and affordability crises. Most estimates put the cost of ending homelessness in the United States — which affects about 770,000 Americans at any given time — at somewhere between $10 billion and $30 billion each year.

He could also opt to make an enormous dent in the nation’s housing shortage, which is a root cause of homelessness. The Council for American Progress estimates that it would cost about $95 billion over five years to construct the 2 million homes needed to close the supply gap.

9. Wipe out tuberculosis and malaria for good

Tuberculosis is the world’s deadliest infectious disease, infecting about 10 million people and killing about 1.5 million every year. Eradicating tuberculosis by 2030 would cost about $250 billion, far more than the under $6 billion spent on prevention and treatment in 2024.

Musk could use a fraction of his fortune to bankroll an end to TB. While he’s at it, he could stop malaria, too, which would cost an estimated $8.5 billion per year to eradicate.

10. Give everyone in the world a check for $146

Here’s a simple one. If just $1.2 trillion of Musk’s net worth (let’s leave the guy a little something!) was divided equally among the world’s 8.2 billion people, everyone would receive a $146 check. In the United States, that’s enough for a week or so of groceries or most of an annual Netflix subscription.

But in other countries, a check like that could be life changing. In Zambia, where most people live off of less than $2 per day, that one eight-billionth-of-a-dollar slice of Musk’s pie could cover a few months worth of necessities, school fees, and housing costs.