Elon The $1 Trillion Dollar Man

Elon The $1 Trillion Dollar Man

Hey, did you hear? SpaceX just went public in what became the largest IPO in history, and in doing so made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire. That amount of wealth is genuinely inconceivable to fathom. Don’t believe me? Let me prove it with some fun facts.

• $1 trillion would last 2,740 years if you spent $1 million every single day.
• $1 trillion worth of $1 bills stacked would reach 68,000 miles high — more than a quarter of the way to the moon.
• $1 trillion is more than double the annual GDP of South Africa, which is ironically where Elon is from.
• My personal favorite: laid flat, $1 trillion in $1 bills would cover the entire state of Delaware. Twice.

Now that I’ve succeeded in making us all feel spectacularly poor, let me put it into some real-life context. YOU WILL NEVER HAVE MORE MONEY THAN ELON MUSK. Good, now that’s out of the way, why does it matter at all?

It matters because you won’t have more money than Elon. Not only that, you won’t have more money than plenty of people you already know, and that’s simply okay. It doesn’t make you better or worse than Elon or anyone else, and I think there’s something genuinely humbling in recognizing that. I’ll take it a step further, because I have a penchant for the dramatic: you also won’t be better looking, smarter, faster, more successful, kinder, neater, taller, stronger, more athletic, or funnier than a whole lot of people out there.

Great — now you all feel like losers. That’s not my point.

Someone is Always Better

My point is that there will always be someone better than you at anything you can think of, including Elon, who for all his wealth probably has someone he quietly measures himself against. The goal of life isn’t outward comparison; it’s inward comparison. I see this mistake constantly when it comes to finances. “I can’t figure out how our neighbor who does xyz for a living has all those nice cars.” Or this classic: “I’ll finally be happy once I make as much as so-and-so.”

There’s an old saying that comparison is the thief of joy, and annoyingly, it’s right. If we live in a comparative world, we end up judging our self-worth, happiness, and success by someone else’s measuring stick. The most successful and content people I know operate with a completely different lens. They measure their growth against one person and one person only: themselves.

Take tennis. I’ll play any day, any time, against anyone. It’s become my athletic obsession, and yes, I’ll use someone better than me as a litmus test for my progress. But I do my best not to let that dictate whether I feel successful. What I know is that I’m better than I was six months ago, and I’m determined to be better six months from now than I am today. That’s the only scoreboard that really matters.

The meta point here is simple: you have a choice in how you gauge success. Option one is outward comparison something you can’t control and that will leave you perpetually disappointed, because you’ll never be the best at anything. Option two is measuring against your own internal standard. In my experience, the second option is a far more reliable way to stay both hungry and content because, by that measure, you’re already winning.

As always, stay wealthy, healthy, and happy.