The class inflation calculator
Creative:
An enduring passion project of mine is pointing out the wealth disparity among the American economic classes. Sometimes, when I read about people applauding billionaires for “donating millions of dollars to charity,” I wonder what that actually feels like to them. So I made a tool to find out. Spoiler alert: Elon Musk donating $6,320,000.00 is equivalent to me donating $5. Try it out for yourself, above.
How does it work? The tool is based on comparison percentages of one’s salary (i.e. what is 1% of your salary, versus what is 1% of Elon Musk’s “salary”). See the full explanation at the bottom of this page.
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HOW THE ORIGINAL CLASS INFLATION CALCULATOR WORKS
The tool is about giving you perspective on how different amounts of money feel to different people at different class levels using equivalent percentages of their salaries. Here’s how to do it:
Take your annual salary and place it in the cell labeled "Your Salary Here."
Take a comparison annual salary (from 2020–2021, Elon Musk’s wealth increased by $151,000,000,000) and place it in the cell labeled "Comparison Salary Here."
Take any dollar amount and place it in the cell labeled "Dollar Amount"; try placing what you would consider a "trivial" amount of money in this cell. Say, like $5.
The cell labeled "Dollar Adjustment" is the the comparable amount of money that has the equivalent "feeling" based on the same salary percentages. In the prepopulated example, $5 to someone making full-time minimum wage in this country ($7.25/hr—or $15,138/year—as of this writing) feels the same as $330,294.62 to someone making $1 billion/year.
For shits and giggles, below are some annual incomes from famous people in the world (at the time of this writing). Click their names to see source references. After you've set your salary cell, try copying these other salaries in the Comparison Salary Here cell to see how broke you actually are.
Kylie Jenner: $17,000,000
Taylor Swift: $185,000,000
Bill Gates: $12,000,000,000
Jeff Bezos: $78,500,000,000
Elon Musk: $126,400,000,000
For double shits and giggles, try the calculator with a non-trivial amount of money—say, rent?
The secret sauce: Both above tools works by using percentages. They’re based on very simple calculations you can do on your own if you want to verify their legitimacies. Elon Musk’s calculator is his net worth increase from 2020 to 2021 (+$126,400,000,000) divided by your income (x), multiplied by your dollar value (y)—it should look like: (126,400,000,000/x)*y=n. In the case of the Original Class Inflation Calculator, just divide the comparison salary (x) by your salary (y) and multiply it by your dollar value (z). The formula should look like: (x/y)*z = n.
Why do I compare Elon Musk’s net worth change with a normal person’s annual salary?
It would make more intuitive sense to compare net worth to net worth, or salary to salary, right? Well, the tough thing is, Elon Musk doesn’t really have an annual salary. Because so much of his wealth is tied up in intangible assets, such as company shares or investment assets, he foregoes all of his actual “salary” from being CEO of any corporation. Every headline that ever says “Elon Musk made $XX amount of money in this year” is basically speculative, seeing as his wealth isn’t really measured in checkings/savings like normal people. This is also how he evades paying excesses of income tax, because on paper, his taxable income is effectively $0.
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Art: Liberty Leading the People