Elon Musk has become the first person to reach $500 billion net worth. That’s $500,000,000,000. A number so large that even your calculator runs out of space trying to display it. To help us grasp it, let’s play a little money visualisation game.

If you stacked $100 bills to make up Musk’s fortune, you’d get a pile about 335 miles high-taller than the typical orbit of one of his Starlink satellites. Technically, Elon could climb his cash tower and wait for SpaceX to pick him up. Now that’s a driverless taxi service. 

This isn’t silly money. This is physics-defying money.

So how do you spend it? Let’s assume you’re Elon, waking up tomorrow, brushing your teeth with a platinum toothbrush, and wondering what to do with half a trillion. It’s no easy task, because if he lives until his mid 80s he has to spend nearly $2 million every hour (and that doesn’t take into account the interest he is earning).

Here are seven ways he could spend his Midas fortune. 

1. Cure the World’s Aching Problems (And Take the Credit)

Bill Gates took the billionaire’s path of virtue: fighting malaria, reinventing toilets, distributing vaccines. Warren Buffett pledged to give away almost his entire fortune to the Gates Foundation. With $500 billion, you could go further and end extreme poverty – several times over.

According to World Bank estimates, it would take upwards of $75 billion a year to end global extreme poverty by 2030. Elon could write a check for four years straight, and voilà – poverty gone. He’d still have money left over to buy Twitter / X three more times, crash it again, and still be richer than most countries.

Serious upside: history books would forever call you the guy who ended hunger. Downside: you’d run out of excuses for why Mars colonisation is “more important than people eating.”

2. Buy All the Leonardo da Vincis (And Probably a Few Fakes)

Da Vinci paintings don’t come cheap. The Salvator Mundi sold for $450 million in 2017 – the most expensive painting ever. At Musk levels, you could buy every Da Vinci still in private hands, commission AI to generate new ones, and still afford to hang an original in a Tesla showroom.

Better yet, you could fund a blockbuster heist movie where you steal your own paintings. Picture it: Ocean’s 22, starring Elon as Danny Ocean, with the Boring Company tunnels as getaway routes.

And if you buy the MoMA in New York, you can keep the logo and just rename it the Museum of Musk Art.

3. Run the World’s Most Expensive Pirate Cosplay

Johnny Depp is famous for blowing hundreds of millions on wine, islands, and yes, actual pirate ships. But imagine scaling that up. With $500 billion, you could build an actual fleet of pirate galleons, staff them with Broadway actors in full Jack Sparrow garb, and sail into Monte Carlo yelling, “But why is the rum gone?” while firing T-Shirt cannons full of Dogecoin.

The Sultan of Brunei has a gold-plated Rolls Royce. Elon could have a jet ski inlaid with black pearls and still afford to pay the fines for disturbing international waters.

4. Do What Nations Do, But Better

Elon already runs companies that feel like mini-governments – SpaceX, Tesla, Starlink. With half a trillion, you could skip the “CEO” thing and just buy an actual country, and impose as much Government Efficiency as you wish.

Many small nations’ GDPs fall well below half a trillion dollars. For example, the GDP of New Zealand is around $260 billion. In theory, you could make an offer: “I’ll pay off your debt, build a Hyperloop from Auckland to Wellington, and everyone gets a Tesla. Call it Musktopia.” Citizens might just go for it, especially if you throw in free satellite WiFi.

5. Solve the World’s Wicked Problems

The Gates/Buffett school of philanthropy is noble but dull. Half a trillion lets you attack the problems people actually talk about at dinner parties. For instance:

• Climate change: Fund global carbon capture at scale, turn deserts into forests, and still have pocket change for rocket fuel.
• Healthcare breakthroughs: Nike co-founder Philip Knight donated $2 billion to the Oregon Health & Science University Cancer Center. Elon could buy his alma mater UPenn.
• Traffic jams Just buy every car on Earth and replace them with Teslas. Problem solved, with a side benefit of global brand loyalty.

This kind of philanthropy ensures you get the credit, rather than some faceless NGO. And for a man who renamed Twitter “X,” branding matters.

6. Buy Democracy, Or at Least Lease It

Forget yachts and moon palaces – true power lies in politics. Federal filings show that Elon Musk spent more than $290 million on the 2024 election. That’s pocket change for the world’s richest person. 

With $500 billion, Elon could bankroll the most expensive political campaign in history. The 2024 U.S. election cost about $15.9 billion total across both parties. That means Musk could personally finance more than 30 full elections at that scale.

He could create a political party from scratch, outspend every lobbyist in Washington, and plaster his face on every billboard from Boston to Boise. He could fund universal voter pizza delivery on election day, ensuring record turnout. And if he wanted global reach, he could bankroll campaigns not just in the U.S., but in dozens of democracies around the world – basically franchising “Musk politics.”

Would it break campaign finance laws? Almost certainly. Would it reshape democracy itself? Absolutely.

7. Do Absolutely Nothing (And Break Capitalism)

Here’s the funniest, darkest option: don’t spend it at all. Just sit on it. With half a trillion parked in bonds or index funds, you’d be earning around $25 billion a year in passive income. That’s close to the GDP of Iceland, every single year, just for existing.

You could literally pay 5 million people $5,000 each year and still not notice the dent. Or fund a global “annual Elon Day,” where everyone gets free lunch. Alternatively, just hoard it, because nothing rattles the world more than the possibility of someone sitting on that much cash with zero plan. The mere existence of unused half-trillion wealth might trigger revolutions, tax code rewrites, and a Netflix series called When Billionaires Got Bored.

The bottom line

The truth is, no one human can actually “spend” $500 billion in the traditional sense. Nations can. Tech companies competing in the AI race can. But one man with a Twitter addiction? Probably not. Which makes the whole thing both absurd and slightly terrifying.

If Elon plays it like Buffett, history may remember him as the greatest philanthropist of all time. If he plays it like Johnny Depp, we’ll get floating pirate kingdoms and legal fees. Either way, when you’re worth half a trillion, the absurd becomes possible. And maybe that’s the point: at a certain level of wealth, money stops being money. It becomes a toy box for ideas – good, bad, or simply bizarre.

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