The Lesser Known Story of the World’s REAL First Trillionaire
Elon Musk just became the world’s first officially recognized trillionaire.
He did it! Wow. What a remarkable achievement, isn’t it?
But did you know that he wasn’t the real first trillionaire?
The World’s REAL First Trillionaire
Earl “Thrifty” Thomas was born in 1849.
In 1867, Earl started working as a trash collector. Within three months, he was so dependable they bumped his salary to the top end of the profession: $100,000 a year, an astonishing promotion in 1867. But it came with the condition that he would never be eligible for a raise. He enthusiastically accepted.
From that day on, Earl vowed to never miss a day. Not even one.
Earl lived alone, never married, and never started a family. His work was his life.
He was incredibly frugal. He never ate out, and rarely indulged in anything, except the occasional fountain soda.
Every morning, Monday through Friday, he was up before the sun, and for eight full hours he worked in the heat, tossing bag after bag into the back of the truck.
- He waved to the children.
- He was a pillar of his community.
- He volunteered with his church.
Through heat waves and snowstorms, holidays and Mondays, Earl showed up.
For 158 years, he showed up. And every month, like clockwork, he put $1,200 into the perfect index fund that returned a steady 10% per year, without fail, without falter.
No crashes. No bad timing. No emergency that ever forced him to touch it. Just pure, uninterrupted compounding.
He waved at children who grew up, had children, and grew old themselves. He outlasted the truck, the route, and nearly everyone who ever knew his name.
And last year, on an ordinary morning in June of 2025, at the blossoming young age of 176, Earl, the hardest working, most frugal, faithful, and reliable trash collector quietly became the world’s actual first trillionaire.
You just never heard of him. Congratulations Earl, you’re a legend.
The Quest for Space Supremacy
You sit at a table and every single second, a crisp $100 bill is added to a pile next to you. This continues, every second, of every day, of every week, of every month and year…for 317 years straight.
Then, one day, it stops. You look around wondering what happened, but realize that you now have some money and free time on your hands.
You look up to see a stack of $100 bills stretching 679 miles into the sky, into space past the International Space Station. You are curious to know if you can finally afford an avocado toast. You’ll need to count your wealth. You begin taping the bills together, end-to-end, counting along the way. A few minutes later, you are done and the string of $100 bills now extends 969,000 miles long. You count the total, a cool trillion.
You decide to conquer space, the final frontier. You loop your string of $100 bills around the moon and back to yourself…four times. You wrap it around your waist. You now have your very own moon belt, made from 4 layers of $100 bills.
You are a winner. You won space.
Then, Elon did it faster
Elon didn’t waste 176 years laboring in the sun. He certainly didn’t waste 317 years collecting Benjamins. He got there in record time by working both smarter and harder. Because if he weren’t the smartest and most hardworking person ever, then how did he arrive at a net worth over a trillion dollars, huh? Checkmate.
Aside from waking up at 5am, here’s how you can follow the Elon Musk playbook and get to a trillion faster than the traditional routes:
- Buy a car company, and build it until it still falls outside of the top 10 for total cars sold or profitability (if you take away their carbon credits), yet make sure that your car company still trades at an astounding 230-360x earnings vs industry average of ~8x. For reference, Tesla’s stock P/E is inflated around 30-40x relative to the industry average.
- Overpay to buy a well-known social network for $44 billion. Proceed to tank its brand recognition and already weak reputation, crater its revenue, deepen its annual losses, and turn it into a safe-haven for extreme right wing discourse.
- The final step is to start a rocket company that’s littering Earth’s orbit with satellites, and then IPO at more than 500x earnings despite even the best, most cherry-picked data failing to justify it.
That’s all you have to do.
A trillion reasons
I’d like to say I could think of a trillion reasons why neither Musk nor anyone else deserves, or should be able to, accumulate $1 billion, let alone $1 trillion of net worth. But, after getting started on that task, I knew I needed help.
When I asked my AI to help me, it estimated that to complete the task would take between 170 and 500+ years running non-stop and producing 20-40 word reasons at around 400,000 reasons per hour.
So I’ll give you five of the ones I came up with:
1. Homelessness (2025)
745,652 people were experiencing homelessness on a single night in January 2025 — a 3.2% decline from January 2024’s count of ~770,000, which was the highest recorded since federal tracking began in 2007. Between 2013 and 2025, overall homelessness increased 27% and chronic homelessness increased 81%.
Source: HUD 2025 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report
2. Full-time workers below the poverty line (2023)
6.1 million individuals were among the “working poor” in 2023 — people who spent at least 27 weeks in the labor force but whose incomes still fell below the official poverty level (3.8% of the labor force). A full-time worker at the federal minimum wage ($7.25/hr) earns $15,080/year — below the poverty line for even a single-person household ($15,650 in 2025).
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, A Profile of the Working Poor, 2023; Economic Policy Institute (2025)
3. Full-time workers who cannot afford a home (2024)
There is no county in the United States where a full-time minimum-wage worker can afford a modest two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent. The national “housing wage” needed for a two-bedroom is $32.11/hour — more than 4x the federal minimum wage. The US median home price hit $412,500 in 2024, equal to 5x the median household income. 66.6 million households (49% of all US households) cannot afford a $250,000 home.
Sources: NLIHC Out of Reach 2024; Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, State of the Nation’s Housing 2025; National Association of Home Builders (2024)
4. Full-time workers carrying medical debt (2024)
36% of US households had medical debt in 2024; 21% had a past-due medical bill. Total medical debt in active collection: $194 billion. A separate KFF/Peterson analysis estimates 20 million people (1 in 12 adults) owe medical debt, with $220 billion owed nationally. Research notes that most Americans with medical debt are employed and have health insurance.
Sources: PMC/JAMA Network Open (2024); KFF/Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker (February 2024)
5. Children of working parents facing food insecurity (2024)
14.1 million children lived in food-insecure households in 2024 — 18.4% of all US households with children. In about half of those households, only the adults experienced food insecurity (parents shielding children). 4.4% of working adults ages 18–64 lived in families experiencing food insecurity (CDC, 2021 data). Parental employment reduces but does not eliminate food insecurity risk.
Sources: USDA ERS, Household Food Security in the United States in 2024; FRAC (December 2025); CDC National Health Statistics Reports (2023)
In a world where so many people still struggle to have the bare necessities, the level of grotesque hoarding of resources by Musk and his contemporaries is something to criticize and work to eradicate, rather than celebrate.