It's a joke really, most Americans are lucky to even have a positive net worth. A traffic ticket hurts your average American much more than this fine hurts Musk and he committed a much larger crime than parking in the wrong spot.
That must be particularly galling to Musk.
The median American has a positive net worth of around $55,000. That's higher than Germany or Sweden, and just below Finland.
> A traffic ticket hurts your average American much more than this
The average American has a positive net worth of over $300,000 and represents the fourth richest average of any nationality. As such, the average American would shrug off a parking ticket every bit as much as Musk would shrug off a $20m fine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...
Or why Belgium is nearly 4x that of Germany. Or why Italy is 3x that of Germany. And so on. It's very clearly a problem that specifically has to do with Germany. Even South Korea, which has only started to become affluent in the last two decades, is well ahead of Germany and Sweden (and the US median as well).
You're also making the excellent point that Americans should be far worse off than Germans and Swedes, because they should be going broke constantly due to medical bills. And yet the American median wealth is still higher.
The US spends as much on its welfare state as a percentage of its economy, as what Canada and Australia do, and is just behind Switzerland.
The median American receives healthcare through their employer. That directly detracts from their income potential, and given how expensive US healthcare is (typically 60% to 80% more than other developed nations), it detracts in a very big way. By your way of thinking, we should account for that massive gap in cost of healthcare and how it impacts income figures (which impacts max savings potential). It's certainly not fair to account for Germans paying into taxes for eg healthcare, while ignoring that Americans lose out on income in the relationship with their employer due to the immense cost of healthcare in the US: that is the tax.
It's not even a real problem, because the primary cause is that housing costs in Germany are much lower than they are in most other places. Correspondingly the homes people own aren't worth as much, but they don't care because they're using housing as a thing to live in instead of a thing to prop up their net worth on paper.
If you must use the concept of an average American (which I'm generally against because people/entities with multiple dependent and interlinked characteristics are not numbers and so average is pretty ill defined), I think general consensus is that your first measure of median would be more appropriate.
By the average American I meant "a typical American," which is admittedly a murky term, but I doubt most people would take this to mean the literal mathematical average.
I'm a little surprised to see that the median wealth per adult in the US is $55K. It sounds high. Does the Credit Suisse report the Wikipedia article is based on define wealth to mean actual net worth, as in assets minus liabilities?
I think the average American household has around $100K in debt. You can lawyer those words all you want, none of it will change the fact that ordinary people have a lot less money than Elon, and are hit harder by a traffic ticket than he is by this fine.
I think that when you made this reply you weren't making a good faith effort to understand my point. Cherry-picked pedantry of this sort doesn't advance the discussion of the larger issues.
Given that these values differ by over $300,000, that's arguably even less accurate than saying that the average American's net worth is below zero.
EDIT: misread original comment's mention of median figure, but given its overall assertion in the context of this discussion, I'm leaving this here.