> And really what is the practical difference between having $20m and $2b? Sure you'll have nicer houses and more of them. You may well have a super-yacht at that point. But who cares? I know I don't.
I found this Reddit comment [1] insightful on that front. Don't know to its validity but have seen it linked to in a few different places.
> $1billion
> I am going to exclude the $10b+ crowd, because they live a head-of-state life. But at $1b, life changes. You can buy anything. ANYTHING. In broad terms, this is what you can buy:
> Access. You now can just ask your staff to contact anyone and you will get a call back. I have seen this first hand and it is mind-blowing the level of access and respect $1 billion+ gets you. In this case, I wanted to speak with a very well-known billionaire businessman (call him billionaire #1 for a project that interested billionaire #2. I mentioned that it would be good to talk to billionaire #1 and B2 told me that he didn't know him. But he called his assistant in. "Get me the xxxgolf club directory. Call B1 at home and tell him I want to talk to him." Within 60 minutes, we had a call back. I was in B1's home talking to him the next day. B2's opinion commanded that kind of respect from a peer. Mind blowing. The same is true with access to almost any Senator/Governor of a billionaires party (because in most cases, he is a significant donor). You meet on an occassional basis with heads-of-state and have real conversations with them. Which leads to ... influence ... (continued)
[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2s9u0s/what_do_i...
Obviously that's a pretty nice passive income stream. But it's not really have a couple nice homes in prime locations, hire full-time assistants, fly private jets everywhere, etc. sort of money.
For instance: private air travel in USA. Find some friends with aligned lifestyles and together buy a high performance twin engine propeller passenger plane that seats 8 people for about 5 million.
There are agencies who will take care of all of the complexities of owning and operating this aircraft and renting it out while you’re not using it. With careful decision making you can bring the aircraft to close to net zero steady state operating cost as the revenue flights paying for maintenance, storage, liability etc. You also get access to a stream of excellent pilots on demand.
These agencies can also book you on a larger plane in their portfolio when you want to go further and for some reason aren’t willing/can’t fly first class commercial.
Real estate is much simpler—tons of fabulous rentals all over the world. And an assistant surely could be hired somewhere for 100k or less annually.
There's an 'aviation YouTuber' who owns a private jet (through his medical supply company?) and puts up videos of his travels:
Honestly, I found many of them condescending and unpleasant. Money can absolutely get influence and access, but a good heart? Maybe not
When you're being constantly hounded by people that believe that you being wealthy means they inherently deserves a share of it, that'll probably distort your worldview real quick.
I hope people don’t learn his “work employees to death” and related philosophy ...
“Bezos everything store?” Harder to start. Amazon allowed flexibility. Can’t infer from choice.
Combine that with the split between the Dodge brother investors, and all the Detroit "Big Three" manufacturers can be traced to Henry Ford. [2]
It’s a great name for a bookstore. But you’d have to change it once it grew. And you’d retain the book brand longer than amazon did.
The Ford motors name worked for generations because Ford stayed in motors.
There is no way to escape the envy and judgement from your "friends" even if you are just a "little" rich. A friend of mine, who is a former Googler, and keeps a "low key" lifestyle just tries to keep all the "triggers" that people use to recognize wealth out of their life because they value their friendships.
What if you just get there quietly through private investment?
Not a billion, but I’ve built up a decent chunk myself and nobody seems to know or even suspect that about me. Nobody begs me for anything more than spare change, no sycophants, nobody trying to impress me. Marketing for luxury goods doesn’t even reach me.
I could easily see myself reaching a billion in a few decades just through private investment, and there must be thousands of people doing the same. I imagine there are many more who have earned millions publicly, then sold their stake and went to a billion privately.
So how does everyone find out about them?
Yes, it's possible to do it quasi-quietly. This optometrist did exactly that.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/maddieberg/2019/02/19/the-great...
"Optometrist Herb Wertheim may be the greatest individual investor the world has never heard of, and he has the Fidelity statements to prove it. Leafing through printouts he has brought to a meeting, you can see hundreds of millions of dollars in stocks like Apple and Microsoft, purchased decades ago during their IPOs. An $800 million-plus position in Heico, a $1.8 billion (revenue) airplane-parts manufacturer, dates to 1992. There are dozens of other holdings, ranging from GE and Google to BP and Bank of America."
"The Microsoft shares he bought during the IPO, which have been paying dividends since 2003, are now worth more than $160 million. His 1.25 million shares of Apple, some purchased during its 1980 IPO and some when the stock was languishing at $10 in the 1990s, are worth $195 million."
First off it's hard being a billionaire and people not knowing. You're going to make a splash somehow. But there's still plenty of billionaires, especially in emerging market countries, that have still to be uncovered.
So your plan to "easily" become a billionaire is to "follow Warren Buffet" and make decades worth of out-performing private investments?
Wait until you learn that markets don't go up forever, and that paper profits on out-of-touch valuations aren't cash. As they say, "everyone's a genius in a bull market".
End goal career-wise is to amass as much wealth as possible by giving smart and capable people a path to building new things that benefit everyone, and then direct that amassed wealth toward the betterment of humanity before I die.
I’m not sure exactly how I’ll do that.
I actually think most philanthropic organizations do more harm than good. I think an effective non-profit would probably look like a boring faceless middleman, affecting positive change by influencing capitalistic markets to serve the underserved. By serve I mean serve, not provide goods to.
I also have my own idea of what it means to better humanity. I think there are better ways to feed and shelter people than feeding and sheltering them.
Whatever I do, it’ll probably be really boring, won’t provide for any photo ops, and there’s a good chance it might even seem pointless and ineffective to most people.
https://angel.co/ for example.
For example in the UK Electra and III are PE funds and Witan in the UK as 10 or 15 % in private investments.
And that's not including UK specific things like VCT's where you would need to have a few k to invest
At $20m you can shape your own world, and your family's. But at $2bn you can change society. You can buy a lot of influence both by directly spending the cash to accomplish goals and by bribing politicians to act on your behalf.
$25m @ 10%/year (assuming your actively investing a have no real estate) can afford you a good baller life around US most expensive cities if you are single or just a couple.
That's been the reality of Denmark's richest family (richest ever since CF Møller, head of Mærsk, died a few years ago). They've had numerous run-ins with people after a slice of their wealth. This lead them to keep as far from the public eye as possible (according to one piece I read) until they were the most talked about Danes of the season last year, as they tragically lost 3 of their 4 children in a bombing that was aimed to wipe them out.
It's hard to imagine a worse scenario to survive as a parent or sibling.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/22/three-children-of-danish-bil...
All of your remaining friends and family will believe this, and the case will be so bad that your name will become associated around the world for the sheer heinousness and reprehensibility of the things you supposedly did. However the djinn is willing to bind himself to not doing this, but you have to pay him $1 right now.
If "nothing matters after you are gone", then you wouldn't even be willing to pay $1 to avoid this scenario.
You care about the wellbeing of your friends and family after your death, even though you're not "around to observe it". So there are at least some things that you value in life, that you still value after death.
Many people being value being respected in life. There's nothing particularly different about extending that value to being respected after death. At least not if you already assign valence to other values post-death.
Few people really don't care what happens after they're gone. We almost always want something to linger on, be it descendants, a master works, or just the world.
If it's just the feeling of being remembered for something then there are lots of other things you can do to make people remember you. Nobody remembers the rich merchants from 2000 or 3000 years ago but people still remember the conquerors who changed maps and the artists of those days whose works have been immortalized. Whether you like it or not, someone like Hitler or Tolkien will be more likely to be remembered than someone like Gates and no, Hitler won't still be considered as an irredeemable monster then, just like how people don't get offended by the conquests and massacres by Genghis or Napoleon unless for nationalistic/jingoistic reasons.
That's assuming that rich people don't want _more_ riches, which I would guess to be not true in more cases than not.
20M isn't quality of life wise too different from 2B, but if you got the chance to get 2B, legally and even morally, would you not?
Frankly, All people with a annual income of either $1B, $10M, or $100K likely live in closer and better quality of life than some medieval king. I'm thankful for our times.
(https://twitter.com/Merman_Melville/status/10885276937573498...)
I was always tempted to do a reality TV show where you get outside and are famous for a few months then forgotten about, for the reason that you could hopefully experience what fame is like and hopefully be forgotten about if you didn't like it.
1. The attention and adulation is your drug. I think there's no shortage of people who fall into this category.
2. To convert that fame into opportunities you wouldn't otherwise have; and
3. To convert that fame into money.
Obviously if you're just plain rich then (3) is moot. If you fall into (1) then money can buy you fame to a degree.
So that leaves (2). Wealth will give you many opportunities fame will but certainly not all. Or at least the costs to replicate that are truly ludicrous, like being a star in a Marvel movie, spending a year on the ISS, going to the Moon, that sort of thing.
The way I see it the downsides of fame are significant. I've heard tales from people who worked in media years ago that the very stars who now want the media to leave them alone and to respect their privacy would beg them for stories and coverage just a few years earlier.
I don't think I'd want to be ultra-wealthy (as in a billionaire+). At that point you're almost removed from society. I imagine you end up moving in circles with other ultra-wealthy people that are actually quite small. You risk being a target of the desperate, the criminally minded (fraud, kidnapping, blackmail, that sort of thing) and the mentally unstable.
And really what is the practical difference between having $20m and $2b? Sure you'll have nicer houses and more of them. You may well have a super-yacht at that point. But who cares? I know I don't.
You could say "you would if you had $2b" and maybe that's true. I'm sure I'd buy a nicer place but I think I'd still want to keep a relatively low profile.