Whenever I see people say: “I don’t get it, if I were <insert billionaire’s name here>, I’d immediately <do some selfless thing with my money>”.
Anybody who is the kind of person who would spend their money to fix societal problems isn’t going to wait until they’re a billionaire to do it. They’ll do it as soon as they think they have enough money to make a difference. That’s what will prevent them from ever becoming a billionaire. It’s a survivorship bias thing. Every billionaire you see is a person who could have fallen into the “trap” of helping other people with their absurd, vast wealth. But, they survived that temptation and instead kept accumulating wealth like a dragon in some fantasy story.
It’s extremely unlikely, for sure, but not necessarily impossible. You could release a piece of digital content, like a game or an album or program, that becomes wildly popular extremely quickly. Again, not likely, but strictly speaking possible.
That’s not going to make you $1b. Maybe tens of millions, but not billions.
I guess you could sort-of argue that it’s what happened with Minecraft, though that took more than 5 years from the alpha to the eventual acquisition. But, it’s true that he went from typical middle class type wealth to a billionaire overnight when that deal closed.
But, in almost every other case someone’s going to make far less than $1b on their first deal. And then they’re going to be multi-millionaires who either start giving their money away, or try for $1b.
Whenever I see people say: “I don’t get it, if I were <insert billionaire’s name here>, I’d immediately <do some selfless thing with my money>”.
Anybody who is the kind of person who would spend their money to fix societal problems isn’t going to wait until they’re a billionaire to do it. They’ll do it as soon as they think they have enough money to make a difference. That’s what will prevent them from ever becoming a billionaire. It’s a survivorship bias thing. Every billionaire you see is a person who could have fallen into the “trap” of helping other people with their absurd, vast wealth. But, they survived that temptation and instead kept accumulating wealth like a dragon in some fantasy story.
This is true and very well said. I don’t understand the accompanying graphic, however.
from here
Brilliant — thanks. (:
I could see becoming a billionaire from an idea too quickly to spend it, but 99.99% of the time this is correct.
I think you’re dreaming if you think that’s possible.
It’s extremely unlikely, for sure, but not necessarily impossible. You could release a piece of digital content, like a game or an album or program, that becomes wildly popular extremely quickly. Again, not likely, but strictly speaking possible.
That’s not going to make you $1b. Maybe tens of millions, but not billions.
I guess you could sort-of argue that it’s what happened with Minecraft, though that took more than 5 years from the alpha to the eventual acquisition. But, it’s true that he went from typical middle class type wealth to a billionaire overnight when that deal closed.
But, in almost every other case someone’s going to make far less than $1b on their first deal. And then they’re going to be multi-millionaires who either start giving their money away, or try for $1b.
The only possible way that could happen is through inheritance