How to become Rich.

How to become a dollar billionaire?

Becoming rich has more to do with restraint and tenacity than it does brilliance or luck.

Bill Gates who has been the richest man in the world for 18 years was recently dethroned by Jeff Bezos in 2017.

According to CNBC Jeff Bezos keeps shattering wealth records first the richest man in the world. Then the richest man of our time. And now, the richest man in recent history – adjusted for inflation. His net worth currently stands at USD155.3B about 55B richer than Bill Gates at number two.

Jeff is the CEO and founder of the largest e-commerce market place and cloud computing platform in the world as measured by revenue and market capitalization – Amazon.

But what does it really take to be a dollar billionaire? To answer this question, we sought our answer by evaluating the Forbes rich list.

According to the list – we have only 2,208 dollar billionaires from the 7.5 billion people living in this world. This is 0.00003% of the worlds population. 🙂

Looking closely at who they are and what they do, I was able to come up with a few interesting observations.

Lets see what they were.

Which are the Winning professions?

According to our analysis – the industries in the billionaire list are highly fragmented. However one thing was clear, about 50% of the billionaires came from five specializations plus one (I’ll explain what I mean in a minute).

1. Real Estate

Real estate comes on top and contributes 12.9% of all the worlds’ dollar billionaires. I guess Robert Kiyosaki was right all along. Location location location.

2. Finance

Second biggest is finance at 9.6% of all the worlds’ billionaires. Insurance? Banking? Trust funds? Mutual funds? Venture capital? If you are doing any of these, then you are well on your way to becoming wealthy.

3. Technology

Third is technology with 8.8% of all billionaires. This ranges from innovative apps to e-commerce to manufacture of electronics.

Interestingly, this category has the youngest billionaires. More on this shortly, stay tuned.

4. Healthcare

Needless to say, we all get unwell at some point. Therefore it makes sense that healthcare is on the top 5 list.

It currently supports 6.6% of the world’s wealthiest.

5. Mining

This age old practice doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere.

With 5.6% of the world’s wealthiest specializing in mining, I better start looking for my shovel!

6. Jack of all trades

This was the plus one I’d mentioned earlier – these guys lack specialization on anything. And surprisingly they make us 9.4% of the worlds’ richest. Their industry were simply classified as ‘diversified’ as they seem to be doing everything.

Are you in the right country towards becoming a billionaire?

I also realized that there are some countries that attract money than others do.

The top five have 62% of all the worlds’ billionaires! They are as follows:

1. USA – The world largest economy leads the pack with 565 billionaires representing 26.5% from the entire list
2. China + Hong Kong – The worlds moms populous country
   Comes is second with 440 billionaires representing 19.9% of the list
3. Germany – Comes in a distant third place. They 123 dollar billionaires. These are 5.6% of the entire list
4. India – Another populous nation – have 119 dollar billionaires. That is 5.4% of the list
5. Russia – Coming in fifth place with 101 dollar billionaires. This is 3% of the list

I am not surprised that most of the dollar billionaires to come from the developed countries.

However this doesn’t mean that you have no chance if you come from a developing country. 79 of the 2,208 come from developing nations -and this list is growing everyday!

How old is old to become a billionaire?

This was my biggest shocker.

According to our analysis, only 15% of the world’s billionaires are below 50 years (yikes). Meaning 85% of the list is aged 50 years and above.

The situation is even worse for those below 40. Only 2% of the billionaires are below the age of 40.

For these handful of people below 40 (73 to be precise) who made it to the big list, I decided to categorize them into two:

1. Inherited wealth – about 15% have inherited their wealth from their rich parents.
2. Self-made wealth – the rest made the wealth themselves. And this is predominantly through technology and apps.

How to become rich faster!

For all the young people out there (like me) who do nothing but dream about being rich, well the quickest way there is by creating a disruptive technology or apps.

Innovators of Snapchat, Stripe, Facebook, Airbnb, Instagram, Uber, Pinterest, Drones, mobile games and others are part of the paltry 15% I talked about earlier.

If not innovation then you can pick something from the rest of the industries list and work on it for the next 20 years. You will surely get there.

And remember, the easiest way to replicate success is to emulate the thinking of successful people. So study these guys more.

With that in mind, here is a quote from Jeff Bezos “One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.”

Have an innovative day, won’t you!