while we are struggling to make ends meet, some people make more money in a single year
than some nations do.
And I am not exaggerating.
If you are lucky, you might make a million dollar over your lifetime, but the founder
of Amazon, Jeff Bezos in 2018 alone made over 27 billion dollars.
In fact, his net worth peaked at 167 billion dollars in September of that year.
But he isn’t the only one who made such an incredible fortune in such a short period
of time, many other billionaires have boosted their wealth as well.
Of course, it's great to make so much money, but when you are at that level of wealth,
it's pretty easy to lose it as well, since it gets quite difficult to manage.
Take an example of the founder of Zara who lost over 16.2 billion dollars just last year.
Or Mark Zuckerburg who’s net worth was down by almost 19 billion dollars.
But the richest man in modern history was John Rockefeller who’s net worth was estimated
to be around 400 billion dollars.
He took advantage of the resource that was newly discovered then and built his wealth
around it, by monopolizing the entire industry.
Of course, you can't do that today because the industry is too competitive and the world
is trying to get greener.
So the worlds first trillionaire will have to conquer an entirely new industry as John
Rockefeller did.
And its probably going to be space.
That sounds pretty vague because a lot of people still don’t understand how are you
going to profit from space except getting satellites to space and delivering cargo to
ISS as SpaceX does today.
Of course, there is the potential of space tourism as well, but only the super rich will
be able to afford that.
So you might make a lot of money out of it, but it will definitely won't make you a trillionaire.
But the space industry is far bigger than that.
It's filled with an infinite amount of resources that are finite here on earth.
And whoever will start mining asteroids first, will probably end up becoming the first trillionaire.
Asteroids contain all kind of raw materials that are extremely precious here on earth
such as Gold, silver, platinum and so on.
In 1997 a small asteroid was discovered with a diameter of just 1.5 kilometers and it contained
20 trillion US Dollars worth of precious metals.
And space is literally filled with them, a small asteroid with a diameter of less than
a kilometer can contain two or three times more iron and nickel than the entire world
production.
Of course mining iron and delivering it back to earth isn’t going to be profitable, at
least in the forecastable future, but platinum that’s quite rare and expensive on earth
is used in many technologies that we use on daily basis and would be extremely profitable.
You can mine 25-50 billion dollar worth of platinum just from a 30 meters long asteroid.
Of course, the excessive supply of these metals will definitely drive the price down, but
one or two companies will get there first, and they will probably be careful with the
amount of raw materials they will supply the earth.
On top of that, as the world gets technological advanced, the demand for these precious metals
will only grow, especially if we start sending more satellites and building colonies on the
moon and mars.
There isn’t yet a single company that can mine asteroids but there are plenty of them
working on that.
The biggest challenge is transportation.
Rockets aren’t cheap because they are not reusable.
However, some people are about to change that.
What SpaceX has achieved already is really impressive, but their rockets aren’t 100
percent reusable and some parts need to be completely replaced before it takes off again.
But they are not the only company with impressive results.
Although that Blue Origin’s rocket is far behind SpaceX’s, judging by their history,
it seems like they going to catch up soon.
and both of these companies are privately owned by Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
By perfecting the reusability of rockets, not only they will be the only companies that
will have the ability to mine asteroids but also create a brand new industry and monopolize
it.
And since Amazon is growing tremendously and isn’t showing any sign of slowing down,
Jeff Bezos will have all the resources to be one of the first people to take advantage
of the space.
And as Amazon is conquering one industry after another here on earth and building monopolies,
there is no reason they wouldn’t do it in space.
So Bezos is in a much better position to cross that trillion dollar threshold first.
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