WE all know our new Prime Minister is a very rich man, with his and his wife’s combined net worth amounting to around £730 million.
But I wouldn’t be surprised if that figure doesn’t mean a huge amount to you - £100m, £300m, £730,…what’s the difference I hear you say?
So let’s put things into perspective for a second and look at just how giant the gap is between Rishi Sunak and the average person in the UK.
According to the latest data from the Office For National Statistics, in 2022 the average UK salary is £33,000, while the average total net worth of UK households is £300,000.
Research by online publication Bankless Times has found it would take a staggering 22,121 years to reach the wealth of Sunak and his wife IF you saved every penny you earned – based on the mean UK household net worth being 0.041% of the PM’s wealth.
So basically, if you were a futuristic, immortal being that never travelled anywhere, and somehow managed to dodge every single bill that came through your postbox, and didn’t pay for anything at the supermarket without getting into trouble, you might have a slim chance of sitting on this kind of cash at some point.
And to put that 22,121-year timeframe in perspective, if you were to go back in time that far you’d be about halfway to seeing the first European humans walk on Earth.
Another way of putting it is if you were to convert the PM’s £730m into US dollars you would reach roughly $846m. This would get you a tower of one-dollar bills measuring 94 kilometers, which would bring you very close to the troposphere – the lowest layer of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Bankless Times – which focuses on the alternative consumer finance market – found that if Sunak, who is 42, joined the workforce at 18, and began with a net worth of zero, he would have 24 years to reach £730m. He would then need to earn £30,416,666 a year in order to reach his current level.
Mindboggling, incomprehensible, astonishing…there just aren’t adjectives in the Oxford dictionary to describe the humungous financial chasm between Sunak and the rest of us.
It really is pretty difficult to stomach this during a cost-of-living crisis, when so many families are struggling to put food on the table, and it’s safe to say he’s got plenty of work to do to show us he knows – in the words of Pulp - what it’s to live like common people.
