You don't get a 17,000% return even with the best insider trading in the world. You get it with luck.

And to become a billionaire you'd have to bet over $5M to start with.

If I had 5M I'd go mostly dividend stocks and retire.

Sounds like his net worth was over 100M at the time. I guess past a certain point, you’ve got enough dividend stocks and want to gamble on something more exciting.

yeah, also 5m out of 100m is nowhere close to an all in. There's a good chance he just had it lying there amongst a bunch of other stocks he was gambling with and didn't even think much of it.

Yes, but if you had $100M you could retire and take some risky bets.

His stock was worth $320 million after the IPO, and he let it all ride. On a single stock in a two-year-old company. Nobody could afford to do that unless losing most of $320 million wouldn't affect their lifestyle. Being wealthy explains most of it, but I suspect being 72 years old was a factor, too.

Some jobs are not just about getting enough money to retire, they can also be about making the world a better place (or sometimes just believing that's the case), just living a passion, just having a social activity and many other reasons.

This is the wet dream of every investor, not something anyone can achieve with hard work.

In the mid 1950s a young investor fresh from a Walk Street hedge fund pitched his investment partnership to doctors and dentists in Omaha, Nebraska. Those who participated earned an average 35% annual return for the next 12 years, increasing their investment by 35 times.

Then around 1970 investor shut down the partnerships and switched to running a public company he controlled. Investors who rolled over their investments could buy into the company for around $12 per share IIRC.

By the late 70s the stock traded for hundreds of dollars per share. In 1990 it hit $7,000, and $70,000 in 1998.

There is a group of Omaha residents who invited this young kid named Warren Buffett into their living rooms in the mid 50s, liked what he said enough to give him $10K, and ended up as billionaires because they believed in him.

I recently heard on a podcast (Planet Money or The Indicator, I think) that insiders generally don't do much better at beating the market. I think that is for the "average" case though. Sorry I don't have a citation.

Trick is to scale up that inside knowledge via a 20 and 2 hedge fund.

Don’t worry about beating the market after fees, enough fools will see you have a winning strategy and assume it will continue to get better and exceed the fees.