Mark zuckerberg became a billionaire at age 22. Where are the young self made billionaires or multi millionaires and in what industry are they mostly ? Is it still mostly in tech, or are sectors like social media, content creation, and crypto taking over?
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I think millennials had a handful of people become billionaires founding social media (Zuck, Dorsey, Sean Parker, Bobby Murphy, Evan Sharp) so that GenZ could have ~ thousands of people become millionaires on it. Outside of the millennial social media founder generation, has there ever been a distinct class of young people who became self-made billionaires?
SBF (before the fraud stuff), Alexandr Wang, founders of Anysphere soon.
I think it's also tougher nowadays because the entrenched players (Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Google) are all so wealthy that they are going all in on the next technological revolution (AI), which many young independent kids can't compete with. I don't think there was as much competition or conglomerate power for the Millennials.
Early internet companies were unique in that they required extremely low capital and professional networks to start up, which allowed someone like Zuckerberg with just a laptop and a good idea to become extremely successful at a young age.
This is different from most other "start ups" nowadays, which is why the average successful founder is ~45 years old. The low handing opportunities of the early internet are gone. You now need a combination of deep industry expertise, connections, or capital to start something meaningful, and usually someone with a decade plus of experience has these things. It's possible for someone in their 20s to expedite this process (like Alexandr Wang), but it's going to be really hard.
To put it into perspective, this is how it was for most of human history, even during other major "inflection points" akin to the internet revolution today. Carnegie started his steel company when he was 38 years old. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil when he was 30. Henry Ford founded Ford Motor Company when he was 39. Most successful companies will start out this way. The the young, "get rich quick" dynamic of the internet era is an extreme anomaly.
As a student of history, I want to correct some of implications you are making.
Rockefeller did start Standard Oil in 1870. But the predecessor firm, Rockefeller, Andrews and Flagler, was already the largest oil refiner in the world by far and the only reason to form Standard Oil was because the firm was buying so many other large refiners that they needed to reincorporate. Pretending like he began his career at 30 is sort of silly - he was probably one of the richest people in America when Standard Oil was founded.
Carnegie is sort of the same. Yes, Carnegie began construction of ET Steel Works in his late 30s, but he also was worth millions if not tens of millions of dollars at the time from bond brokering, stock market shenanigans, and investments in iron mills and oil wells during the Civil War.
I think Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos are apt comparison points, in the sense that both men had wealth or built it to something more than simply a modest degree of success before identifying some new trend or force in the economy and the using that wealth to absolutely explode their net worth. Musk understood the power of government largesse and the gullibility of retail investors to turn his companies into powerhouses, and Bezos saw the scalability of online shopping instead of just bookselling.
Yes I'm aware of all this. I was comparing them to people like Zuckerberg who carved out multibillion dollar industries with 0 meaningful experience in anything before that.
The fact that Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford were either 1) already wealthy through other ventures or 2) had a decade plus of work experience before founding billion dollar companies is exactly my point. I agree that Musk and Bezos are in this camp, but not people like Zuckerberg and Dorsey.
Can I please DM you, I’m super into the Rockefeller and gilded age era and you seem very knowledgeable about it. Thanks in advance :)
"low capital" bruh he got $500k funding from Peter Thiel
That was down the line. He didn't need $500k to just start a website.
$500k is a lot of capital to found what became a $1T+ company? lol that's less than many seed rounds today.
Because Zuckerberg made his money doing what no one else had. He was in a new(ish) field, and that's the kind of place where very young people can make very massive fortunes very quickly. Since Mr Zuckerberg and his cohort made it big, everyone else and their uncle has the same exact idea, which means that it is no longer possible to do it anymore.
The idea that there should be any billionaires in their 20s is sort of absurd. Not as in it is unethical, but that assuming that there should be multiple people in that age bracket making it that big just doesn't make much sense.
Currently it's mostly these guys (in no order:
1. Crypto kids. These fall into various categories, some trade actual coins, (BTC, SOL, ETH, etc.) some do perpetual futures on them, and many do shitcoins/memecoins. Many have roundtripped 7 figures on these, myself included. I know multiple 8 figure guys in this space. If you make it you're really set here. Very much a grind, have to spend hours a day watching charts and trading and following communities on social media, looking for virality of a meme and gauging sentiment.
2. Wifi money kids. These are your ecommerce guys, running paid ads, dropshipping, scaling brands by running ads for them, managing onlyfans girls, etc. Also profitable and a little more grindy because it could take a while before your business really takes off.
3. Startup founders. Early employees and founders of new startups. Usually funded by some incubators or VCs past a certain stage. Some of these kids already have an exit or 2 under their belt so they know how to run a company and scale it to an exit. Some keep starting new companies, but many just start VC firms themselves after their big break.
I'm gonna leave out content creators since I feel less people do that that actually make it but I suppose this is viable as well. Some editors for big content creators pull in a lot as well and have most expenses covered by the creator including housing and food. Girls who do OF probably count here as well but it's only a small percent making consistently big bucks.
Is there any science to gaguing sentiment or do u just have to be super tapped into these comms
This is where these types of plays differ from traditional investing because it's almost inverted from regular logic. It's the retarded stuff that makes money, the stuff that makes no sense to normal people. You gotta be a bit chronically online. Initially you can be tapped into the comms which will help you develop a gauge. If you're already kind of an online person or been on the internet for many years through many meme golden ages then you will likely have a good sense for it already. Right mix of fucked up and offensive and stupid, any combo or correct ratio of such will yield a profitable memecoin. Have to be good at telling what other people in this community will find funny enough to just chuck money at and run up to a high marketcap. A good example is the baltimore bridge getting hit by a boat sometime last year. I came into work at 8 and checked the charts and saw someone had made a memecoin off that event, at about 6 am, not too long after it happened. Hadn't seen any mention of it on twitter or anything, nor did I check. I just thought it was funny and kind of fucked up. So I put some money in. Few hours later some big accounts posted about it on twitter and everyone started getting in. I 5x'd on it and sold by lunch and I was out just like that. Is it always that easy? No of course not. There's different timelines for these things too. That was event based and nobody is gonna talk about that for more than a day or 2 so that coin is not gonna last long. Some can last months and run up well over $1 and you can 100x on it if you got in under 1 cent. To answer your question, on the surface level if you're coming in with the mind of how traditional investing works, it seems that there isn't a science to it but once you start thinking in terms of memes and virality potential and what makes people laugh and such, yeah there kind of is a science to it. It's just that the factors and metrics are different than those of a real stock and significantly more volatile.
How long have you been in crypto to achieve that? Can I please dm you?
Not that long honestly. I just happened to join during a bull run. The whole thing just depends on market cycles. Sure you can if you'd like.
Those girls have pimps?!
Do you get 10%? More? Less?
from what I was reading once, some act more like marketing agents, others act like actual pimps that "put them to work when they don't feel like" (having a boss to motivate them), others have more of a "market researcher" role in understanding what's trendy in that space to do and advise
payment is very flexible, can even run a fixed payment with equity kickers aka bonuses when milestones are achieved (not being sarcastic)
sounds exaggerated, but OF is just online prostitution, and prostitution always had its unique business model
I've seen 10% and higher depending on how much the guy does. Some run promo for them, some do everything from promo to post and social media management to actually chatting with subscribers through her account. Most people outsource this to cheap task workers online though.
Thanks for sharing insights here! May I ask is it inevitable to master quant trading skills in crypto trading?
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