That rules something like finance out, which compounds very poorly, and hasn't produced trillionaires despite being around for centuries.
I'd bet on education. Colleges and universities can be worth billions each. While the billion dollar ones are pretty good, the sub billion ones aren't and are getting competed with by several month courses.
It seems something mostly neglected. Universities hire the smartest people, but teaching still uses the same old lecturing technique for decades, despite all this interactive technology. We've learned a lot about psychology and productivity. We have tried improving education technology, but it seems to just be a side gimmick. This can also be combined with upcoming new tech like AI to work better.
It seems like something that compounds very well. If you can hack your brain to have, say, 90% comprehension, and comprehend harder things, you can also discover better education techniques and train others.
Energy would be second. Oil has already produced trillionaire families, but it's too big to concentrate on one person.
I'd imagine Bill Gates's shiny new nuclear plants could push him into trillionaire territory. Combined with the new electrical vehicle trend, people could be migrating from oil to electricity.
Spaced repetition seems promising. Or letting students learn at their own pace. Maybe going deeper down in details they're interested in. But we had those for decades and they never took off.
Maybe we should be looking more into learning than teaching.
I learnt a lot from Europa Universalis. I think people should be able to simply experiment more with things, see what happens when they tweak things, actually play.
We teach derivatives and integrals all the time, and yet nobody has mainstream software that illustrates how they work. The concept is easy visually, difficult in writing. It's used a lot in algorithms, but that's more because programmers make algorithms to illustrate to themselves the concept. We can do a good deal with physics, chemistry, and so on.
It doesn't have the exponential effect, though, and it's a big market spread over many players. I'm sure it could be more efficient, but how much does that change?
Then again, reading the Checklist Manifesto, where a checklist made such a difference, that makes me think that healthcare can be far improved.
If someone figured out a way to accurately predict market trends in a positive-ROI scenario, they could become a trillionaire without ever having to do all the pesky parts of actually creating a sustainable business.
Elon Musk & Andrej Karpathy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBklltKXtDE
Elon Musk & Max Hodak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wqb7P3u5ujw
Larry Page & Sergey brin
Bill Gates https://youtu.be/s7O3oCWZgjE?t=225
Mark Zuckerberg & Abhinav Gupta https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-swj_rj3luE https://research.fb.com/publications/canonical-surface-mappi...
Jason Kelly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaVsc65iu6E
John & Patrick Collison https://youtu.be/_4t12rS6_jo?t=700 ------------------------ To make a trillion
- sell ~33,333,333 cars at $30,000 - sell ~2,000,000,000 devices at $500 - sell ~10,000,000 virtual developers at $100,000 / year
And cashing out a billion dollars a year (over one percent of his net worth at the peak) to spend on rocket ships has got to put a dent in his earnings growth.
Palladium today is $1704.73 per ounce, but the price of palladium comes from the fact that it's extremely rare on Earth. But what if someone comes back from an asteroid with an amount of palladium that suddenly triples the worldwide supply? What will the effects be on the price point? I'm sure the costs of getting it back planetside will be factored in and slow down any inflation, but I am still curious.
And what kind of things could we create, given a vastly increased supply of rare elements?