11 ms·

Will I become a billionaire if I am determined and put in the necessary work?

22 points by kurinikku 3y ago

coldtea 3y ago
No.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  The value in the Quora post comes from the perspective provided by Justine Musk's response, having been married to the obsession needed to attempt to achieve this. You're right! You'll likely still fail, but that's what it takes to try: obsession. The potential wealth is a byproduct.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    >but that's what it takes to try: obsession Having a diamond mine owning dad (Musk), a 250K loan from your parents (Bezos), a businesswoman mother with connections to IBM leadership (Gates), a half-billionaire real estate mogul father (Trump), financial support from friends and family to the tune of $1 million (Thiel), an $100K cheque from your father (Zuckerberg), and so on, doesn't hurt either. Or a stable middle and above class family background, with the support to study, preferably at an elite university. Or family connections. Or a safety net in general. Or being at the right place, at the right time (like at the early eighties PC boom, or at the late 90s web boom), and at the right country too (not many opportunities if you're born in a family in Lagos). Or the ability to treat people as a means to an end, and lie, cheat, backstab, and take advantage of them as needed to get ahead. Including the ability to turn a blind eye to shady things you caused or implicitly ordered but don't need to know the details of.
    - Jerrrry 3y ago
      You have to be lucky. Hard work makes you a magnitude more lucky. everything and everyone else is just peanut-butthurt and jelly.
      - Salgat 3y ago
        Hard work simply makes you eligible for a lottery to become a billionaire.
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      I agree with you. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37419334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37419334
    - reducesuffering 3y ago
      > Having a diamond mine owning dad (Musk) Idk why this keeps getting repeated as significant. It wasn't even diamonds, illustrating how bad the telephone game is here. 'Musk’s father Errol ran a successful engineering company in Pretoria, South Africa. Some writers have made much of him “owning an emerald mine”. But the mine only cost $50,000, never really produced many emeralds, and closed after a few years - it was a side investment unrelated to the family’s wealth. Rumors that it used “apartheid labor” or produced “blood emeralds” are false: the mine was in Zambia, which had no apartheid or bloody conflicts. Musk claims to be self-made; he moved to Canada at age 17 with $2500 and worked his way up from there. For a while he supported himself by cutting logs, Abe Lincoln style. Nobody paid for his college and he took out $100,000 in debt. Musk’s father invested $28,000 in his first company, but Musk dismissed this as a “later round” and claimed he was already successful at that point and would have gotten the money anyway. The total for that round was $200,000, so Musk’s father’s contribution was only about 15%.' People should read https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-elon-musk https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-elon-musk
      - coldtea 3y ago
        >Some writers have made much of him “owning an emerald mine”. But the mine only cost $50,000, never really produced many emeralds, and closed after a few years - it was a side investment unrelated to the family’s wealth. Rumors that it used “apartheid labor” or produced “blood emeralds” are false: the mine was in Zambia, which had no apartheid or bloody conflicts. Even if that was the case, it would still be the 'casual' $50K side-business emerald mine purchase of a multi-millionaire dad (don't we all have a $50 emerald mine?). Very humble upbringing wise. But it's not the case. Musk has said it doesn't exist [1], after first saying back in the day that it did exist [2]. That "claims it produced “blood emeralds” are false: the mine was in Zambia, which had no apartheid or bloody conflicts" is also BS for people knowing the situation on the ground in such developing African countries, especially back in the day. But here it is from Musk's father: "Elon knows it's true. All the kids know about it." "Elon saw them (the emeralds) at our house," he added. "He knew I was selling them." (...) "What Elon is saying is that there was no formal mine. It was a rock formation protruding from the ground in the middle of nowhere," Errol told the tabloid, noting that he kept his involvement with the operation "under the table." "There was no mining company. There are no signed agreements or financial statements," he explained. "No one owned anything. The deal was done on a handshake with the Italian man at a time when Zambia was a free for all." And here's from Elon himself in Forbes interview: "(...) my father also had a share in an Emerald mine in Zambia. I was 15 and really wanted to go with him but didn’t realize how dangerous it was. I couldn’t find my passport so I ended up grabbing my brother’s – which turned out to be six months overdue! So we had this planeload of contraband and an overdue passport from another person. There were AK-47s all over the place and I’m thinking, “Man, this could really go bad.” If it indeed "only cost $50K", it was because it was a hush-hush deal, stealing Zambian resources from some foreigner sleazeballs who grabbed them. "AK-47s all over the place" and a handshake hush deal "at a time when Zambia was a free for all" does sound awful like blood diamonds, sorry, blood emeralds. As for never "really producing many emeralds", the whole narrative adding that goes like a Bart Simpson excuse: "the mine never existed, and if it did it was bought cheap, and if it wasn't bought cheap in didn't produce any emeralds anyway, and even if it did produce some, Elon never got money from those" According to his father, he quite did: ""During that time," said Errol, speaking to Elon's college years, "I managed to send money I made from emerald sales to him and [Elon's brother, Kimbal Musk] for living expenses." Rather, people should not believe the self-mythologizing narratives of billionaire CEOs past, especially when they involve their self-made quality. Including in biographies and biopics. [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1646272562488569857 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1646272562488569857 [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20140729222547/http://www.forbes.com/sites/jimclash/2014/07/28/elon-musk-tells-me-his-secret-of-success-hint-it-aint-about-the-money/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140729222547/http://www.forbes...
  - hgs3 3y ago
    You need the right obsession's at the right time. Markets change. I doubt many dot com millionaires would have the same success with the web if they'd been born today regardless of their enthusiasm for the technology.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  No (almost certainly), but you will become frustrated and exhausted. You will probably destroy your relationships with the people who should be closest to you by chasing this obsession. You will be so busy chasing money that you miss out on living.
burrish 3y ago
That was some well written and experienced response by Justine Musk.
gustavus 3y ago
I don't know if determination and hard work are all that is required to be a billionaire, but I do know for sure that laziness, sloth, and sitting around will never make one a billionaire.
- asddubs 3y ago
  if hard work and determination were all that was required there would be a lot more billionaires
- adamredwoods 3y ago
  >> I do know for sure that laziness, sloth, and sitting around will never make one a billionaire. It can actually, consider a multi-millionaire who becomes a billionaire due to finding a lucky stock pick. People tend to perceive wealth as equated to hard work, but the reality is it's luck. Just as we perceive ill-fortune as random, so is extreme wealth. It's because that most people really want money to equate to success.
glitchc 3y ago
Nope. Exploiting a loophole in the current system is an essential ingredient. Once the loophole is closed, your hack will be grandfathered in, creating an automatic moat.
- bhhaskin 3y ago
  Like what? Have an example?
  - egberts1 3y ago
    Telcom, oil, railway, Google (I don't mean Google it, but just Google).
    - bhhaskin 3y ago
      None of those are loop holes in the system, just gaps in the market. A loophole implies bypassing existing laws or regulations. I suppose you could make an pretty compelling argument that ride-sharing like Uber and Lift are a loophole around the regulations of taxies. Same with Airbnb. But not sure if those made anyone a billionaire. Multi millionaire for sure, but I don't think a billionaire.
      - teachrdan 3y ago
        You actually gave a perfect example. Airbnb made it possible to create unregulated hotels across the world, and Airbnb got a cut of every booking. Brian Chesky, one of the founders, is worth almost $10 billion. https://www.forbes.com/profile/brian-chesky/?sh=34a2068944d3 https://www.forbes.com/profile/brian-chesky/?sh=34a2068944d3
        bhhaskin 3y ago
        I stand corrected!
- nunez 3y ago
  This is a key topic in Peter Thiel's "Zero to One." Questionable dude, but good book, in case anyone's interested.
arilotter 3y ago
> One of the many qualities that separate self-made billionaires from the rest of us is their ability to ask the right questions. I posit that there is no such thing as a self-made billionaire. I believe that every single billionaire has had massive amounts of financial assistance. I'd love to see a single counter-example to this statement.
- scarmig 3y ago
  What counts as massive financial assistance? Howard Schultz, Larry Ellison, Oprah, George Soros all have reasonable claims to being self-made, though of course they all received support at times.
- gottorf 3y ago
  Your statement is true, for some definitions of "massive" and "financial assistance". We all Live In A Society, after all, and nobody exists in a vacuum, let alone build a billion-dollar enterprise in a vacuum. The first step is having other people pay you for products and services! So, if we can agree that merely having gone to public school and driven on public highways is not "massive financial assistance", whereas having received a billion-dollar inheritance is definitely "massive financial assistance", where does the line fall, under which you can be considered self-made?
  - scarmig 3y ago
    Taking a stab at a reasonable definition for me, if you receive resources X or less as financial or in-kind assistance, and you go from X to 100X through regular market transactions, you can say you're a self-made 100Xaire. 10X seems too liberal (after all, someone could have just invested the X at birth in an index fund and waited 40 years and be at 10X), while 1000x seems too restrictive (if you start out with $10k and end up with $5M, I think it's still fair to say you're a self made millionaire). It's probably not a truly linear relationship, though (it's easier to go from $10M to $100M than $10k to $100k). This is probably a broader definition than the original comment's. I suspect there the core issue is questioning whether it makes sense to even differentiate a billionaire who's self-made vs one who's not. I find that a useful distinction to make in many contexts, though.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
steve1977 3y ago
If you put in the necessary work, then by definition yes.
- borroka 3y ago
  We live in a stochastic world, and what we can do with our actions is to increase the probability of getting the outcome we want.
- itishappy 3y ago
  Necessary doesn't necessarily mean sufficient.
  - steve1977 3y ago
    That’s a sufficient argument to convince me, you’re correct
LarsDu88 3y ago
Just if anyone didn't notice the top reply is from Elon's ex-wife Justine Musk, and here response is point on. You become a billionaire by accumulating wealth. What is wealth? Wealth is something that other people want! It could be cars, gold, influence, a piece of software that saves people time. She is fundamentally correct. Elon became a millionaire by helping build a product that solved a problem many people had (how to pay each other on Ebay) Then he became a billionaire by strategically gambling his millions buildin products that people absolutely needed: low cost reusable rocketry, affordable electric vehicles, and right now, global low latency satellite internet. The power of wealth is evident when you build a product where even people that justifiably dislike you (for being a douchebag and spouting Russian propaganda) need to use your product regardless (Starlink)
JohnFen 3y ago
Determination and hard work are necessary to succeed in business. But they aren't sufficient. You also need a healthy amount of luck.
stormfather 3y ago
Necessary but not sufficient
canogat 3y ago
No one becomes a billionaire from hard work. Typically some amount of theft, fraud, misery or abuse is involved.

22 points by kurinikku 3y ago

coldtea 3y ago

No.

toomuchtodo 3y ago
The value in the Quora post comes from the perspective provided by Justine Musk's response, having been married to the obsession needed to attempt to achieve this. You're right! You'll likely still fail, but that's what it takes to try: obsession. The potential wealth is a byproduct.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >but that's what it takes to try: obsession Having a diamond mine owning dad (Musk), a 250K loan from your parents (Bezos), a businesswoman mother with connections to IBM leadership (Gates), a half-billionaire real estate mogul father (Trump), financial support from friends and family to the tune of $1 million (Thiel), an $100K cheque from your father (Zuckerberg), and so on, doesn't hurt either. Or a stable middle and above class family background, with the support to study, preferably at an elite university. Or family connections. Or a safety net in general. Or being at the right place, at the right time (like at the early eighties PC boom, or at the late 90s web boom), and at the right country too (not many opportunities if you're born in a family in Lagos). Or the ability to treat people as a means to an end, and lie, cheat, backstab, and take advantage of them as needed to get ahead. Including the ability to turn a blind eye to shady things you caused or implicitly ordered but don't need to know the details of.
  - Jerrrry 3y ago
    You have to be lucky. Hard work makes you a magnitude more lucky. everything and everyone else is just peanut-butthurt and jelly.
    - Salgat 3y ago
      Hard work simply makes you eligible for a lottery to become a billionaire.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    I agree with you. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37419334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37419334
  - reducesuffering 3y ago
    > Having a diamond mine owning dad (Musk) Idk why this keeps getting repeated as significant. It wasn't even diamonds, illustrating how bad the telephone game is here. 'Musk’s father Errol ran a successful engineering company in Pretoria, South Africa. Some writers have made much of him “owning an emerald mine”. But the mine only cost $50,000, never really produced many emeralds, and closed after a few years - it was a side investment unrelated to the family’s wealth. Rumors that it used “apartheid labor” or produced “blood emeralds” are false: the mine was in Zambia, which had no apartheid or bloody conflicts. Musk claims to be self-made; he moved to Canada at age 17 with $2500 and worked his way up from there. For a while he supported himself by cutting logs, Abe Lincoln style. Nobody paid for his college and he took out $100,000 in debt. Musk’s father invested $28,000 in his first company, but Musk dismissed this as a “later round” and claimed he was already successful at that point and would have gotten the money anyway. The total for that round was $200,000, so Musk’s father’s contribution was only about 15%.' People should read https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-elon-musk https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-elon-musk
    - coldtea 3y ago
      >Some writers have made much of him “owning an emerald mine”. But the mine only cost $50,000, never really produced many emeralds, and closed after a few years - it was a side investment unrelated to the family’s wealth. Rumors that it used “apartheid labor” or produced “blood emeralds” are false: the mine was in Zambia, which had no apartheid or bloody conflicts. Even if that was the case, it would still be the 'casual' $50K side-business emerald mine purchase of a multi-millionaire dad (don't we all have a $50 emerald mine?). Very humble upbringing wise. But it's not the case. Musk has said it doesn't exist [1], after first saying back in the day that it did exist [2]. That "claims it produced “blood emeralds” are false: the mine was in Zambia, which had no apartheid or bloody conflicts" is also BS for people knowing the situation on the ground in such developing African countries, especially back in the day. But here it is from Musk's father: "Elon knows it's true. All the kids know about it." "Elon saw them (the emeralds) at our house," he added. "He knew I was selling them." (...) "What Elon is saying is that there was no formal mine. It was a rock formation protruding from the ground in the middle of nowhere," Errol told the tabloid, noting that he kept his involvement with the operation "under the table." "There was no mining company. There are no signed agreements or financial statements," he explained. "No one owned anything. The deal was done on a handshake with the Italian man at a time when Zambia was a free for all." And here's from Elon himself in Forbes interview: "(...) my father also had a share in an Emerald mine in Zambia. I was 15 and really wanted to go with him but didn’t realize how dangerous it was. I couldn’t find my passport so I ended up grabbing my brother’s – which turned out to be six months overdue! So we had this planeload of contraband and an overdue passport from another person. There were AK-47s all over the place and I’m thinking, “Man, this could really go bad.” If it indeed "only cost $50K", it was because it was a hush-hush deal, stealing Zambian resources from some foreigner sleazeballs who grabbed them. "AK-47s all over the place" and a handshake hush deal "at a time when Zambia was a free for all" does sound awful like blood diamonds, sorry, blood emeralds. As for never "really producing many emeralds", the whole narrative adding that goes like a Bart Simpson excuse: "the mine never existed, and if it did it was bought cheap, and if it wasn't bought cheap in didn't produce any emeralds anyway, and even if it did produce some, Elon never got money from those" According to his father, he quite did: ""During that time," said Errol, speaking to Elon's college years, "I managed to send money I made from emerald sales to him and [Elon's brother, Kimbal Musk] for living expenses." Rather, people should not believe the self-mythologizing narratives of billionaire CEOs past, especially when they involve their self-made quality. Including in biographies and biopics. [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1646272562488569857 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1646272562488569857 [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20140729222547/http://www.forbes.com/sites/jimclash/2014/07/28/elon-musk-tells-me-his-secret-of-success-hint-it-aint-about-the-money/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140729222547/http://www.forbes...
- hgs3 3y ago
  You need the right obsession's at the right time. Markets change. I doubt many dot com millionaires would have the same success with the web if they'd been born today regardless of their enthusiasm for the technology.
AnimalMuppet 3y ago
No (almost certainly), but you will become frustrated and exhausted. You will probably destroy your relationships with the people who should be closest to you by chasing this obsession. You will be so busy chasing money that you miss out on living.

burrish 3y ago

That was some well written and experienced response by Justine Musk.

gustavus 3y ago

I don't know if determination and hard work are all that is required to be a billionaire, but I do know for sure that laziness, sloth, and sitting around will never make one a billionaire.

asddubs 3y ago
if hard work and determination were all that was required there would be a lot more billionaires
adamredwoods 3y ago
>> I do know for sure that laziness, sloth, and sitting around will never make one a billionaire. It can actually, consider a multi-millionaire who becomes a billionaire due to finding a lucky stock pick. People tend to perceive wealth as equated to hard work, but the reality is it's luck. Just as we perceive ill-fortune as random, so is extreme wealth. It's because that most people really want money to equate to success.

glitchc 3y ago

Nope. Exploiting a loophole in the current system is an essential ingredient. Once the loophole is closed, your hack will be grandfathered in, creating an automatic moat.

bhhaskin 3y ago
Like what? Have an example?
- egberts1 3y ago
  Telcom, oil, railway, Google (I don't mean Google it, but just Google).
  - bhhaskin 3y ago
    None of those are loop holes in the system, just gaps in the market. A loophole implies bypassing existing laws or regulations. I suppose you could make an pretty compelling argument that ride-sharing like Uber and Lift are a loophole around the regulations of taxies. Same with Airbnb. But not sure if those made anyone a billionaire. Multi millionaire for sure, but I don't think a billionaire.
    - teachrdan 3y ago
      You actually gave a perfect example. Airbnb made it possible to create unregulated hotels across the world, and Airbnb got a cut of every booking. Brian Chesky, one of the founders, is worth almost $10 billion. https://www.forbes.com/profile/brian-chesky/?sh=34a2068944d3 https://www.forbes.com/profile/brian-chesky/?sh=34a2068944d3
      - bhhaskin 3y ago
        I stand corrected!
nunez 3y ago
This is a key topic in Peter Thiel's "Zero to One." Questionable dude, but good book, in case anyone's interested.

arilotter 3y ago

> One of the many qualities that separate self-made billionaires from the rest of us is their ability to ask the right questions. I posit that there is no such thing as a self-made billionaire. I believe that every single billionaire has had massive amounts of financial assistance. I'd love to see a single counter-example to this statement.

scarmig 3y ago
What counts as massive financial assistance? Howard Schultz, Larry Ellison, Oprah, George Soros all have reasonable claims to being self-made, though of course they all received support at times.
gottorf 3y ago
Your statement is true, for some definitions of "massive" and "financial assistance". We all Live In A Society, after all, and nobody exists in a vacuum, let alone build a billion-dollar enterprise in a vacuum. The first step is having other people pay you for products and services! So, if we can agree that merely having gone to public school and driven on public highways is not "massive financial assistance", whereas having received a billion-dollar inheritance is definitely "massive financial assistance", where does the line fall, under which you can be considered self-made?
- scarmig 3y ago
  Taking a stab at a reasonable definition for me, if you receive resources X or less as financial or in-kind assistance, and you go from X to 100X through regular market transactions, you can say you're a self-made 100Xaire. 10X seems too liberal (after all, someone could have just invested the X at birth in an index fund and waited 40 years and be at 10X), while 1000x seems too restrictive (if you start out with $10k and end up with $5M, I think it's still fair to say you're a self made millionaire). It's probably not a truly linear relationship, though (it's easier to go from $10M to $100M than $10k to $100k). This is probably a broader definition than the original comment's. I suspect there the core issue is questioning whether it makes sense to even differentiate a billionaire who's self-made vs one who's not. I find that a useful distinction to make in many contexts, though.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

steve1977 3y ago

If you put in the necessary work, then by definition yes.

borroka 3y ago
We live in a stochastic world, and what we can do with our actions is to increase the probability of getting the outcome we want.
itishappy 3y ago
Necessary doesn't necessarily mean sufficient.
- steve1977 3y ago
  That’s a sufficient argument to convince me, you’re correct

LarsDu88 3y ago

Just if anyone didn't notice the top reply is from Elon's ex-wife Justine Musk, and here response is point on. You become a billionaire by accumulating wealth. What is wealth? Wealth is something that other people want! It could be cars, gold, influence, a piece of software that saves people time. She is fundamentally correct. Elon became a millionaire by helping build a product that solved a problem many people had (how to pay each other on Ebay) Then he became a billionaire by strategically gambling his millions buildin products that people absolutely needed: low cost reusable rocketry, affordable electric vehicles, and right now, global low latency satellite internet. The power of wealth is evident when you build a product where even people that justifiably dislike you (for being a douchebag and spouting Russian propaganda) need to use your product regardless (Starlink)

JohnFen 3y ago

Determination and hard work are necessary to succeed in business. But they aren't sufficient. You also need a healthy amount of luck.

stormfather 3y ago

Necessary but not sufficient

canogat 3y ago

No one becomes a billionaire from hard work. Typically some amount of theft, fraud, misery or abuse is involved.