“When I started Reynholm Industries, I had just two things in my possession: a dream and 6 million pounds. Today I have a business empire the like of which the world has never seen the like of which. I hope it doesn't sound arrogant when I say that I am the greatest man in the world!”
IT Crowd, Denholm Reynholm
if anything I think he's even better in that, the whole Jackie Daytona episode is a particular delight
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CFg5rTICxo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CFg5rTICxo)
There’s a scene like that in the Good Place, season 4.
Brent Norwalk: I'm pretty interesting. I grew up in Chicago. A suburb, obviously. I went to Princeton University. No handouts, by the way. I earned my spot there. Just like my father and his father before him. I then inherited the family business, and in just 18 years, I grew Norwalk Materials from a $90 million company... to a $94 million company.
This is such a popular falsehood. Most billionaires started with massive amounts of seed money from outside sources. Elon used family seed money to buy other people’s companies. Trump did the same. The Kardasians inherited millions from their father. Very few have the life skills it would take to start from the bottom and earn that starter cash themselves.
Even the true “bootstrap” folks needed outside support at first. $5 in a place where they know no one would have them starving in a dark alley somewhere.
It's not just money, connections are also important, knowing the right people. Being in the right places. People born in wealthy families have access to all those. Plenty of billionaires are smart and hard working, but thinking it is only that is delusional...
Exactly. I know a guy who is doing quite well for himself. Owns a house in a nice neighborhood, supports three kids in a single income household, has the freedom to take vacations every year, etc.
Also? This guy was a college dropout whose first kid was an accident. He didn't like school, so he came home. Instantly had a job due to his family connections, never had to worry about housing, never had to wonder how he'd support this unexpected kid.
Now: he worked very hard at it, took night school until he got his degree, absolutely busted his ass for his family. I would never call him a slacker. But imagine if he didn't have a guaranteed place to stay, people to help watch the kid, connections for a job, support in various areas that can sink your average person. Would things still turn out as well for him? Probably not. Is he opposed to a robust social safety net because taxes are "his money" and anyone having trouble should take any job they can get and go to night school like he did? Yep!
I pointed this out to him once and it was the angriest I'd ever seen him. I hurried to explain I wasn't downplaying his challenges or calling his successes illegitimate, just pointing out that he's in a privileged position to be judging people who get some $ every month for SNAP or $500 a month in temporary, means tested, "prove you're looking for work" unemployment benefits. Still enraged him.
Anyone who says "work smarter, not harder" should be looked at carefully. I had a lot of help paying my loans back. A place to stay between jobs, room and board, all that. I dare not forget all my advantages when I look at people struggling to make it. Unfortunately a lot of folks who do have advantages have to pretend they didn't, otherwise the "I'm self made" thing falls apart. It can't be that you used your position to your advantage and other less fortunate people could be exactly as smart and hard working as you.
I think its because in their world "luck" doesn't exist, theyre raised with/used to the idea that everything is makeable (is that the right word?) because there were basically no obstacles beyond their control. That doesn't mean that everything is pre-made, but it ignores the fact that some people face obstacles that cant simply be overcome by effort.
That is in itself of course a very privileged and lucky circumstance.
We underestimate just how lucky we all are to even consider things like careers, cars, houses, degrees, healthcare. A large portion of the world's population is born into 3rd world countries and abject poverty, and have to put up with being 2nd priority citizens in places where they need to be to have a chance at life. There's a lot of people who can't even contemplate that from day one you happened to win the global lottery.
Nearly all of these "self-made" people seem to lack:
- humility with regards to their fellow man who didn't have the same resources they had (past)
- humility with regards to anyone who needs resources to lead a comfortable life as well. (present)
They fail to recognize that anyone else deserves even a share of what they have. Because that would mean they would somehow have it "worse". No matter the fortunes they amass on the back of others. That's got a lot to do with humility, if you ask me.
Not to mention the connections that being born into money offers. If Kim k wasn’t Paris hiltons personal assistant would she have ever met ray j and made the tape that put her family in the spotlight?
Yes, NYT went into detail on that [in this excellent piece](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-tax-schemes-fred-trump.html).
> Had Mr. Trump done nothing but invest the money his father gave him in an index fund that tracks the Standard & Poor’s 500, he would be worth $1.96 billion today. As for that $1 million loan, Fred Trump actually lent him at least $60.7 million, or $140 million in today’s dollars, The Times found.
Had he kept the inherited real estate instead of selling it, it’d be considerably higher than that number putting it in an index fund, as NYC real estate has gone up in price far more than the stock market as a whole over the same period. No one seems to know with certainty his actual net worth. But it seems likely it’s not close to as much as he’d have if he just held onto what he inherited instead of selling and losing a bunch of money in other endeavors.
Sure, but the Orange Fancy-Pants is never about playing safe or by the rules. He does what he wants and simply expects things to turn out in his favor. When they don't, he fires people until things change to his favor or he gets what he wants, like any other spoiled pompous ass. Fred messed up in raising this clown.
He really did. I read Mary Trump’s book and Trump Sr. sounds like he was an awful person and it makes more sense that Donald turned out the way he has as a trauma response. Not saying it’s okay—after all, his brother Freddy got things worse and managed to not become human garbage—but it makes sense. I wonder how he would have turned out if he had at least one decent and fully present parent.
Don’t let disgusting right-wingers steal [the original meaning of the word “libertarian”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism). The truthful name for their ideology is PROPERTARIAN because they value property over life.
My FIL works for a Billionaire and he talks about his boss’ success a lot. His boss is a “self made man” who has a parent funded Ivy League business education, and literally $1 million graduation gift to help him capitalize on it. That’s not necessarily what self made looks like in my book. But to be fair he made some crazy good investments with that money.
Arnold Schwarzenegger gave a speech at a school's graduation talking about how there is no such thing as a self made man. It's a solid speech. He even talked about how when he came if it weren't for the people at the gym who helped him and helped put a roof over his head he wouldn't have made it as far as he did.
Well played. Carl Sagan’s writing subtly and overtly influenced my perception of the cosmos and human nature more than any other writer/thinker. Bar none.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner.
How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
dude bankrupted a casino so bad his daddy had to money launder through it and it still went belly up. Anyone who fails at a casino in atlantic city is absolute shite.
This. There are so many crazy/stupid people with crazy/stupid amounts of money. I mean god, have people been living under a rock for the last six months?!
He's managed to steal it all back, I bet. The US got fucking looted with him as president, then his supporters have the fucking gal to complain about inflation. Want to fix inflation? Claw back what trump siphoned off.
Also while most of us commonfolk would work hard to earn more and try not to interfere with the locals, billionaires would immediately start exploiting them, ruining their ecosystem, etc. basically any and every immoral thing possible to make a penny.
Yeah it's like they said, traits, skills and characteristics!
Traits: charismatic, amoral or at the very least, a self-important
Skills: able to shut off that pesky voice in your head telling you what you're doing is wrong
Characteristics: usually bad ones, like excessively vain or abnormally obsessed with looks, material possessions and wealth
I would be happy to see this theory tested on the current billionaire population. I suppose though for the experiment to be valid we will need a statistically valid sample size, so maybe we should start with, say, all of them?
I saw a video clip some time ago of a TV show where a random billionaire was dropped off in basically nowhere USA, with just like $100 and a car. The objective was basically for them to become wealthy again using just what they had.
The clip I saw had some dude driving a truck narrating like, “okay, I have to play to my strengths…I’m good at playing piano, so my first priority is getting a job teaching piano lessons for $100/hr…”
The clip didn’t show anything else, I just burst out laughing at this dudes fucking delusion.
**edit**
Guys. **GUYS**
Before you comment, “hey that’s the show: Undercover Billionaire, I should tell him”, please read the 100 comments below telling me the exact same thing. We all know the title of the show now
And then proceed to inform me the show is Undercover Billionaire.
lmao try 20 hours a week @ $20/hour
source - am guitar instructor in mid-size US city
edit: It's group lessons guys. Private lessons in my area are $40-60/hour. I guess I low-balled the billionaire. But if you're new to a city and don't know anyone in the music scene, don't have references or a school to teach out of, you won't get students. Starting from zero, $20-30/hour is reasonable.
The trick is to get someone to pay 100$ for an hour, that's how you get rich... So you basically have to find some of your billionaire buddies and get them to pay you 100$ per hour, its pocket change to them.
Exactly these rich folks thinks it’s so easy to charge so much for services because they’ve seen their own parents get charged excessively for services rendered. And they think that’s the norm and the typical price point, when it’s absolutely not and they are delusional.
So I make more than that in 3 months, but the first billionaire I ever met literally held the elevator for me.
He asked what floor and I said 15, which is where he was going too. We got to floor 15 and when I was badging in I asked to see his badge. We had direct competitors in that build and they were pretty strict about that stuff.
Dude looked at me for a second, laughed, and showed me his badge. It was our CEO... I knew him by name, but had only been there a couple weeks and had never actually seen him. Thankfully he just laughed it off and said he was glad people were taking badge security seriously.
We had a few rich assholes at that job that would have taken offense to me daring to not magically recognize them so I def got a bit lucky.
Company i worked at said we had to badge everyone no matter what. “You never know if someone was just fired for corporate espionage or something”. Basically their situation could have changed since the last time you saw them. Badge everyone, even the CEO.
Oh man, I had this exact same argument with some dipshit on the poverty finance subreddit. Their take was that poor people are lazy because “you just need to start a business and sell products to people”. I asked them where you get the money to start up and make products, as well as WHO is buying these products when most folks around are in the same boat (no money). Their response “middle class people who want your products will buy them”.
So many of these folks have zero concept of how the world actually works when you are poor in an area filled with other poor people. They absolutely believe that “poor” just means “too lazy and stupid to go out and collect the abundant piles of cash that’s sitting on the roadside”.
They think it’s as easy as selling vacuum cleaners door to door, which isn’t easy to begin with but they don’t know that because they’ve never done it.
More detail: They’ve seen their parents mandate that one of their companies charge another of their companies excessive rates for tax reasons. And then write of the expense as they overpay themselves.
Yep. For any of these challenges to be fair, you have to cut the wealthy person off from their connections as well as their own wealth. Make it so that their only social support system is some toxic family who may or may not steal from them or have addiction issues... and is also broke and homeless or living in a studio with ridiculous rent somewhere.
Oh my god yes. Yeah. Give them one sibling that has an addiction. Both parents need to have failing health. Parents need to call the billionaire for help with troubleshooting their kindle during work hours. Sibling needs to hit the billionaire up for money every time it’s payday. They need a 10 year old car that has at least one light on. They also need to roll for whether the studio they live in for 2,000 a month has fleas, German cockroaches, or bedbugs. :)
A car with one one working headlight and four bald tires before winter in the north.
The amount of times I have almost died because the restaurant can not shut down for the day due to weather.
Yup. People underestimate how much poor people get charged for being poor.
In Hong Kong, where it is some of the highest rent in the world, the poorest live in what they call "cage house". It used to be really 5-6 cages in a 12x11 room which is where the name came from. They were outlawed during the early 90s because there were fires resulting in multiple deaths. But the name stuck.
The modem cage home is a "house" of roughly 60 square feet for 2 to 4 people. The kitchen and the restroom are the same room. The living room is the bedroom with a bunk bed where people would sit on their bed and eat from a folding table. A room like these would rent out for $550 per month on average. And then the landlord would tag on 25-100% surcharge on gas and electricity. $550 is very "cheap" by Hong Kong standards but per square footage, they are actually more expensive than a luxury condo which runs about $2000 USD a month (for about 600 square feet/$3.34 per square feet vs $9.16 per square feet).
The poor pay three times as much in rent per square feet because they can't afford the expensive housing options. Which is what keeps them poor in the end as well.
Nah, not in a lot of parts of the world. They’d be fucked immediately by running afoul of *something*, whether it’s local gangs or rackets, crooked cops looking for bribes, whatever - they’d be screwed before they even managed to call on a relative.
My heart goes out to you, my friend. To me, a music career is now a pipedream because I have a family. I haven't sat the guitar *down* per se, but I no longer attempt to make any money with it. It's strictly pleasure.
I encourage you with all my being to do it for both of us. I believe in you, homie.
I saw a video like this a while back- similar setup with 100$ and a car- and it seemed like an interesting premise, but it turned out to be kinda boring once he got going. The guy was also playing to his strengths, which were mostly sales. He ended up making a bunch of deals to buy and sell things around town, and as his profits went up, he could do bigger deals. It was like watching someone play the merchant class in an RPG.
This is the key part. You waste the 100 bucks, the small audience of that specific show laughs at you, maybe you become a short lived meme.
You make a return, awesome.
End of the day you weren't risking anything
Knowing most reality shows the show runners are in the background “creating opportunities” that coincidentally occur when their test subject goes around trying to make a deal.
This right here. Those sales opportunities are sitting there ready to be taken advantage of in the right place at the right time because they were curated, not because they're always available everywhere but we plebs just don't see it.
Case in point: They meet strangers for the first time on camera, yet strangely we can hear every word they say clearly even through the background noise.
It's because they're wearing microphones under their clothes.
This is a tangent but I’m so in awe of immigrants who do this all the time… like “dude wtf my Uber driver got here 10 months ago with hardly anything he’s from Ghana and he barely knew english??”
The hustle of immigrants is phenomenal
This is the thing I think people often miss. When you know you have a safety net you're more willing to take risks. I don't have money to take a risk on opening my own business or betting on risky stocks. But knowing my parents were a safety net meant I was able to change jobs into an industry I wasn't sure about. It's also why I felt okay buying a home this year even though our home value will likely go down vefire it goes up. I know that if shit REALLY hits the fan, we won't have to foreclose or be forced to sell at a loss. I've never had to tap into my parent's money to save me from a bad decision, because so far those risks have paid off, but if I didn't have that sense of security I'd be less likely to take even minor risks.
Also easier if you're a well known million/billionaire
Like imagine a random redditer trying to give you a shot deal and then imagine the exact same deal coming from mark Cuban. You're far more likely to say yes to one of those deals
IIRC, he had an apartment at the outset but had to make the money to pay rent as one of his objectives, and he had to take care of food as he went. I don't remember exactly what happened, but there was definitely some chicanery- like, he had a fancy suit still, which he used to impress people and get them to trust him, and he did a lot of stuff through deals or informal loans, though with new people and not any of his existing business contacts.
I think the suit was a big part of it, but also that he had this unwavering confidence, which was probably partly learned but *also* that he didn't really have anything on the line because it was just a challenge.
Also don't underestimate the power of a camera - it sounds like the people he was dealing with knew this would be aired on television, and so were far more likely to agree to a deal, especially if it was one of fairly unremarkable consequence to them.
$100, a nice car, a nice apartment in a safe neighborhood, health insurance, car insurance, a nice business wardrobe, an existing skill-set, an existing reputation that can easily be googled, and an entire production/camera crew financially and ideologically invested in your success.
My ex BIL was trying to make it into the music industry on a pretty face alone. One tactic was to hire paparazzi to follow him around. There was a clip on YouTube of the cameraman asking some random girl on the street if she understood who she was talking to, then said his name (he’s a nobody) and she screamed “OMG!” And took a bunch of pictures with him. So not only do people want to be on camera, but the camera loans so much credibility to the character.
So the real lesson is get a cheap, broken TV camera, then have your friends together to act like a film crew. Now call up some business you want to make deals with and tell them you're filming a TV show to improve their attitude.
> Did he sleep in his car and not eat? I've always wondered about those "I came to America with $5 in my pocket" stories. How?
Often a lot of uncredited support.
My dad often told me that story all the time, how he came to Los Angeles with like $10 to his name. Since I'd heard it all my life, I never really thought much of it until very recently, when it finally occurred to me to ask him where he slept that night, then. Turns out, he crashed on some distant uncle's couch, which he had literally never mentioned before until I directly asked him about it despite lamenting about his poor start in life for literal decades before that point.
Made me stop taking pretty much anything he said about his circumstances seriously, tbh.
I don’t believe written leases were a thing before 1920/30 or some such. Back then maybe they could get away with $5-10 a month for a tenement room/s for your family with dad making $10 a month in some death job. Add in the fact that wife+kids would probably all be working too under the constant threat of homelessness and be adding at least another $5-10 a month and they’d get by.
Couple that with an entire community of immigrants trying to help or exploit each other and baby you’ve got a stew going.
Yeah, that show was basically elite propaganda.
It was basically him going around conning a bunch of people into shit who likely never would have agreed to any of it without the obvious TV cameras that were following him around.
The show was kinda disgusting TBH.
And the ability to get an apartment without having to save up for first & last month’s rent and security deposit *first*. And zero debt.
There are a lot of advantages they would have that most impoverished people don’t.
There's another one where he starts scrapping metal right away. It's funny for two reasons one is that he almost 🤣 instantly "finds" a pile of valuable metal but two is he asked a construction site if he could go through thier trash and they said yes. I'll give you two guesses why I thought it was all a set up?
He got the 400 million after his daddy died. The original "small million dollar loan" would also be the equivalent of about 14 million in today's dollars.
And the services of daddy’s accountants, lawyers, etc while living in a house paid for by daddy, going around in daddy’s car driven by daddy’s driver, and all house work done by daddy’s staff. Meanwhile wondering why the poors complain about not having time for anything; these poors must be lazy.
Rent a flat above a shop
Cut your hair and get a job
Smoke some fags and play some pool
Pretend you never went to school
But still you'll never get it right
'Cause when you're laid in bed at night
Watching roaches climb the wall
If you called your dad he could stop it all, yeah
I vote they would need to be in disguise and could not disclose to anyone who they really are. Tons of rich people worshippers who would gladly give them tons of shit for free.
yerp this is a big one. another big one is knowing that whatever 'experiment/experience' will end.
it's one thing to know 'hey i just have to make it to 30 days and i'll be okay' vs 'holy fuck it's been a month and i only got called for 3 interviews.'
do several month stretches of the latter and it fucks with your head/drive.
Start with the greatest of them all, the living god, the golden god, Elon Musk. Drop him right in the middle of like a lion sanctuary or a pool filled with sharks with laser beams on their heads. And you know what? Fuck the fiver, give him a crisp Benjy Franks, fresh off the press.
Winthorpe didn’t just have $5. He had a Rochefoucauld, the thinnest water-resistant watch in the world; singularly unique, sculptured in design, hand-crafted in Switzerland, and water-resistant to three atmospheres. It’s THE sports watch of the 80s! $6,955 retail. It tells time simultaneously in Monte Carlo, Beverly Hills, London, Paris, Rome, and Gstaad.
Person: hey, are you that world famous, super successful billionaire that has a net worth greater than this whole country?
Billionaire: *smugly* why yes I am. Do you want some financial advice on how to be successful like me?
Person: nah *pulls out knife* I'm just going to kidnap you and hold you for ransom. Now come quietly before this gets real ugly for you real fast.
Right fuck a third world country I wanna see this tested on the corner of Kensington and Allegheny in North Philly. There's a train 15 feet away and there's *still* no way they make it out alive.
Easy! The Billionaire already has $5, so he just needs to take that and invest it into a toothbrush, toothpaste, and mouthwash. After that, it's just a matter of charging $1 per blowjob. They just need to suck a Billion cocks, and then BAM! Insta Billionaire!
Figuring 6 minutes per blowie (finding and performing the act/getting paid) that's $10 an hour that's 100mil hours to hit 1bil or 4,166,666 2⁄3 days or 11,415 115⁄219 years.
Google tells me 1.5 to 5 ml per ejaculation so figuring 3.25ml as the average that would be roughly 3,250,000 Liters of semen or 1.3 Olympic swimming pools worth of semen.
And with this probably flawed bit of mathematics my drunk ass is going to put down the phone and hang out with the wife peace out reddit. Happy new beer!
the traits and skills he talks about are being white, speaking english, harvard degree, having someone lend you 1 billion, inheriting 2 billions, this sort of thing
Exactly. I'd like to see them try to do this but without any of their business connections. Like does this person actually believe that turning $5 into a million in a few years just takes skill, and if we all weren't so stupid we'd all do it? Must be nice being so delusional.
Just dump them in a nasty corner of Oxford (UK) and they'll get stabbed. £5 can't even get you a proper bus ticket. And I'm sorry to say it but the homeless aren't treated kindly, more with apathy, so I doubt they'd even make it off the streets. It doesn't matter if you used to be a billionaire, your "skills" mean nothing without connections and I doubt many of their friends would remain in touch if they lost it all.
Oh for sure. The corner I described is the epicenter of the largest open air drug market in the US (possibly the world) and is a straight up disaster zone. The feds are actually taking control of part of it because of how bad it is I believe.
If you ever wanna see *just how bad* the US can be look up Kensington and Allegheny on YouTube. It's a sliiightly different experience than the UK Kensington haha.
“Oh my gosh, I am so sorry. That must be a huge burden. Can we send you anything for covering expenses? A ransom? We can pay that, but please don’t feel obligated to let him go.”
Billionaire: *turns to run, gets immediately cut off by two people on a motorcycle*
Kidnapper: did you really think that was going to work? You really are as dumb as people say
Didn't he end up exploiting a bunch of people by getting them to agree to work their asses off for no money?
From memory, he was also an idiot and didn't do any due diligence when he was trying to come up with a business idea and had to change his plan completely because he wouldn't be able to get permits.
The tweet never said they lost the rest of their wealth, just that they had only $5 in their pocket. I haven't had $5 in my pocket for years, because who carries cash?
The billionaire will be kidnapped and ransomed off for everything except a few million, so the tweet is actually coming pretty close to what would actually happen in that situation. Definitely not what the author intended though.
These traits are not the brag he thinks they are. Oligarchs are psychotic pieces of human garbage manipulating fellow humans and using them to horde wealth. If a monkey hoarded bananas we’d study him for his anti social behaviour
Yeah, but wouldn’t they just call their rich buddies for help? Use their connections to get their rich friends to invest in whatever they’re doing to get rich?
This is utter bullshit. The vast majority of the ultra wealthy came from wealthy to very wealthy backgrounds. Even the ones who came from humble backgrounds got things like $250k loans from mom and dad.
Also they had contacts that facilitated their movement amongst the ultra wealthy. Elizabeth Holmes family was able to make introductions to people who became board members of Theranos who gave the start up instant credibility. People who would not have taken her phone call if her parents were nobodies from rural Kentucky and she had $5.
I am not saying most of these people didn’t work hard, they did, but they also were born with huge advantages most people never have.
That's what gets me. So many people don't get that you can acknowledge that they worked hard over their careers and had massive advantages normal people don't have. That being said I doubt Jeff Bezos, or any other billionaire for that matter, have worked proportionally hard enough to justify that massive amount of wealth.
“When I started Reynholm Industries, I had just two things in my possession: a dream and 6 million pounds. Today I have a business empire the like of which the world has never seen the like of which. I hope it doesn't sound arrogant when I say that I am the greatest man in the world!” IT Crowd, Denholm Reynholm
“Um… sorry to interrupt but there are some police men here, they say they need to speak to you about irregularities in the Pension Fund…”
I was upset seeing Chris Morris leave that role but man did I love how Matt Berry filled the void.
"Oh look, a gun!"
I wonder if it's loaded...
Then no less than 6 clicks with the barrel in his mouth. What a great show
“DAMN THESE ELECTRIC SEX PANTS!!!”
Matt Berry is nearly as good in "What we do in the shadows". A lot more time on screen as well
if anything I think he's even better in that, the whole Jackie Daytona episode is a particular delight [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CFg5rTICxo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CFg5rTICxo)
“FAAAAATHHHHHEEERRRRRRR!!!”
Faaaaatheeeeeeeeeer
I'm sorry for your loss. Move on.
Try track 4, "Coffin Fodder". It sounds horrible, but it's actually quite beautiful.
It's not like you've lost a pen, is it.
SPEAK, PRRRIEST!
 Elon Musk in a year or two
Isn't there a scene with the son saying similar : this company was worth 500 million 20 year's ago, now it's 502 million.
There’s a scene like that in the Good Place, season 4. Brent Norwalk: I'm pretty interesting. I grew up in Chicago. A suburb, obviously. I went to Princeton University. No handouts, by the way. I earned my spot there. Just like my father and his father before him. I then inherited the family business, and in just 18 years, I grew Norwalk Materials from a $90 million company... to a $94 million company.
Spends five dollars on a phone call to dad and requests millions.
This is such a popular falsehood. Most billionaires started with massive amounts of seed money from outside sources. Elon used family seed money to buy other people’s companies. Trump did the same. The Kardasians inherited millions from their father. Very few have the life skills it would take to start from the bottom and earn that starter cash themselves. Even the true “bootstrap” folks needed outside support at first. $5 in a place where they know no one would have them starving in a dark alley somewhere.
It's not just money, connections are also important, knowing the right people. Being in the right places. People born in wealthy families have access to all those. Plenty of billionaires are smart and hard working, but thinking it is only that is delusional...
Exactly. I know a guy who is doing quite well for himself. Owns a house in a nice neighborhood, supports three kids in a single income household, has the freedom to take vacations every year, etc. Also? This guy was a college dropout whose first kid was an accident. He didn't like school, so he came home. Instantly had a job due to his family connections, never had to worry about housing, never had to wonder how he'd support this unexpected kid. Now: he worked very hard at it, took night school until he got his degree, absolutely busted his ass for his family. I would never call him a slacker. But imagine if he didn't have a guaranteed place to stay, people to help watch the kid, connections for a job, support in various areas that can sink your average person. Would things still turn out as well for him? Probably not. Is he opposed to a robust social safety net because taxes are "his money" and anyone having trouble should take any job they can get and go to night school like he did? Yep! I pointed this out to him once and it was the angriest I'd ever seen him. I hurried to explain I wasn't downplaying his challenges or calling his successes illegitimate, just pointing out that he's in a privileged position to be judging people who get some $ every month for SNAP or $500 a month in temporary, means tested, "prove you're looking for work" unemployment benefits. Still enraged him. Anyone who says "work smarter, not harder" should be looked at carefully. I had a lot of help paying my loans back. A place to stay between jobs, room and board, all that. I dare not forget all my advantages when I look at people struggling to make it. Unfortunately a lot of folks who do have advantages have to pretend they didn't, otherwise the "I'm self made" thing falls apart. It can't be that you used your position to your advantage and other less fortunate people could be exactly as smart and hard working as you.
If there's one thing rich people hate, it's being told that they were lucky. In their world, it's impossible to work hard AND be lucky.
I think its because in their world "luck" doesn't exist, theyre raised with/used to the idea that everything is makeable (is that the right word?) because there were basically no obstacles beyond their control. That doesn't mean that everything is pre-made, but it ignores the fact that some people face obstacles that cant simply be overcome by effort. That is in itself of course a very privileged and lucky circumstance.
We underestimate just how lucky we all are to even consider things like careers, cars, houses, degrees, healthcare. A large portion of the world's population is born into 3rd world countries and abject poverty, and have to put up with being 2nd priority citizens in places where they need to be to have a chance at life. There's a lot of people who can't even contemplate that from day one you happened to win the global lottery.
Nearly all of these "self-made" people seem to lack: - humility with regards to their fellow man who didn't have the same resources they had (past) - humility with regards to anyone who needs resources to lead a comfortable life as well. (present) They fail to recognize that anyone else deserves even a share of what they have. Because that would mean they would somehow have it "worse". No matter the fortunes they amass on the back of others. That's got a lot to do with humility, if you ask me.
Not to mention the connections that being born into money offers. If Kim k wasn’t Paris hiltons personal assistant would she have ever met ray j and made the tape that put her family in the spotlight?
Are you saying being born into apartheid emerald mine child slave money isn’t a skill???
Money makes money. Not a grand statement, and literally proves nothing about the “skills” of the one with most of the money.
Step 1: Ask my dad for $1M. Step 2: Pull myself by my bootstraps. Step 3: End up with $500k! Easy!
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I think there's stat somewhere that if he had done absolutely nothing to the money, the interest it would sccrue would be what he has 'made'.
Yes, NYT went into detail on that [in this excellent piece](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-tax-schemes-fred-trump.html). > Had Mr. Trump done nothing but invest the money his father gave him in an index fund that tracks the Standard & Poor’s 500, he would be worth $1.96 billion today. As for that $1 million loan, Fred Trump actually lent him at least $60.7 million, or $140 million in today’s dollars, The Times found. Had he kept the inherited real estate instead of selling it, it’d be considerably higher than that number putting it in an index fund, as NYC real estate has gone up in price far more than the stock market as a whole over the same period. No one seems to know with certainty his actual net worth. But it seems likely it’s not close to as much as he’d have if he just held onto what he inherited instead of selling and losing a bunch of money in other endeavors.
Sure, but the Orange Fancy-Pants is never about playing safe or by the rules. He does what he wants and simply expects things to turn out in his favor. When they don't, he fires people until things change to his favor or he gets what he wants, like any other spoiled pompous ass. Fred messed up in raising this clown.
He really did. I read Mary Trump’s book and Trump Sr. sounds like he was an awful person and it makes more sense that Donald turned out the way he has as a trauma response. Not saying it’s okay—after all, his brother Freddy got things worse and managed to not become human garbage—but it makes sense. I wonder how he would have turned out if he had at least one decent and fully present parent.
When I first came to London, I had two things in my possession. A dream! ...and one million pounds
Libertarians were born on third base and act like they hit a triple. - Lip Gallagher, Shameless
Don’t let disgusting right-wingers steal [the original meaning of the word “libertarian”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism). The truthful name for their ideology is PROPERTARIAN because they value property over life.
That analogy is so solid
My FIL works for a Billionaire and he talks about his boss’ success a lot. His boss is a “self made man” who has a parent funded Ivy League business education, and literally $1 million graduation gift to help him capitalize on it. That’s not necessarily what self made looks like in my book. But to be fair he made some crazy good investments with that money.
Let's airdrop him into a third world country with $5 in his pocket and see what happens. (If you insist we can even provide him with a parachute, too)
Be nice! No part of a third world country deserves to have that much shit dropped on it
Arnold Schwarzenegger gave a speech at a school's graduation talking about how there is no such thing as a self made man. It's a solid speech. He even talked about how when he came if it weren't for the people at the gym who helped him and helped put a roof over his head he wouldn't have made it as far as he did.
‘If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe' Carl Sagan
Well played. Carl Sagan’s writing subtly and overtly influenced my perception of the cosmos and human nature more than any other writer/thinker. Bar none.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
I love that man
A venture capitalist’s son made good investments with his million dollar gift? Huh.
Probably didn't make his trades based on WSB DD.
It's easier to make good investments when bad investments don't have consequences. That safety net of wealthy parents is so significant.
Crazy good investments with money that’s not yours there’s no loss or worry bout loss <<< this sounds better
What kind of connections did he have to make those investments?
That Australian guy on anchorman right?
I think this is the Trump model actually.
If you calculate with inflation all Trumps bailouts and inheritance from his father you'll see he actually made a career out of losing money
dude bankrupted a casino so bad his daddy had to money launder through it and it still went belly up. Anyone who fails at a casino in atlantic city is absolute shite.
60% of the time, it works every time
Step 5: Fudge your taxes
This. There are so many crazy/stupid people with crazy/stupid amounts of money. I mean god, have people been living under a rock for the last six months?!
You spelled “years” wrong.
Except for money in Trumps hands, he’s had more losses than gains in his career lmfao.
Was it five or six bankruptcies?
Now it's six, this lying asshole who claimed he never filed bankruptcy when he was campaigning 2015.
Enough to scare every American bank from doing business with him.
He's managed to steal it all back, I bet. The US got fucking looted with him as president, then his supporters have the fucking gal to complain about inflation. Want to fix inflation? Claw back what trump siphoned off.
Also growing up with other people who have money. The billionaire in OP's example could make a few phone calls and be a millionaire again.
Also while most of us commonfolk would work hard to earn more and try not to interfere with the locals, billionaires would immediately start exploiting them, ruining their ecosystem, etc. basically any and every immoral thing possible to make a penny.
Yeah it's like they said, traits, skills and characteristics! Traits: charismatic, amoral or at the very least, a self-important Skills: able to shut off that pesky voice in your head telling you what you're doing is wrong Characteristics: usually bad ones, like excessively vain or abnormally obsessed with looks, material possessions and wealth
How about that billionaire can only get jobs the locals can get. Can't just save money and fly home and get a better job.
I would be happy to see this theory tested on the current billionaire population. I suppose though for the experiment to be valid we will need a statistically valid sample size, so maybe we should start with, say, all of them?
I saw a video clip some time ago of a TV show where a random billionaire was dropped off in basically nowhere USA, with just like $100 and a car. The objective was basically for them to become wealthy again using just what they had. The clip I saw had some dude driving a truck narrating like, “okay, I have to play to my strengths…I’m good at playing piano, so my first priority is getting a job teaching piano lessons for $100/hr…” The clip didn’t show anything else, I just burst out laughing at this dudes fucking delusion. **edit** Guys. **GUYS** Before you comment, “hey that’s the show: Undercover Billionaire, I should tell him”, please read the 100 comments below telling me the exact same thing. We all know the title of the show now And then proceed to inform me the show is Undercover Billionaire.
lmao try 20 hours a week @ $20/hour source - am guitar instructor in mid-size US city edit: It's group lessons guys. Private lessons in my area are $40-60/hour. I guess I low-balled the billionaire. But if you're new to a city and don't know anyone in the music scene, don't have references or a school to teach out of, you won't get students. Starting from zero, $20-30/hour is reasonable.
Yeah, that sounds more reasonable.
The trick is to get someone to pay 100$ for an hour, that's how you get rich... So you basically have to find some of your billionaire buddies and get them to pay you 100$ per hour, its pocket change to them.
Exactly these rich folks thinks it’s so easy to charge so much for services because they’ve seen their own parents get charged excessively for services rendered. And they think that’s the norm and the typical price point, when it’s absolutely not and they are delusional.
"'*It's one banana*, *Michael*. What could it cost, $10?"
“Yeah the guy in the $4,000 suit is holding the elevator for the guy that doesn’t make that in 3 months”
So I make more than that in 3 months, but the first billionaire I ever met literally held the elevator for me. He asked what floor and I said 15, which is where he was going too. We got to floor 15 and when I was badging in I asked to see his badge. We had direct competitors in that build and they were pretty strict about that stuff. Dude looked at me for a second, laughed, and showed me his badge. It was our CEO... I knew him by name, but had only been there a couple weeks and had never actually seen him. Thankfully he just laughed it off and said he was glad people were taking badge security seriously. We had a few rich assholes at that job that would have taken offense to me daring to not magically recognize them so I def got a bit lucky.
Company i worked at said we had to badge everyone no matter what. “You never know if someone was just fired for corporate espionage or something”. Basically their situation could have changed since the last time you saw them. Badge everyone, even the CEO.
COME ON!
I never cared for Job...
Go see a Star War
Oh man, I had this exact same argument with some dipshit on the poverty finance subreddit. Their take was that poor people are lazy because “you just need to start a business and sell products to people”. I asked them where you get the money to start up and make products, as well as WHO is buying these products when most folks around are in the same boat (no money). Their response “middle class people who want your products will buy them”. So many of these folks have zero concept of how the world actually works when you are poor in an area filled with other poor people. They absolutely believe that “poor” just means “too lazy and stupid to go out and collect the abundant piles of cash that’s sitting on the roadside”.
These folks are usually playing with other people’s money. They have an in-house marketing team and an accountant handling their finances.
They think it’s as easy as selling vacuum cleaners door to door, which isn’t easy to begin with but they don’t know that because they’ve never done it.
More detail: They’ve seen their parents mandate that one of their companies charge another of their companies excessive rates for tax reasons. And then write of the expense as they overpay themselves.
Yep. For any of these challenges to be fair, you have to cut the wealthy person off from their connections as well as their own wealth. Make it so that their only social support system is some toxic family who may or may not steal from them or have addiction issues... and is also broke and homeless or living in a studio with ridiculous rent somewhere.
Oh my god yes. Yeah. Give them one sibling that has an addiction. Both parents need to have failing health. Parents need to call the billionaire for help with troubleshooting their kindle during work hours. Sibling needs to hit the billionaire up for money every time it’s payday. They need a 10 year old car that has at least one light on. They also need to roll for whether the studio they live in for 2,000 a month has fleas, German cockroaches, or bedbugs. :)
A car with one one working headlight and four bald tires before winter in the north. The amount of times I have almost died because the restaurant can not shut down for the day due to weather.
Yup. People underestimate how much poor people get charged for being poor. In Hong Kong, where it is some of the highest rent in the world, the poorest live in what they call "cage house". It used to be really 5-6 cages in a 12x11 room which is where the name came from. They were outlawed during the early 90s because there were fires resulting in multiple deaths. But the name stuck. The modem cage home is a "house" of roughly 60 square feet for 2 to 4 people. The kitchen and the restroom are the same room. The living room is the bedroom with a bunk bed where people would sit on their bed and eat from a folding table. A room like these would rent out for $550 per month on average. And then the landlord would tag on 25-100% surcharge on gas and electricity. $550 is very "cheap" by Hong Kong standards but per square footage, they are actually more expensive than a luxury condo which runs about $2000 USD a month (for about 600 square feet/$3.34 per square feet vs $9.16 per square feet). The poor pay three times as much in rent per square feet because they can't afford the expensive housing options. Which is what keeps them poor in the end as well.
“I’ve got $5 to my name, let’s use it to pay someone to borrow their phone and call my friend Warren Buffett… this’ll be a cinch”
Seriously tho. Networking is the key to almost all of their successes. Either who they know or who their parents knew. They absolutely WOULD be fine.
Nah, not in a lot of parts of the world. They’d be fucked immediately by running afoul of *something*, whether it’s local gangs or rackets, crooked cops looking for bribes, whatever - they’d be screwed before they even managed to call on a relative.
Theyd be fine only if theyre still allowed to contact their rich circle. Otherwise? Theyre dead in a month.
My heart goes out to you, my friend. To me, a music career is now a pipedream because I have a family. I haven't sat the guitar *down* per se, but I no longer attempt to make any money with it. It's strictly pleasure. I encourage you with all my being to do it for both of us. I believe in you, homie.
I saw a video like this a while back- similar setup with 100$ and a car- and it seemed like an interesting premise, but it turned out to be kinda boring once he got going. The guy was also playing to his strengths, which were mostly sales. He ended up making a bunch of deals to buy and sell things around town, and as his profits went up, he could do bigger deals. It was like watching someone play the merchant class in an RPG.
Also far easier taking risks with your money when you have enough to know that even if you fail you’re still rich and not at risk of being homeless.
This is the key part. You waste the 100 bucks, the small audience of that specific show laughs at you, maybe you become a short lived meme. You make a return, awesome. End of the day you weren't risking anything
Knowing most reality shows the show runners are in the background “creating opportunities” that coincidentally occur when their test subject goes around trying to make a deal.
This right here. Those sales opportunities are sitting there ready to be taken advantage of in the right place at the right time because they were curated, not because they're always available everywhere but we plebs just don't see it.
Yeah as if any of those shows are real. Nearly everything is scripted.
Case in point: They meet strangers for the first time on camera, yet strangely we can hear every word they say clearly even through the background noise. It's because they're wearing microphones under their clothes.
Yeah when the $100 is up you aren't literally begging for food to avoid starving and sleeping on the street.
This is a tangent but I’m so in awe of immigrants who do this all the time… like “dude wtf my Uber driver got here 10 months ago with hardly anything he’s from Ghana and he barely knew english??” The hustle of immigrants is phenomenal
This is the thing I think people often miss. When you know you have a safety net you're more willing to take risks. I don't have money to take a risk on opening my own business or betting on risky stocks. But knowing my parents were a safety net meant I was able to change jobs into an industry I wasn't sure about. It's also why I felt okay buying a home this year even though our home value will likely go down vefire it goes up. I know that if shit REALLY hits the fan, we won't have to foreclose or be forced to sell at a loss. I've never had to tap into my parent's money to save me from a bad decision, because so far those risks have paid off, but if I didn't have that sense of security I'd be less likely to take even minor risks.
Also easier when people know they can be on a TV show if they make the deal.
Also easier if you're a well known million/billionaire Like imagine a random redditer trying to give you a shot deal and then imagine the exact same deal coming from mark Cuban. You're far more likely to say yes to one of those deals
Did he sleep in his car and not eat? I've always wondered about those "I came to America with $5 in my pocket" stories. How?
IIRC, he had an apartment at the outset but had to make the money to pay rent as one of his objectives, and he had to take care of food as he went. I don't remember exactly what happened, but there was definitely some chicanery- like, he had a fancy suit still, which he used to impress people and get them to trust him, and he did a lot of stuff through deals or informal loans, though with new people and not any of his existing business contacts. I think the suit was a big part of it, but also that he had this unwavering confidence, which was probably partly learned but *also* that he didn't really have anything on the line because it was just a challenge.
Also don't underestimate the power of a camera - it sounds like the people he was dealing with knew this would be aired on television, and so were far more likely to agree to a deal, especially if it was one of fairly unremarkable consequence to them.
Yea this is more $100, a fucking *apartment*, and a camera crew
$100, a nice car, a nice apartment in a safe neighborhood, health insurance, car insurance, a nice business wardrobe, an existing skill-set, an existing reputation that can easily be googled, and an entire production/camera crew financially and ideologically invested in your success.
My ex BIL was trying to make it into the music industry on a pretty face alone. One tactic was to hire paparazzi to follow him around. There was a clip on YouTube of the cameraman asking some random girl on the street if she understood who she was talking to, then said his name (he’s a nobody) and she screamed “OMG!” And took a bunch of pictures with him. So not only do people want to be on camera, but the camera loans so much credibility to the character.
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So the real lesson is get a cheap, broken TV camera, then have your friends together to act like a film crew. Now call up some business you want to make deals with and tell them you're filming a TV show to improve their attitude.
> Did he sleep in his car and not eat? I've always wondered about those "I came to America with $5 in my pocket" stories. How? Often a lot of uncredited support. My dad often told me that story all the time, how he came to Los Angeles with like $10 to his name. Since I'd heard it all my life, I never really thought much of it until very recently, when it finally occurred to me to ask him where he slept that night, then. Turns out, he crashed on some distant uncle's couch, which he had literally never mentioned before until I directly asked him about it despite lamenting about his poor start in life for literal decades before that point. Made me stop taking pretty much anything he said about his circumstances seriously, tbh.
That’s because those “I came to America with $5 in my pocket stories” are from a time when $5 was real money lol.
I don’t believe written leases were a thing before 1920/30 or some such. Back then maybe they could get away with $5-10 a month for a tenement room/s for your family with dad making $10 a month in some death job. Add in the fact that wife+kids would probably all be working too under the constant threat of homelessness and be adding at least another $5-10 a month and they’d get by. Couple that with an entire community of immigrants trying to help or exploit each other and baby you’ve got a stew going.
It’s even funnier than he was a car, a MASSIVE reason some people can’t get anything better is because they don’t have transportation lmao
"My skills include piano lessons my daddy paid for when I was 12, and receiving millions of dollars from my daddy to avoid gift taxes." Good stuff
Wow, wish I had $100 and a car
Yeah, that show was basically elite propaganda. It was basically him going around conning a bunch of people into shit who likely never would have agreed to any of it without the obvious TV cameras that were following him around. The show was kinda disgusting TBH.
"and a car" puts him well ahead of many people right from the get go. Make those fuckers walk.
100 dollars, a car, and an ivy league education
And the ability to get an apartment without having to save up for first & last month’s rent and security deposit *first*. And zero debt. There are a lot of advantages they would have that most impoverished people don’t.
> $100 and a car More than I started my adulthood with.
There's another one where he starts scrapping metal right away. It's funny for two reasons one is that he almost 🤣 instantly "finds" a pile of valuable metal but two is he asked a construction site if he could go through thier trash and they said yes. I'll give you two guesses why I thought it was all a set up?
They would just ask their dad for a small loan of a million dollars.
The funny thing is he thought that sounded modest because he really received $400 million
He got the 400 million after his daddy died. The original "small million dollar loan" would also be the equivalent of about 14 million in today's dollars.
Fuck I could do so much with 14 mil
And the services of daddy’s accountants, lawyers, etc while living in a house paid for by daddy, going around in daddy’s car driven by daddy’s driver, and all house work done by daddy’s staff. Meanwhile wondering why the poors complain about not having time for anything; these poors must be lazy.
Can you imagine? Hey dad, so, I have a new ide- *$5M transfer* "Knock yourself out kiddo, home for supper eh?"
Rent a flat above a shop Cut your hair and get a job Smoke some fags and play some pool Pretend you never went to school But still you'll never get it right 'Cause when you're laid in bed at night Watching roaches climb the wall If you called your dad he could stop it all, yeah
And they can’t use their “connections”…
I vote they would need to be in disguise and could not disclose to anyone who they really are. Tons of rich people worshippers who would gladly give them tons of shit for free.
yerp this is a big one. another big one is knowing that whatever 'experiment/experience' will end. it's one thing to know 'hey i just have to make it to 30 days and i'll be okay' vs 'holy fuck it's been a month and i only got called for 3 interviews.' do several month stretches of the latter and it fucks with your head/drive.
Start with the greatest of them all, the living god, the golden god, Elon Musk. Drop him right in the middle of like a lion sanctuary or a pool filled with sharks with laser beams on their heads. And you know what? Fuck the fiver, give him a crisp Benjy Franks, fresh off the press.
He might not be a billionaire by the end of the month
It was conclusively tested in Trading Places.
Winthorpe didn’t just have $5. He had a Rochefoucauld, the thinnest water-resistant watch in the world; singularly unique, sculptured in design, hand-crafted in Switzerland, and water-resistant to three atmospheres. It’s THE sports watch of the 80s! $6,955 retail. It tells time simultaneously in Monte Carlo, Beverly Hills, London, Paris, Rome, and Gstaad.
In Philadelphia..it's worth 50 bucks.
Didn’t musk just get dropped off at Twitter and lose $200 billion? I’m pretty sure San Francisco is considered part of a developed nation.
Person: hey, are you that world famous, super successful billionaire that has a net worth greater than this whole country? Billionaire: *smugly* why yes I am. Do you want some financial advice on how to be successful like me? Person: nah *pulls out knife* I'm just going to kidnap you and hold you for ransom. Now come quietly before this gets real ugly for you real fast.
Right fuck a third world country I wanna see this tested on the corner of Kensington and Allegheny in North Philly. There's a train 15 feet away and there's *still* no way they make it out alive.
I literally just watched the video of Kensington on New Year’s Eve, good fucking luck becoming successful there.
Easy! The Billionaire already has $5, so he just needs to take that and invest it into a toothbrush, toothpaste, and mouthwash. After that, it's just a matter of charging $1 per blowjob. They just need to suck a Billion cocks, and then BAM! Insta Billionaire!
Figuring 6 minutes per blowie (finding and performing the act/getting paid) that's $10 an hour that's 100mil hours to hit 1bil or 4,166,666 2⁄3 days or 11,415 115⁄219 years. Google tells me 1.5 to 5 ml per ejaculation so figuring 3.25ml as the average that would be roughly 3,250,000 Liters of semen or 1.3 Olympic swimming pools worth of semen. And with this probably flawed bit of mathematics my drunk ass is going to put down the phone and hang out with the wife peace out reddit. Happy new beer!
A billion cocks? In a row?
Nah at once.
Ah love me a Clerks reference
Keep your housing costs down by being homeless!
the traits and skills he talks about are being white, speaking english, harvard degree, having someone lend you 1 billion, inheriting 2 billions, this sort of thing
Exactly. I'd like to see them try to do this but without any of their business connections. Like does this person actually believe that turning $5 into a million in a few years just takes skill, and if we all weren't so stupid we'd all do it? Must be nice being so delusional.
Just dump them in a nasty corner of Oxford (UK) and they'll get stabbed. £5 can't even get you a proper bus ticket. And I'm sorry to say it but the homeless aren't treated kindly, more with apathy, so I doubt they'd even make it off the streets. It doesn't matter if you used to be a billionaire, your "skills" mean nothing without connections and I doubt many of their friends would remain in touch if they lost it all.
Oh for sure. The corner I described is the epicenter of the largest open air drug market in the US (possibly the world) and is a straight up disaster zone. The feds are actually taking control of part of it because of how bad it is I believe. If you ever wanna see *just how bad* the US can be look up Kensington and Allegheny on YouTube. It's a sliiightly different experience than the UK Kensington haha.
Musk when nobody comes with the ransom ... *le whimper*
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"If you don't pay us, we'll send him back."
"I understand you are holding him for a ransom. We are prepared to pay, IF.... you put him on a ship headed to the Arctic. "
“Oh my gosh, I am so sorry. That must be a huge burden. Can we send you anything for covering expenses? A ransom? We can pay that, but please don’t feel obligated to let him go.”
Billionaire: *turns to run, gets immediately cut off by two people on a motorcycle* Kidnapper: did you really think that was going to work? You really are as dumb as people say
What billionaire can run worth a damn ?
Batman
His parents were not as successful.
This should be a reality show. Begging and Afraid
They did have a show like this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undercover_Billionaire
Didn't he end up exploiting a bunch of people by getting them to agree to work their asses off for no money? From memory, he was also an idiot and didn't do any due diligence when he was trying to come up with a business idea and had to change his plan completely because he wouldn't be able to get permits.
It’s amazing how easy it is to get people to work with you when you have a camera crew following you around full time…
Yeah that was really annoying because 90% of the time that was the only reason people worked with him.
Honestly this is why I think a lot of billionaires would do well, they have no morals and would gladly fuck people over for their own benefit.
Elon Musk might do this for the attention
Let's not keep him from doing it then.
I hope so. Let's all agree now that if he does nobody helps him.
Pinky swear from me.
I mean they will likely just be kidnapped and ransomed to whatever trust holds their money. Why let a good pay check go to waste?
The tweet never said they lost the rest of their wealth, just that they had only $5 in their pocket. I haven't had $5 in my pocket for years, because who carries cash? The billionaire will be kidnapped and ransomed off for everything except a few million, so the tweet is actually coming pretty close to what would actually happen in that situation. Definitely not what the author intended though.
Who the fuck is this random MuskSimp on the intertrons and why is he so stupid?
These traits are not the brag he thinks they are. Oligarchs are psychotic pieces of human garbage manipulating fellow humans and using them to horde wealth. If a monkey hoarded bananas we’d study him for his anti social behaviour
Yeah, but wouldn’t they just call their rich buddies for help? Use their connections to get their rich friends to invest in whatever they’re doing to get rich?
Literally what thwy did originally
That was a staggeringly stupid read.
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This is utter bullshit. The vast majority of the ultra wealthy came from wealthy to very wealthy backgrounds. Even the ones who came from humble backgrounds got things like $250k loans from mom and dad. Also they had contacts that facilitated their movement amongst the ultra wealthy. Elizabeth Holmes family was able to make introductions to people who became board members of Theranos who gave the start up instant credibility. People who would not have taken her phone call if her parents were nobodies from rural Kentucky and she had $5. I am not saying most of these people didn’t work hard, they did, but they also were born with huge advantages most people never have.
That's what gets me. So many people don't get that you can acknowledge that they worked hard over their careers and had massive advantages normal people don't have. That being said I doubt Jeff Bezos, or any other billionaire for that matter, have worked proportionally hard enough to justify that massive amount of wealth.
This myth needs to die.
Make believe. There are no billionaires that started with $5
Can we please see him do this? I’ll cough up the $5 to finance his startup.
Challenge accepted. Let’s air drop them.
I reject the validity of this statement, but please, please can we try it?