He has good and true advice: If you approach challenges with tenacity, always be curious to learn, and be open and thoughtful with your team, you too can be an early employee at the next FB and become a billionaire.
Moskovitz (now Asana), D'Angelo (now Quora), Vernal (now Sequoia), Bosworth (still at FB on hardware/Building 8), Cohler (now Benchmark), Hammerbacher (now ?), Chamath (now Social Capital) ... those are some of the standouts off of the top of my head, out of hundreds of early employees.
You couldn't start Social Capital on $10M, for example.
Sure, if you have a bunch of money and throw that money at things, you'll "change the world", but that doesn't mean that's an effective way of making lasting or useful change.
But the Gates Foundation doesn't run on $10k. You can found zero biotech companies on $10k. Money, alas, has value, believe it or not.
If you approach challenges with tenacity, always be curious to learn, and be open and thoughtful with your team, you too can do something that actually matters.
Don't mean to be rude, but being a billionaire is a boring goal with no value in and of itself.
Are you a billionaire?
Do you need to be a billionaire to have an opinion on billionaires or be aware of human behavior? Really rich people aren't a new thing.
What's inherently valuable about being a billionaire? What values and standards does the end goal of being a billionaire tend to produce in people?
"Are you a billionaire?" --> if you were a billionaire I imagine you would be pretty stoked.
You certainly don't need to break your leg to deduce that the action results in pain. You do however need to know and experience a nontrivial amount of wealth to realize how much power and inherent value being a billionaire affords. One becomes a radical agent of change at this point. It is thus a worthy goal.