Elon Musk Is Mind-Blown by This Tech Fact: 6.64 Billion People Have Smartphones!

Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted his surprise at the fact that more than 80 percent of people have smartphones.

Even more surprisingly, this percentage is predicted to have a massive increase in the next three years.

Elon Musk Tweets Being Mind-Blown Over Smartphone Adoption

The Russian American computer scientist and podcast host Led Fridman tweeted that January 10 marks the 15th anniversary of Steve Jobs' unveiling of the first iPhone. He also added in his tweet that there are now over 6.3 billion smartphone users.

Moreover, Fridman continued that the adoption of technology has been phenomenal, and it continues to accelerate. With this reported increase, it has the potential to either assist or harm mankind. For this reason, he mentioned that every new product designed should consider both outcomes.

Surprised by this fact, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted that he was mind-blown about the huge percentage of humans that have a smartphone.

The replied tweet of the South-African-born business mogul gained more than 37,000 likes and over 1800 retweets.

Upon tweeting his amusement, numerous people also expressed their thoughts and opinion on this matter.

Twitter user @Juanof9 replied to Elon Musk's tweet, claiming that only half of the world's population utilize the internet. With that said, he does not believe that the projected figure is correct.

"Either a subset of that 80 percent have disconnected smart smartphones, or many people have 2 smartphones and many others have none," Juan continued.

Meanwhile, another Twitter user said that the projected internet user is probably less than half of the world, defining that "internet users are individuals who have used the Internet (from any location [or device]) in the last 3 months."

Aside from these comments, Twitter user @AntonioJLievano positively noted that the 80 percent rate of people who have smartphones indicates that several people have an infinite amount of information at their fingertips.

"No excuses when we all have similar tools to be successful," Antonio furthered.

In relation to this, Bank My Cell released a report, titled "How Many Smartphones Are In The World?" to provide detailed information about this projection.

Smartphone Adoption in the World

For those wondering how Bank My Cell came up with this analysis, the company penned that they started by looking at the most recent weekly numbers on the number of phones, which are broken down into smartphones and feature phones.

Through this distinction, it allowed them to estimate both the global total number of mobile phone users and the adoption of smartphones solely.

To support Elon Musk's tweet, Statista reported that there are more than 6 billion smartphone users in the world, which indicates that about 80 percent of the world's population owns a smartphone.

This percentage is a significant increase from 2016, when there were just about 3 billion users, accounting for approximately 49 percent of the world population at the time.

In addition to this, Bank My Cell noted that the current number of mobile phone users--including both smart and feature phones--is more than 7 billion, accounting for more than 91 percent of all people on the planet.

Feature phones are simple mobile phones without apps or complicated operating systems that are more common in developing countries.

Meanwhile, in terms of mobile connectivity, GSMA real-time intelligence statistics reported that there are currently over 10 billion mobile connections globally, surpassing UN digital expert projections of 7 billion.

On a global scale, Statista forecasts significant growth for all cellular-enabled phones, tablets and IoT devices. According to the company's data sources, the number of mobile device users will rise to more than 7 billion in the next three years.