What Elon Musk could do with his £44bn pay packet – from the NHS to Jude Bellingham

Payday: a happy excuse for ordinary people to get a takeaway or head to the shops.

But Elon Musk is anything but ordinary. The Tesla boss has won a huge $56bn (£44bn) pay deal – a sum bigger than the GDP of Cyprus and Albania – after shareholders gave it the green light at the firm’s annual general meeting. While it is yet to be finalised, this puts the South African-born entrepreneur on track for the mother of all paydays – the largest-ever executive pay package at a US-listed firm.

With a net worth of £143bn even before this deal was agreed, it might be safe to assume he’s not going to save the money for a rainy day. But he already has access to all the accoutrements of extreme wealth: private jets, sports cars, spaceships, and so on. That got The Telegraph thinking about what Britain might have to offer should he find himself in the mood for a spending spree…

Hinkley Point C

This windfall could buy Musk one Hinkley Point power plant, based on current projections. In January, the owner of the nuclear power project in Somerset blamed inflation, Covid, and Brexit for delays and spiralling costs. It is now set to cost in the region of £35 billion, and could be completed as late as 2031. Small change, to Musk – he’d even have £10 billion left over.

Three months of the NHS

Should he find himself in a particularly benevolent mood, Musk could cover the NHS’s behemoth of a bill for three months. The cost of running the health service is £160 billion per year. With the tech geniuses at Musk’s disposal across his numerous companies, he could probably solve the IT issues that blight the NHS in that time. He may even be inclined to recruit and train more staff given that, in March, he posted on X that “nurses are underrated”. Maybe NHSX wouldn’t be such a bad idea, after all.

507 Jude Bellinghams

If Musk had a vested interest in the Euros, the obvious payday treat would be Bellingham, the 20-year-old Real Madrid superstar who has quickly become England’s poster boy. When the Spanish giants made him their showpiece signing last summer, it cost them just under £89 million. At that price, Musk could afford to buy 507 Jude Bellinghams. There are 624 players in total at Euro 24, so if Musk systematically replaced the existing squads with his army of Judes, only one group’s worth of teams would be unaffected. Perhaps he would opt for that to be Group F, which contains Portugal – there’s no risk of anyone stealing Cristiano Ronaldo’s spotlight that way.

20,000 Rishi Sunaks

The Prime Minister and his wife may be worth a comparatively modest £730 million, but given he earnt £2.2 million last year pre-tax, Musk could afford to pay Sunak’s salary 20,000 times over. This may or may not be relevant, but a Sky TV subscription starts from £26 per month, or £312 per year, so Musk might want to factor that in if he wants to offer his new Sunak recruits particularly topical perks with work.

156,000 average UK houses

Musk once had an extensive property portfolio, but in 2020 tweeted that he would be selling all his possessions and would “own no house”. His reported primary residence has since been a “~$50k house in Boca Chica”, Texas, that he rents from his company SpaceX. Perhaps he’d like to reconsider and snap up some prime British real estate. His payout would allow him to buy 156,000 averagely priced UK houses costing £282,000 apiece (as of January 2024). There are about 26.4 million dwellings in England and Wales in total, so, perhaps reassuringly, most of our homes would remain our own castles, or so the saying goes.