three years to a millionaire, unless you live for free. taxes ain't your only expense.

They’ll argue that it’s because of risk and because of their “ideas” but it takes about thirty seconds to see that there’s never a real risk and that there ideas are verifiably awful.

If I made $500k USD a year tax-free, it would take me

2 years to become a millionaire

2000 years to become a billionaire

This is a very simplistic way of looking at personal income, as it doesn't consider the value of money. You really want to look at PPP (Purchasing Price Parity).

Consider, for instance, the impact that a high rate of inflation has on income and wealth. If you're living in Chile right now, with an 11% inflation rate, and your income scales with that inflation rate, then you can become a billionaire in 67 years. But, of course, that means costs are exploding as well. So that billion dollars doesn't feel like a billion dollars 67 years later.

Now consider that we've seen the US Stock Market doing an average 14% return over the last 10 years. So that $500k of recurring principle gets you to billionaire status in a mere 58 years. Some of these billionaires are getting ROI at much higher than 14%, thanks to their access to low-interest loans, government contracts, and below-market capital.

What has the US economy actually added over the last decade? What justifies the numerical growth in value? The dirty truth is that "billionaires" are just folks who got to ride the exploding price wave.

There’s no way what billionaires contribute to the world is worth 2000 times more than someone making $500k.

It isn't a question of contribution but of access to large pools of credit, interest accruing materials, and high return labor. What we have is a new kind of socio-economic enclosure, by which a select few people gain special privileges through social networking. Getting that explosive rate of return on a relatively meager upfront investment propels you into the billionaire class in a short amount of time.

But to get that access, you need social connections. Which is why folks like Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg could catapult themselves into the billionaire class while you're still sitting around with your genitals in your hands.

Billionaire is an entirely relative measure. What you can buy with a billion dollars is diminishing at the rate that new billionaires are minted. FFS, you can't even buy a basketball franchise for a billion dollars anymore.