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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Forbes says there are about 2800 billionaires in the world, and there are like 8 billion people, so your odds are about 1-in-3 million of making it into that class. And it doesn't just take smarts, it takes being in the right place at the right time.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/?form=MG0AV3

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I have no clue why your comment would be down-voted. Luck or chance is definitely important once one is in a position to benefit from it.

Weird. I never ran the math.

Becoming a billionaire is actually more achievable than I would have predicted, by a lot.

The probability in GP's comment assumes that everyone has an equal chance of attaining billionaire status, and that the percentage of billionaires in the world remains constant. Given heritability of wealth and access to better education and healthcare, wealthy children have much lower barriers to success. The second assumption may not hold either, as the current overall economic trends seem to favor increasing concentration of wealth.

It'd be interesting to see just how steeply those advantages decrease the odds for the rest of us. I'd be willing to bet that—even in a comparatively wealthy developed country—the true chances for an average person achieving >$1B are orders of magnitude lower than the figure quoted.

I feel like the odds are so long that a few orders of magnitude either way don't really change the argument that luck is a bigger factory than anything else.

Developing vs developing world is an interesting question. There are a lot of people in the developing world who outright stole $1B or more, and the process of development frequently makes billionaires. Chinese people I know who came to the US and had average results often regret coming because they know people back home who got really lucky and hit it big.

I agree, it's not at all perfectly random. For some the chances are better than 1 in 3 million, for others they are miniscule and improbable.

Alternate reading: being a billionaire is less impressive than it's hyped to be, if it's a pure numbers game.

It's not just a numbers game. Bill Gates was stupendously smart, driven and competitive. He and Paul Allen also got the idea that the microcomputer industry was going to need systems software before he could get a microcomputer to develop it on, so he developed it with an emulator on a PDP-10. It was "flip switches on the front panel" or "ship with Microsoft BASIC" which let Microsoft claim to be "the first microcomputer software"; they got a few lucky breaks such as getting a contract with IBM for the systems software for the PC which could have easily gone to a competitors like Digital Research.

Bernard Arnault is another interesting case study, his talents were quite different, started with a wealthy family, had luck to multiply his family wealth with real estate and get out [2] had a lot of luck rolling luxury brands together, and also benefited from the growth of China, as "keeping up with the Chens" more than made up for the decline of materialism in the west.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Arnault

[2] it is easy to turn a small fortune into a huge one in real estate using leverage and then lose it all

> Bill Gates was stupendously smart

[citation needed]

Gates had family and connections. Brain didn't come into play.

Rich doesn't have to mean billionaire. Now look at the number of millionaires in the US, ~22 million or 8.5% of the population.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...

Some people are going to argue that a millionaire isn't really "rich". It's not that hard to become a millionaire if you make a decent income, sock a lot away, and invest in stocks in the 1930-2024 time frame. [1] You'd be pretty old when you make that milestone though.

I think the OP wants to be rich when he's young.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Next-Door-Surprising-Amer...

Statistically, which do you think is a better way to get to $1 million? Working for BigTech or equivalent or starting your own business?

“there were 56 million people worldwide whose assets exceeded one million US dollars”

That doesn’t take starting your own business or even working for one of the top paying companies. If you bought a house ten years ago in an area with rapid price appreciation - congratulations you are now close to a million easily.

Now if you work for any of the tech companies that pay top of market for a few years and live below your means, reaching 1 million is even easier.

Indeed, that's my point. It is statistically unlikely to do well enough in business to get to 1 MM compared to working for a living.

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