If you want to be a billionaire, you gotta get the mindset right.
Hustle…
Discipline…
Vision...
A rise and grind attitude…
And total delusion.
You’re never going to become a billionaire.
And here’s why.
First of all, a billion is a helluva lot more than a million.
Ok, that sounds obvious, but it’s kind of wild how much more than a million a billion
actually is.
Put it this way: if you got one pound every 10 seconds, and didn’t get taxed on any
of it or have any living costs, you’d be a millionaire within 4 months.
But if you got £1 every 10 seconds, you’d have to wait 310 years before you hit your
first billion.
You could have been on a 650 grand salary since the age of 18 - which would put you
in the top 0.1% of earners, fyi - and still not have anything close to a billion in your
bank account by the time you retire.
Billionaires don’t ‘earn’ money the way you or I do.
If you were relying on income to make you a billionaire, you’d literally die before
you ever saw it happen.
So how do people get to become billionaires?
Entrepreneurialism, sound investments, and a can-do spirit right?
Right?
According to Forbes, 69.5% of the billionaires on their 400 list are ‘self made’.
They cite Oprah Winfrey and the private equity tycoon Barry Sternlicht as examples of people
who were born into working class families, who overcame significant obstacles in order
to get where they are today.
Pretty inspiring - but fundamentally misleading.
Forbes might claim that nearly 70% of its top 400 billionaires are self-made, but most
of them aren’t exactly Jenny from the Block.
308 of Forbes’ top 400 come from middle and upper class backgrounds, or inherited
a business or fortune from their parents, or are just a hired/hands off investor who
didn’t actually grow the business.
The self-made myth falls apart the closer you look at it.
One study from 2012 showed that 40% of American billionaires inherited a “sizeable asset
from a spouse or family member.”
And according to Oxfam, about a third of global billionaire wealth comes from inheritance,
and another third comes from ‘crony connections to government and monopoly’.
They’re the beneficiaries of a rigged system stacked in favour of those who already have
a degree of money and power.
But what about like, investments and stuff?
(can you tell I did arts and humanities at uni?)
As Grace Blakeley points out, the greatest single source of wealth on the Sunday Times
Rich List is property.
This doesn’t create jobs, or trickle down.
It pushes up housing costs for everyone else.
This then creates even more wealth for the already wealthy: the rental market basically
transfers money from people who don’t own stuff to people who do.
Property portfolios aren’t a productive investment - they’re a predatory one.
And property developers don’t become billionaires by building affordable housing.
The richest ones make their money by building ugly-ass luxury developments, and selling
them to other billionaires (who in turn, sell them to other billionaires, who sell them
to other - you get the idea).
But most property wealth doesn’t even come from building things.
It’s through speculation - buying up the housing stock, and sitting on it as the prices
skyrocket.
Billionaire wealth is built on exploitation.
This can be through monopolising a resource that we all need to survive like oil, steel,
and information, and putting up barriers so we can only access it through them.
Or it can be creating miserable conditions for workers so that owners can maximise profit.
Think about those self-made, ‘one great idea’ billionaires: Tim Cook of Apple, Jeff
Bezos of Amazon, or Uber’s Garrett Camp.
For guys who are literally some of the richest people on the planet, they don’t pay their
workers very much.
Apple has been linked to forced labour and sweatshops in the Chinese factories which
produce the bulk of the company’s iPhones.
In the past ten years, there have been multiple suicides of assembly line workers.
The FoxConn corporate response was to install large safety nets outside its buildings to
catch falling bodies.
Workers at Amazon warehouses, paid about a tenner an hour, have reported being forced
to urinate in plastic bottles because they can’t go to the toilet on shift.
Meanwhile Uber has been fighting its own drivers’ demand to be recognised as employees, and
be paid the minimum wage.
One driver has said that unpaid waiting times force down his pay so much that he has to
work 12- to 14-hour shifts just to break even.
Becoming a billionaire isn’t a reward of individual effort.
It’s not a prize for playing fair, or working towards the public good.
The societies which produce the most billionaires are the most unequal on the planet: the UK
produced 24 billionaires, the biggest single jump for 33 years, during a pandemic which
has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and plunged 1.7 million people into
unemployment.
In the words of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, no one ever makes a billion dollars.
You take a billion dollars.
Billionaires are a symptom of a sick society which rewards those with the greatest capacity
to leverage their power over as many people as possible, and extract money from them.
You’re never going to be a billionaire.
But even if you could - would you really want to?