How Massive Is Elon Musk’s Trillion-Dollar Fortune? Spend It Yourself
Wired · LC · trust 29/100
Animation: Neal Agarwal Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story On any given day, Elon Musk is worth about a trillion dollars . This does not mean that he has a trillion dollar bills sitting in an old-timey vault in a dusty basement somewhere; his wealth is mostly tied up in shares of SpaceX and Tesla . But if he were to cash those out, sell Neuralink and the Boring Company, and scrounge together some extra change, his checking account would hit 13 digits.
“Trillionaire” is an easy enough word to say. It’s fun, even! Rolls off the tongue. But research has shown that the human brain has a very hard time comprehending the actual size and scope of large numbers. “Trillion” sounds like a short hop from “billion,” after all, even though it is in fact 1,000 times bigger. And even if you are somehow able to wrap your mind around that immense scale, it still feels abstract, no matter how many times you compare it to the area of Central Park or the weight of a fleet of trucks. Maybe a better way to visualize a trillion dollars, then, is through what you can actually buy with it.
Spend Elon Musk’s Money What’s it like to be the richest man in the world? Find out for yourself. By Neal Agarwal WIRED has partnered with Neal Agarwal, the proprietor of the consistently delightful website Neal.fun , to do just that. Spend Elon Musk’s Money is a new visualization that lets you, well, spend Elon Musk’s money, on anything from Big Macs to aircraft carriers to the Las Vegas Sphere . It keeps a tally as you go, so you can actually see how far a trillion dollars gets you these days, and it shows the items you’ve bought in a physical space.
WIRED spoke with Agarwal about this new project, why it feels so relevant now, and the state of building things on the web. You can read that interview below, and waste a few hours on Spend Elon Musk’s money right here.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
WIRED: I’ve known about Neal.fun for a long time, I’m a big fan. But describe it for someone who’s never been there.
Neal Agarwal: I never wanted to constrain the site to one thing, so it ended up being almost like a journal at this point. I’ve been running it since I was 19, and it’s kind of a catalog of everything I’m interested in: visualizations, science, weird game mechanics. For me, it’s mostly an exploration of what you can do with a website.
Why is that important to you, the idea of exploring what a website is and means? If there’s one thing I know about you it’s that you love the web.
Very much so. I grew up on the web; I was 8 years old on forums. I probably spent more time in Club Penguin than any real-world walls. I’m definitely a child of the web, and it’s interesting that I’m around the same age as it. It’s a privilege. Painters are working in a medium that’s a thousand years older, a million years older, so a lot of things have already been found out, been fleshed out. But on the web there’s so much that we haven’t figured out yet. I think there’s still a lot of new stuff to discover, and that’s really interesting to me.
I think every medium has distinct things you can do with it. You can turn a book into a movie but it’s not quite the same. There are some things a book is always going to be better at, and vice versa. I think that’s true of the web too. This visualization we’re working on, you can’t print it in a newspaper.
I suspect people might be familiar with some of your individual projects, if not your site itself. To list some off that are huge in my household: The Password Game , Space Elevator , The Deep Sea , Infinite Craft . When something goes viral, as so many of these have, what’s it like on your end? Is it almost boring now to see things blow up?
I think each project has been very different. The ones that excite me the most now are where a lot of people play it and start doing things with it that I did not expect or intend. Within a few days of Infinite Craft launching, people started crafting Japanese words within the game. And they crafted enough Japanese words that they could play the whole game in Japanese. I’ve never released a game before where they unlocked a language.
I had another one called Internet Road Trip; it’s like a simulated road trip but through Google Street View. A Discord formed around that, and people started backseat driving and arguing over which city to go to next, should they make a pit stop here so they can see this monument. People started birdwatching within that game. All these emergent things started happening, and I think the web is really good at that, too. It’s really good at forming communities out of the silliest things, which I find really exciting.
There’s also this contrast with a more closed-off app environment; you don’t really work in apps as a medium.
When I was a teenager I did make some apps, but I always really disliked that Apple and Google had to approve what I could put in them, and you have to wait a week for approval, and if they don’t like your app you have no recourse. So just the idea of having a homepage where it’s like, this is my homepage. Nobody can tell me what to do with it. I can put whatever I want.
We should talk about this visualization, Spend Elon Musk’s Money. It’s sort of a sequel to Spend Bill Gates’ Money , which was one of your first projects, right?
That actually launched with the website itself. I just wanted to showcase how much $100 billion was, which I guess now seems like a little amount of money compared to the trillion we’re working with.
It’s almost quaint, right? The premise is you’ve got a $100 billion counter and a bunch of things you can buy with prices attached to them: a Big Mac, flip-flops, a lobster dinner, a year of Netflix, all the way up to things like a diamond ring, a Ferrari, a McDonald’s franchise, and then up again to the Mona Lisa. And you just keep trying to add it up. What was the response to that game when it…
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