May Elon Musk’s $43 Billion Purchase Each Toyota Camry On Earth?

The world awoke to a shock this morning when Tesla CEO Elon Musk supplied to purchase Twitter for $43 billion. How handy is that for an govt whose automobile firm has recalled over 594,000 automobiles this very morning? Anyway, there are a hell of plenty of methods to spend $43 billion, from fixing the water provide in Flint, Michigan to taking up the U.S. housing disaster. However this can be a whimsical man we’re speaking about, a person who despatched his automobile to house and made others fart their approach from zero to 60 mph in two seconds. He can use his fortune nevertheless he needs, and given his objective of changing all inside combustion automobiles with electrical autos, we puzzled: may Elon Musk purchase each Toyota Camry on the planet?

Based on our admittedly tough math, yep, he completely may.

To show this, we have to estimate what number of Toyota Camrys are on the market immediately and their approximate common market worth. Spitballing would be the order of the day, as the required knowledge merely does not exist or would take weeks to compile, so I’ll make a number of educated estimates that I do not suppose you may object to.

First off, the Camry depend. Toyota constructed its 10 millionth Camry final July, having beforehand handed three million in 2000, that means it has constructed a mean of about 318,000 Camrys in annually of the brand new millennium. It stands to cause that tempo has slowed with the rise of crossovers, so it feels a secure assumption that Toyota has constructed solely round 200,000 since July, for a operating complete of 10.2 million Camrys. That is all of them constructed worldwide—US gross sales numbers aren’t sufficient right here—since 1982, when the Camry turned a standalone mannequin and never only a trim of the Celica.

Clearly, lots of these Camrys have not made it to 2022, nearly all of the older ones having rusted away, been crashed, jumped over highways, or damaged down past restore over a long time of use. Aggregated worldwide registration knowledge is not accessible, however it appears a good assumption that 5 % of these constructed earlier than 2000 stay—so, 150,000 automobiles. Camrys constructed since then ought to nonetheless be on the street (in the event that they’re correctly cared for, at the least), however crashes and poor upkeep occur, taking a good quantity out of service earlier than their time. Let’s assume 65 % of these newer 7.2 million stay, or 4.68 million, which mixes with older automobiles involves a complete of 4.83 million.

With $43 billion to spend, Musk would want to safe each Camry constructed from 1982 to 2022 (blissful fortieth!) for a mean of $8,903 apiece. Three years in the past, when one may discover dependable transportation for only some grand, that may’ve been possible, so long as we conform to faux one dude shopping for up each Toyota Camry in existence would not do bizarre issues to their worth. However COVID-19 shifted the world’s course, disrupting provide chains and pinching the availability of recent automobiles, which in flip strained the used market and drove up costs. Because of this, the worth for any Camry, used or new, has averaged $21,162 in 2022 in line with iSeeCars. At that value, Musk’s $43 billion may solely purchase two million of the world’s estimated 4.83 million Camrys—although that’d nonetheless make him the world’s largest Toyota collector, amongst different issues.

If Musk have been keen to shed a number of dozen extra of his $265 billion, he may nonetheless purchase all of them, and in spite of everything, what’s cash to a person who gave up all his personal possessions to reside in a shack, and dedicate his life to bettering the world? Wait, you imply he nonetheless recurrently buzzes round on his personal jet? And tried to purchase the silence of the Twitter account that tracks his travels? Huh. Possibly that explains why he is attempting to purchase Twitter. Cannot tweet unflattering issues about Elon Musk if you cannot tweet in any respect, are you able to?

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