Elon Musk doesn't get paid, buy stuff or pay taxes like you do

The world's wealthiest people have unfathomable riches. But there's a huge difference between wealth and income, and that's what makes Elon Musk's weekend Twitter stunt, polling his followers about whether to sell 10% of his Tesla stock, both fascinating and jarring.

For the uninitiated: Musk, like many ultra-wealthy heads of companies, doesn't receive a paycheck like regular people. When you see headlines about his net worth topping $300 billion, it's fun to imagine him diving into a vault of gold coins, a la Scrooge McDuck. But that eye-popping number refers mostly to Musk's equity stake in Tesla, his trillion-dollar electric vehicle company.