How to Get to the Top .01%
Disclaimer: This is a hypothetical discussion and I'm not sure it would be wise to draw significant career-related conclusions from it.
I am curious as to what people consider to be the fastest way to make *a lot* of money in this industry.
Is it....
1. Ibanking --> Private Equity?
2. Ibanking --> Hedge Fund?
3. Consultant --> PE/HF?
4. Algorithmic prop trading?
Or other avenues like...
5. Joining an early-stage tech startup?
Anecdotes welcome!
All of those will make you some serious money and congrats if you're on one of those tracks. But if you want to get to the upper echelon and be making fuck you type money, entrepreneurship is probably the path. All the incredibly wealthy people are their own boss, Buffett, Icahn, Ellison, Gates, Zuckerberg, and the list goes on. Incredibly high risk, but the potential rewards are huge.
The "fastest" way is also going to be the path of most resistance/risk, which would be starting(not joining) your own start-up.
College kids on this forum can not grasp the fact that there is money to be made outside of the IB--->PE--->MBA route
Outside of Stanford, I'm not sure many schools promote the entrepreneurship path. Though I think that is changing. Considering the risk, it may not actually be "responsible" to promote entrepreneurship if a student has a lot of options for stable, decently-compensated jobs.
Schools are run by the most risk adverse people in life.
If you’re young and have no dependents then entrepreneurship is not that risky. The worst that happens is you lose your net worth which is likely already low out of school or have to BK. Neither is that bad really. You can even keep your primary residence in event of BK.
It's tough to grasp, because it's somewhat true.
22 year old bankers make more than 35 year old doctors, and 25 year old lawyers. They have zero debt from grad school, and face zero risk of being unemployed for a long period of time. When you work in tech, your company could go up in flames in a single day, and you could be on the streets with failed work experience.
"I wanna be a billionaire so freaking bad Buy all of the things I never had I wanna be on the cover of Forbes magazine..."
I was an engineer in undergrad and have an MBA, some of the posts here are comical because people think they are going to get paid a lot of money by following some formula as if it they learned it in a college math class. A couple things to think about, working for yourself is always going to be the most lucrative. Think about it, if you are in a managerial job and serious about your business why would you pay your employees one cent above market rate? While you get paid a lot working at a bank and climbing the ranks, Lloyd Blankfein makes peanuts compared to Henry Kravis. If you truly want to make a lot a of money find a solution to a problem that has not been found. Every year thousands of people go to Ivy league schools and graduate with good grades, that does not make you special and while those credentials will allow you to earn a good salary it it will not get you the largest house on the block.
The most promising route is IB -> Startup. You need the network to start a business. IB gives you that..and the international vision.
Owning equity in something that grows. Pretty much starting a unicorn. You won't get there working for someone else. I'm only going into IB because it's a relatively risk averse way of making more money than 99% of the world. I'm not *that* interested in out earning 99.99% of them. The 2020 Credit Suisse global wealth report puts the proportion of adults globally that have a net worth of at least $1MM at "exactly 1%." They list ~170k at or above $30MM in net worth which is ~.003% of the global adult population. 0.01% of the global adult population would mean you have to be in the top 520,000 people globally by net worth. I wasn't able to find enough information to zero in on a closer figure for a net worth that would be .01% globally, but its somewhere between $1MM and $30MM. Let just say $15MM, which is probably doable over the lifespan of a successful banker according to that other thread that talked about it. If you are talking about being in the top .01% of the United States, that would be *much* harder since 8.2% of adult Americans are >$1MM.
start a billion dollar company from your garage. If your ego is high enough to think you can be the top .01% in all of those fields, i'm sure you can delude yourself into believing you will be the next Steve Jobs.
Shitty answer for a shitty question.
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