In sports it's fun to say that 2nd place is just the first loser, but that's all in jest and friendly banter. When making things like this overly dramatic, it serves nobody except those trying to short the stock.
Earning more than $60k/year puts you in the 1% already. [1]
I would be fairly surprised if $60K is top 1%, even if you have the entire world population in the denominator. But when I checked your link, it's not using the entire population for the denominator, (which is correct, IMO) so I don't think it's even close.
In the US, there are about 110M fulltime wage earners, (out of 330M population) with median being ~$50K and top quartile ~$80K. My very rough estimate based on that might be 45M people >$60K. That is a lot more than 110/330 * 1% * 7.8B = 26M before adding in Europe (lower wages but twice the population) or anywhere else.
Median in the US is not clear to me - I saw a figure of 60K and 35K within 2 minutes of searching. I think wage earning gets divided across family size, so those 45M people in your calculation, after dividing by family size, would have a much smaller income.
I think the difference between this convoluted statement and normal measures of inequality could be approximately translated to "most people making > $60K have dependents". It seems like a bad way to talk about inequality, because what goal would it imply to reduce inequality? Prevent people from having dependents, or prevent them from not having dependents?
Having an income of $60k while having a dependent is very different than when not having a dependent. I seems correct to say that without a dependent, you're in the top 1% of the world's wage earners (with respect to your financial freedom); while if you have a dependent, your income is no longer fully yours - and you are no longer in the top 1% of the world's wage earners.
Understatement much? You could also say Elon has more money than 50% of humans on the planet.