The underlying gist of “You’ll NEVER get rich by working for someone else” is that you should look for opportunities to build wealth that’s not tied to hour-by-hour labor. You can do this by owning your own business, or by looking for ways to own equity in valuable assets beyond your regular job.
I mean, enterprise software sales folks can get rich being paid on commission, "influencers" can get rich being paid by affiliate links, and none of them have any ownership in the business.
The question is, are more of them rich from salary, from capital ownership, or from inherited wealth?
In the US, the broad “rich”—about the top 1% by income—overwhelmingly make their income from salaries and wages (https://www.cnbc.com/2015/04/09/where-the-rich-make-their-in...). However, the ultrarich—say, the top 0.1%—tend to make it from capital and inheritance.
Assuming financial gurus are trying to give feasible advice for how to become comfortably rich, the safest bet with the highest expected value is probably something like “get an elite professional education and find a spot in the elite managerial/professional class.” I.e., banker, MBA, corporate lawyer, or (for all the HN readers) FAANG engineer.
Of course you can get rich (or at least well off) in A Job. but realistically, that almost invariably means becoming a workplace strategist and doing office politics to make sure you outpace your peers, not just performing a job you like and then checking out to focus on your domestic life.
If you are just a diligent and unselfish team member who never tries to elbow your way in front of others, you are very unlikely to become rich just from your job. Wealth tends to flow towards people who are competitive rather than cooperative.
Apple's employees are managed by him, but both him and the other employees are working for the apple's shareholders.
I'm not singling Cook out here, he seems like a nice person. But i think you understand that there's a big difference between being a regular worker bee and CEO of a large corporation.
That's a stretch. An average of $150K/year before taxes throughout 20s and 30s is a pretty good job in the US. Say they save $50K/year--which is a lot on that salary--that's $1million saved overall which, depending on your assumptions, will give you about median US household income annually. So possible in a sense if retiring as soon as possible is your goal but certainly not to everyone's tastes.
In your example, a high salary individual contributing $50k/yr for 20 years at 7% ends up with over $2mm by age 40. That's $80k/yr at a %4 withdrawal rate for the rest of your life.
More reasonably, a $25k/yr contribution for 20 years at %7, would pass $1mm by 40. If you let that sit for the next decade and retire just before you turn 50, that will roughly double over the decade to $2mm.
I agree that this isn't attainable for everyone, but contributing the $19.5k/yr max to a 401k pre-tax, and $5.5k/yr into a Roth IRA over your 20s and 30s, will likely make you a millionaire by 40 and a 2-millionaire by 50.