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Half a billion dollars for someone worth $1 trillion is about 0.05%.
Median American net worth is $216,000, and 0.05% of that is about $108.
I was looking at HHI, but that tracks too.
The expense is basically meaningless to him.
Just one small point of contention, median and average are not the same, that might be the median, but the average is significantly lower than that. About $65,000, which is $32, which honestly tells a much more illustrative story.
Still what Elon spent dwarfs both by multiple orders of magnitude.
No, you're confusing average with statistical mean. Average can also be the median. In cases where the data becomes heavily skewed by the extremes, like this case, median is often the better way to convey the average.
No, for these types of long tail distributions, the mean is much, much higher than the median. In this case, mean net worth is about $1.25 million, about 6 times larger than the median.
I literally went to Bureau of Labor Statistics and pulled up the average income for americans. Fidelity and Sofi are also in the same ballpark, ablut $65,000/year.
Actually looking it up further, you're not even right about the median income, that is also about $65,000 per year again from BLS, Fidelity and Sofi.
I've been talking about net worth this whole thread.
You know what, that's fair. My error.
And none of it detracts from the main point, like you were saying. Being rich takes things into another world, to where comparisons to normal budgets don't really capture the essence of what is going on or how it is being experienced by the rich person.
I chose net worth because I think at around the $100 million mark, realized income in any given year gets fairly meaningless compared to longer term trends, including in unrealized gains/losses in one's net worth.
But nothing truly captures what it's like to have money like this. These people treat money like points in a video game.