Most self-made billionaires are going to have founded a company that became very successful.
If you’re gonna make a billion bucks from scratch and you start working around twenty or so, you’re starting with no experience and have less than ten years to pull it off. You basically have no track record and have to convince investors that you have the chops to pull this off and then manage to multiply that investment many times over.
I’m not saying that it’s impossible. It has been done. Mark Zuckerberg – who is almost 40 now – was a billionaire at 23, riding a major transition in tech:
Zuckerberg briefly attended Harvard University, where he launched Facebook in February 2004 with his roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. Originally launched in only select college campuses, the site expanded rapidly and eventually beyond colleges, reaching one billion users in 2012. Zuckerberg took the company public in May 2012 with majority shares. In 2007, at age 23, he was the world’s youngest self-made billionaire at the time. He has since used his funds to organize multiple philanthropic endeavors, including the establishment of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
Business-to-consumer social media companies like that had a huge incentive to be large, benefited from network effect, so there was a major advantage to starting quickly. You didn’t require much capital to get started. The technology was new, and low-hanging fruit hadn’t been picked, and new graduates were among the most-familiar with the technology.
…but it’s only going to happen under pretty exceptional circumstances.
I’m not sure that I’d call that terribly surprising or alarming. I mean, you could probably graph the number of under-30 self-made billionaires – in inflation-adjusted terms – by decade, and I’d bet that it’s pretty historically rare, because that particular combination of circumstances aren’t likely to show up all the time.
If we can find some kind of new, extraordinarily-important technology that in a very short period of time expands collossally in uptake, and where starting out in the industry has relatively-low capital requirements, my guess is that we could do it again. Zuckerberg did it with the Internet. Maybe AI or something like that could be the next area.
EDIT: And if you wanted to do it over the last ten years, you needed to do it over the COVID pandemic and a major war in Europe, which spanned a pretty considerable chunk of that period of time. Now, okay, yes, adversity means upset and can bring its own opportunities. Maybe you can meet a need that people have in either of those areas. But generally, neither were very good for economic activity.
There is absolutely truth to the saying “The best way to make a million dollars is to first spend 2 million dollars.” However, I think Zuckerberg is an exception more than a rule. That is, the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is about a billion dollars.
Most self-made billionaires are going to have founded a company that became very successful.
If you’re gonna make a billion bucks from scratch and you start working around twenty or so, you’re starting with no experience and have less than ten years to pull it off. You basically have no track record and have to convince investors that you have the chops to pull this off and then manage to multiply that investment many times over.
I’m not saying that it’s impossible. It has been done. Mark Zuckerberg – who is almost 40 now – was a billionaire at 23, riding a major transition in tech:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg
Business-to-consumer social media companies like that had a huge incentive to be large, benefited from network effect, so there was a major advantage to starting quickly. You didn’t require much capital to get started. The technology was new, and low-hanging fruit hadn’t been picked, and new graduates were among the most-familiar with the technology.
…but it’s only going to happen under pretty exceptional circumstances.
I’m not sure that I’d call that terribly surprising or alarming. I mean, you could probably graph the number of under-30 self-made billionaires – in inflation-adjusted terms – by decade, and I’d bet that it’s pretty historically rare, because that particular combination of circumstances aren’t likely to show up all the time.
If we can find some kind of new, extraordinarily-important technology that in a very short period of time expands collossally in uptake, and where starting out in the industry has relatively-low capital requirements, my guess is that we could do it again. Zuckerberg did it with the Internet. Maybe AI or something like that could be the next area.
EDIT: And if you wanted to do it over the last ten years, you needed to do it over the COVID pandemic and a major war in Europe, which spanned a pretty considerable chunk of that period of time. Now, okay, yes, adversity means upset and can bring its own opportunities. Maybe you can meet a need that people have in either of those areas. But generally, neither were very good for economic activity.
'ol Zucky took a $100,000 loan from his father to found Facebook. Much self made, such from scratch.
There is absolutely truth to the saying “The best way to make a million dollars is to first spend 2 million dollars.” However, I think Zuckerberg is an exception more than a rule. That is, the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is about a billion dollars.
That’s still very impressive ngl, despite my sheer disgust towards him and Facebook.
100,000 to 1,000,000,000 is a massive jump.
Easy to make risky moves when you know that no matter what you won’t end up destitute
No, most new billionaires are hedge fund/private equity leeches that just suck money out of the economy.