Saquon Barkley is playing for equity
readtheprofile.com
readtheprofile.com
He's a generational talent who signed a $30 million rookie contract.
I know guys who played in the NFL and they got paid a sliver of that, at best. They are out of the league. 99% of guys who make it aren't Saquon Barkley. Shit, 99% of guys in his position aren't at his level. RBs do not last at the NFL level for very long. There's always some young new hotshot out of the college game who is faster, younger, and not beat up.
The big issue is that most of those guys spent their entire lives to that point to play in the NFL. They didn't challenge themselves in high school or college from an academic standpoint - they focused on football. They took home through that 3 year rookie deal MAYBE $200k-300k total after tax, outside training expenses, agent expenses, etc.
A slightly different perspective: they weren't challenged academically, primarily because they excelled at footballs/sports. I had a friend in high school (back in the 80s) that was, coincidentally, also a star running back, broke rushing records, played for a good college, all that. However, he never made it to the NFL. He coasted through high school because everyone wanted him on the field and didn't care at all about his education. College was even worse. He told me for most semesters he didn't even know what his classes were; he was there only to play football, and that was made very clear to him from the start.
It's easy to point the finger, like, "You should've challenged yourself in high school!", and that's true. But for a lot of these kids, "the system" either simply looks the other way or actively discourages them from education.
Fortunately for my friend he landed a job in the football program at a small, private college, where he also was able to actually attend classes and eventually get a degree. I think he's retired now, though.
For some players, too, they know the allure of the NFL can outweigh anything else, especially if they can run like the wind and ain't too smart but come from a really poor background. The school might know football is their best way out. Sad but true.
$100k invested in 2017 turning into $2m in 2025 implies a 46% annualized return over 8 years.
Those numbers are not realistic from even the world’s top hedge funds.
That begs the question of what magic well of oil you struck to yield those numbers? The only public investment I can see is TSLA. And I would not recommend an average Joe YOLO $100k into TSLA.
But I would presume a regular Joe didn’t YOLO $100k into that, either.
I guess my original point was: there is no realistic way a retail investor walked away from a $100k investment a multimillionaire after 8 years unless they took an enormous, absurd punt.
Bitcoin was around $1k in 2017 and, after jumping up to about $20k, was back at around $4k in 2018. It's recently been over $100k, and fairly reliably been over $40k for much of the time in-between.
Gamestop's share price was below $10, stock split-adjusted, for many years, bottoming at $1 ($4 unadjusted). It infamously rocketed to over $100 ($400) in January 2021, with several similar, seemingly-random bursts of upward volatility since. Even now, depending on your entry, buyers from before the high would have seen somewhere between 200% and 2000% returns. There are a number of other so-called "meme" stocks which briefly performed similarly, though most have not retained even a fraction of their increase.
Both could have been used to hit $2m or more with a single set of buy-sell transactions. That's not considering leveraged trading like options. Keith Gill infamously turned $50k (briefly) into a billion dollars (and is likely, more durably, a centimillionaire).
In short: crypto and options, buying early and holding long. 2017 was actually almost the perfect time to jump in. Someone who was looking in the right direction could easily have struck oil, as you say. (Let's not even talk about the guys who made $660m off the negative oil price incident in 2020.) ZIRP and lax oversight of the securities market structure make odd things happen.
But I will say that Saquon has access to deal flow that most of us will never have access to (they mentioned Anthropic and Stripe, for example).
> If I had access to private markets like startups, it would be worth even more.
As to
>why OP didn't get a loan to make these investments if they were such a sure thing.
You could ask him. Perhaps he didn't qualify. There are people who did this; depending on entry timing, you would certainly have seen enough returned to at least cover interest payments.
None of those are reproducible investment strategies, they’re “dumb money” gambles.
If someone did turn $100k into $2m using crypto and options, the smartest thing they could do is to cash out and go home, as they will never get more lucky than that.
[not financial advice]
And the true problem here is that this would be true if they turned $100k into $200k, $100k into $300k, $100k, into $400k... That is always the problem with these crypto discussions, it's all hypothetical, but anyone in this actual situation would have felt an incredible pressure to start taking their profit before they got to the most astronomical returns that are often cited.
As for your first two, none of that matters, because all you asked for was a publicly-accessible way to turn $100k in 2017 into $2.5m today, in response to the claim that GP could have done it. A crypto or a stock YOLO is how. From what he said, he probably did purchase Bitcoin or something else that went up massively in value, but not enough of it to see a large absolute return. I myself was aware of Bitcoin just after its creation, and had a small amount to invest, but instead put most into a blue chip stock on advice from family. Forget $100k, I could have been a millionaire off of $1k. And I can tell you that I probably would have made that wager if I'd had $10k to invest at the time, let alone $100k. I wouldn't have been expecting such ridiculous returns, very few were. However, the common investment wisdom of relying on "time in the market" would have seen at least a portion of the initial investment through to today.
But that's a little beside the GP's original point, which was that generational wealth made those kinds of (highly speculative) investments tenable. I don't see the point in arguing that they don't when they clearly do. You're on a website founded by a company that exists specifically to invest in such a manner. The entire point is to find the "unicorn".
But I will say, finding the unicorn is always a trivial exercise in hindsight and it’s a more difficult exercise to pick tomorrow’s winner. Everyone has a story of, “if I had just invested in Amazon in 2000, I’d be rich.”
If anybody has the next unicorn picks they want to share, I’m open to ideas :)
Btc $2k -> $120k (60x held)
ETH 200 -> $4k (20x held)
Tesla 20 => 400 (sold), then bought back in on its recovery at $150 when it went to $100. Sold again at $300.
FB => DCAd my cost down to $120 in the late 2022 (6x now, all holding)
Nvidia => $5 after accounting for splits, now $170 (34x)
Infamous FAANG: Netflix is 8x, Microsoft is almost 10x, Amazon and Google are 5x, apple 7x
Those weren’t my only investments and I’m not pretending to be a genius but even SPY is 3X and QQQ is 5X. But just a little prudent investing would’ve gotten you a lot of money.
If you just held $100k of Microsoft you’d be a millionaire and it won’t need a magic well of oil.
You would not 20X your investment in 8 years unless you got extremely lucky and avoided losing anything in risky bets that did not work out.
Many novice investors have gotten lucky on a trade or two and imagined what their return would be if they had invested 10X or 100X more. However, when you have 10X or 100X more capital on the line, you don't play the same game.
Even a non-famous person with ~$20mm to invest (somewhere around the after-tax amount of his rookie contract) would not get a seat at the table at these VC firms.
I also see no real indication that Barkley is especially good at what he is doing here. Is there a reason to believe that anything but luck separates his investments, including in crypto, from deals his peers like Tom Brady and Steph Curry made with FTX that got those guys pulled into the company's legal problems?
For players on the roster opening day, the average career is 6 years.
For players with 3 years of experience, the average career is 7 years.
First round picks have an average career of 9.3 years.
And if you make a Pro Bowl, your career average is 11.7 years.
League minimum is $840K. Cut it in half for taxes and agent fees and that's still $420K.
And making an opening day roster already puts you 2x longer than the overall average.
Bold statement two hours before kickoff but I'm expecting a significant regression this year and for him to be out of the league in two years.
> His change of direction, elusiveness, and vision are all generational.
I hear he's pretty good at football too.
He won ROY, and last season was amazing, but the rest of his career is far from generational level production.
Not all NFL athletes have a shot at getting any endorsements at all. In fact, most don't.
Be a star player or famous role player on a very successful team, that's way different than some backup lineman who is out of the league by the time their rookie contract ends.
American football is by and far the worst culprit - in all the other big or semi-relevant american sports - baseball, basketball, hockey, etc, you can make a decent living playing overseas. Not huge, but decent enough. Can't do that with football.
Then the expenses related to their jobs - food, training, etc. Shit ain't cheap. And before you ask - no, not all NFL teams really provide a ton to their players. My local team, Miami, has the best nutrition and food staff in the league. Players love it. Other teams don't provide much besides Gatorade on game days or other shitty protein snacks provided by league sponsors. Forget about full nutritious meals. Then you've got some teams with a great strength and conditioning staff. Other teams simply don't, which leaves players to find their own private solutions. This all adds up.
Many (but not all) states have tax credit arangements with other states so you wouldn't pay full tax on all income to your state of residence as well as the taxes owed to the states you worked in.
Seems like a lot for playing with a ball, while producing exactly zero in practical value (other than advertising and distraction, which is a net negative for society arguably).
I do also have to remark on the irony of someone on the "250k a year to type prompts into a AI to get the wrong answer" website complaining that athletes are overpaid and don't contribute anything to society
Going the athlete route is generally easier and requires less time investment than going the academic route.
Including practice squad players (who are paid peanuts), the NFL has about 2,240 roster spots. About a million US high school students play football any given year. The average NFL career is 3.3 years.
So from 3.3 graduating classes of a million high school football players, you'd expect somewhere around 0.07% to make it into the NFL. Fewer even will have something resembling a successful career.
Then look at how many high paying "smart person" jobs there are. There are about a million doctors in the US, two million engineers, and four million computer professionals.
Almost every student studies math, almost none of those ever become a mathematician - who are compensated much less than NFL players.
> There are about a million doctors in the US
Comparing # of doctors to # of NFL players is a very false equivalence. Try comparing # of athletes in all sports combined to number of doctors - that would be more reasonable. Or compare the number of brain surgeons to the number of NFL players - and the difficulty/time in becoming either.
Being a doctor is a much more stressful and difficult job, which requires more years of training/education and provides far more real value for society.
So what do you consider difficult? Having a linebacker smash into you at a full sprint over and over in practice and then not choking in a real game? Or studying relentlessly, writing grants, doing essentially free work as a resident for years while being on call. They are just stressful in different ways, but again, different humans have more fitness for one or the other.
You are always taking a risk. Sometimes it's just that it won't work out financially. Sometimes it's more serious than that. It's a small risk, but non-zero. Even successful football players suffer from much higher rates of mental health issues, among other poor health outcomes.
Complaining about NFL players not making enough money is just funny to me.
I do happen to think that players should probably make more, for the same reason that I think all workers should probably make more, not because of any particular risk reason.
No, I clearly didn't say that.
> 'sacrifice' what exactly lol?
I don’t get much entertainment from watching sports, but I mean, the market is how we decide how to value things in the US, and it turns out professional sports are valuable by that metric for whatever reason.
What is materially produced by the NFL? What societal problems does it solve?
It's as practically useful as scrolling through a tiktok feed, and the 'value' is basically the same - pushing advertising (which I don't consider to be a net benefit to society).
I enjoy NFL football because it is a showcase of brain (from the offensive and defensive schemes), brawn (pretty self explanatory), and planning (drafting, trading, roster construction). Arguably moreso than most software development (replace brawn with the mental toughness to not crack after the fifth night of sleeping under your desk to ship something).
That you do not understand the game does not make it worthless. Clearly there is some worth because football is something people pay a lot of money to enjoy, and that money, while also concentrating in the hands of owners (and there's a lot to talk about there), goes to support the trainers, assistants, equipment managers, travel coordinators, hotel workers, security guards at the game, stadium staff, concessions staff, bars and restaurants (both around the stadium and at home during away games), and many other people. It inarguably creates value. That doesn't go away because you don't like and don't understand it.
In conclusion: GO PACK GO
> I enjoy NFL football because it is a showcase of brain
You enjoy it because you were brought up by society to enjoy it and it was pushed on you from all sides. If you grew up in, say, Iceland, you probably wouldn't know anything about it or care at all.
> That you do not understand the game does not make it worthless.
That you clearly do not understand the history of big sports, the way they were pushed onto the public, and their explicit use in the manipulation public opinion, doesn't mean your 'understanding' of arbitrary tidbits of an arbitrary sport is any kind of argument for that sport's overall usefulness and benefit to society.
> Clearly there is some worth because football is something people pay a lot of money to enjoy
You should go look into the history of big sports and why an arbitrary artificial sport which has existed for less than 200 years is so popular in one particular country and almost entirely ignored everywhere else. Saying 'thing exists therefore it's good' is meaningless and boring.
> It inarguably creates value.
Just because something creates economic activity does not mean it's of overall benefit to society. I (and you) can very easily name many things that create(d) economic activity that we can both agree are bad for society (let me know if you can't). That doesn't change just because you like the thing, or because you know some arbitrary detail about the thing.
If so, then why does no other sport match its popularity in the US when NFL football isn't in season? If it's so goddamn arbitrary the something like baseball should make as much as it does. Basketball should make as much as it does. Hockey should make as much as it does. However, as marketed as those sports are in the US (and they are heavily marketed), then why don't they match the NFL in viewership and revenue?
>> I enjoy NFL football because it is a showcase of brain
> You enjoy it because you were brought up by society to enjoy it and it was pushed on you from all sides. If you grew up in, say, Iceland, you probably wouldn't know anything about it or care at all.
You don't know a goddamn thing about me. I grew up in The Netherlands watching (the other kind) of football, not in an area where the NFL existed. Maybe stop trying to pidgeonhole people that like things you don't.
Is there a lot of marketing around sports? Yes. There's a lot of marketing around software, video games, pharmaceuticals, fiscal policy, food, and automobiles. Would you say anybody who enjoys cooking for their family "brainwashed by Tyson into liking something they wouldn't like?
Fuck you for assuming
What does popularity have to do with artificialness? But, anyway, this is where it would be helpful for you to know a little bit about the history of the sport - the answer to your question is readily available with a bit of googling.
> If it's so goddamn arbitrary the something like baseball should make as much as it does.
Basketball is also an arbitrary and artificial sport. Many sports are. By definition.
> I grew up in The Netherlands watching (the other kind) of football,
That's good for you. But it is very obvious that the popularity of american foot ball is mostly due to societal influence. That is why it is popular in the US and almost nowhere else. The history of how and why it is so popular in the US is also readily available - if you're actually interested in that.
> Fuck you for assuming
Relax buddy, we're just having a civil discussion where we happen to disagree, no need to get emotional.
Everybody who studies and works towards a career/goal 'sacrifices the first 20 years of their life' as well by that logic. And playing lottery is a pointless and practically useless activity, which only results in negative results for the vast majority of participants.
> I do also have to remark on the irony of someone on the "250k a year to type prompts into a AI to get the wrong answer" website complaining that athletes are overpaid and don't contribute anything to society
I don't see the irony at all. But I guess your point is that posting 'on the "250k a year to type prompts into a AI to get the wrong answer" website' makes your comments somehow irrelevant and/or meaningless? Is that the point you're trying to make lol?
Yeah honestly HN is a huge circle jerk and commenting here feels like I am losing brain cells. Unfortunately as someone who doesn't live in the Bay and works remotely for startups there's some signalling value when interviewing if you can regurgitate whatever has been on the front page recently.
Think about these fantasy sports gambling apps, your coworkers who distract themselves from the drudgery of work by discussing sports, the financial institutions that take a transaction fee from money being passed around, the infinite scroll of content on social media, all because of athletes.
Not me, I spend nothing and invest it all, but all these investments are basically leveraging what society truly wants, among which is leisure and art.
Functionally, as a curmudgeon, my value to the economy is near zero.
I don't see how you can claim gambling, and pointless discussion about some arbitrary game you (they) don't even play are positive. Financial transactions for the sake of financial transactions are also completely pointless.
By choosing different basis vectors? Not everyone's values match yours.
Yeah, maybe, but that's neither useful nor interesting.
'Heroin addition is good and valuable to society - if you disagree it's because the addict's values just don't match yours'
It's unclear how this is related to what I said.
> 'Heroin addition is good and valuable to society - if you disagree it's because the addict's values just don't match yours'
What does it mean for something to be "good and valuable to society"? What is the "society" that is passing absolute judgement here? I think of society as a collection of people, and collections don't have values, individuals do.
Is it surprising the the values of someone choosing to take actions you consider repulsive are different than yours?
Coming in and saying 'we can't judge the practical societal value of anything because groups of people don't have values' is both incorrect and does not argue either for or against NFL as having a practical value, or introduce any new argument or data into the discussion.
> repulsive
Spare me the poetics, you're the only one to talk about repulsiveness in this comment chain so far.
Benefit to society becomes a philosophical argument. Personally I don't value most forms of entertainment, gambling, etc. Humans only need food and whatever basic needs there are. I enjoy classical music but I would even argue that music is just noise at the end of the day. On a scale of heroin to Chopin, I'd put the NFL closer to Chopin.
Nevertheless, these seemingly "worthless" forms of sense-stimuli are supporting a huge portion of our livelihoods at the moment.
By the way Saquon Barkley can squat 600lbs. Surely that's of value, no?
'supporting' in what way?
> By the way Saquon Barkley can squat 600lbs. Surely that's of value, no?
It could be of value to him, not really of value to others or society at large.
Would you prefer they all do this work out of the goodness of their hearts, simply as fun hobbies? Gifts to society?
The vast majority of wealthy celebrities are such because they provide entertainment.
Back in the early 90s in my 10th grade econ class, the teacher spent a whole class examinging Michael Jordan's value through salary and endorsements, and whether or not he actually deserved it. By the end of the class, he made the point that not only did he deserve it, he was vastly under-compensated for the value he brought the NBA and the companies that endorsed him, and ultimately, society of a whole.
I didn't say they are all worthless, yeah sports has value as entertainment, but it does not provide practical benefit to society generally speaking.
> Would you prefer they all do this work out of the goodness of their hearts, simply as fun hobbies? Gifts to society?
Not at all, I'm simply pointing out that earning 850k/year for playing with a ball for entertainment is not at all as terrible as others in this thread make it out to be. It's quite a sweet deal.
> The vast majority of wealthy celebrities are such because they provide entertainment.
And I would have no problem if the vast majority of these celebrities were not wealthy.
> By the end of the class, he made the point that not only did he deserve it, he was vastly under-compensated for the value he brought the NBA and the companies that endorsed him, and ultimately, society of a whole.
I mean cool story, but 'my 10th grade teacher said this' is not really interesting or convincing in any way. Yeah, star players provide income for the team/owners, and yes most of that is because of advertising (literally the dishonest manipulation of people into behaviors which are generally not beneficial to them), so just because they provide income for the team/owners does not mean it is a net benefit for society.
Take entertainment/sports watching and replace it with another type of 'entertainment' which people would love even more if it was as marketed nearly as much - heroin. Yes people love it, it generates 'economic activity and financial transactions', yes addicts will freely chose to spend their money on it. Does that make heroin a net benefit to society?
As to the 850k median salary, you also have to consider that the vast majority of players don’t last more than a few years in the league. The lifetime value of a typical NFL career is far less - and far more rare - than a big tech career. Additionally, NFL players subject their body to stress that can lead to lifetime medical issues.
And on top of that, the advertising you dismiss is what funds much of big tech, and is integral to how capitalist society functions as a whole.
I'm talking specifically about NFL (and some other sports). Not all entertainment.
> It’s an overwhelming driver of capitalism and consumer behavior
That doesn't make it a benefit to society. Slavery was an 'economic driver' - is that of overall benefit to society? Dishonest advertising is a 'driver of capitalism and consumer behaviour' - is dishonest advertising a benefit to society?
> and it also provides real social and cultural cohesion.
Really? An arbitrary made up game provides 'real' social and cultural cohesion? How so? The only reason NFL is so popular is because it was very strongly pushed onto society for decades in a top-down way everywhere from schools to television, radio, etc. It's been long understood that sports entertainment makes people pay less attention to things that actually practically affect them such as policy and economics, and that's part of the reason sports entertainment is so heavily pushed in US. You can replace NFL with another arbitrary made-up ball-game and nothing would change.
> As to the 850k median salary, you also have to consider that the vast majority of players don’t last more than a few years in the league.
I don't see how that's relevant? Are they incapable of working after playing the NFL? Or is working a regular job like the rest of us so shockingly terrible that it shouldn't even be considered for NFL players?
> The lifetime value of an NFL career is far less - and far more rare - than a big tech career.
If they were to live and spend like a regular person, they would save in 3 years more than the median person saves in their entire life.
> And on top of that, the advertising you dismiss is what funds much of big tech
That doesn't really contradict my point at all? I wouldn't mind at all if ads were less prevalent, more honest, and ad-based big tech like meta made less money.
> is integral to how capitalist society functions as a whole.
That's a big claim that I doubt you can back up.
What I dislike is the mass propagandization of sports, and the use of sports as a means of mass advertising and manipulation of the public.
Also, just because something has an economic or cultural impact doesn't mean it's a benefit to society. WW2 also had an 'economic and cultural impact'.
WW2 had profound and positive impact in the society. It reshaped the geopolitical picture, just to name one. Many previous colonies became independence after WW2, countries like India, China, Vietnam, or Indonesia. Wars are brutal, but wars can have positive impact.
Obviously not since forever, and big difference between playing sports and watching other people play sports. There are also different kinds of sports.
> Kids playing sport because they look up to their icons. That's hugely positive.
Nah, that's not a good reason to play sports. Having human 'icons' in general is not that great.
> There are pros and cons of everything, but to say sports have no benefit to the society is very shallow.
That's clearly not what I said, your engagement here is quite shallow.
> WW2 had profound and positive impact in the society.
lol, carry on bud
Reminds me of Steve Young
He was born and raised in Greenwich, CT. Hedge fund capital of the world. Went to school at BYU which is run by the Mormon ~Private Equity group~ Church. Played his pro career in Silicon Valley.
The stars were aligned from the start.
Dividing the entire rookie contract amount across so many investments and so many funds means relatively small investments in those funds.
No way any non-famous-athlete individual would be able to LP in those funds without athletic stardom attached. It's a selling point for those LPs to say he's part of their funds and they get to rub shoulders with a professional athlete.
Some of those big-name VC funds wouldn't even return your call if you wanted to invest several million dollars. Founders Fund brings in multiple billions of dollars when they raise a new fund.
His fame and status unlocked his access.
> Also I doubt that ex: Thrive LPs would care about this kind of thing.
Thrive has raised over ten billion dollars. If a normal moderately wealthy person showed up with a couple million dollars to invest they would not be invited to be an LP.
Fly Eagles Fly!
What I'm more interested in is how is he getting dealflow:
>The high-growth startups in his portfolio include Anthropic (currently valued at $183 billion), Anduril ($30.5 billion), Ramp ($22.5 billion), Cognition ($9.8 billion), Neuralink ($9 billion), Strike (~$1 billion), and Polymarket (~$1 billion). He’s also a limited partner in funds including Founders Fund, Thrive Capital, Silver Point Capital, and Multicoin Capital.
If he has sizable investments in these companies at an early-ish stage then one has to ask: is this guy nostradamus? Or is he doing the classic early stage playbook and investing everywhere? Is there someone else making the bets?
It's really easy to look in hindsight at this guy and said he did a good job with his money, but I'd argue for any angel that wasn't already tapped into the network, this would be an impressive portfolio. It's not like Anthropic was hurting for investors. And if it is the case that Anthropic said "why not, I'd love to have a check from 2024 superbowl champion Saquan Barkley", then it's not really repeatable.
I have plenty of friends who made quite a bit of money from previous exits and have also read Zero to One, and their angel portfolio isn't as lucrative.
Because he's Saquon Barkley. Other than your lead + maybe 1 or 2 others, everyone else is pretty interchangable. At least Saquon is interesting.
> To date, none of Barkley’s investments have flamed out or depreciated, largely because he prefers to come in at later stages of a company’s growth.
Starting with $30MM, and having who knows how many millions in endorsement deals to fall back on, makes it easier to absorb the misses. It's not necessarily about talent at this level...
for an aging star that's on the downhill side of their prime, it'd help with salary caps and letting them build new stars around them. and the franchise doesn't have to worry about shipping off a beloved player once they get too expensive.
besides, lets player take ownership of the teams that they're building just feels right.
Owners don't have to give up anything. Thanks to media deals and taking advantage of city-owned stadiums (with ridiculous parking fees and nacho prices, etc.), the teams print money no matter how good or bad they are, even if they let a beloved player go.
[1] https://collegefootballnetwork.com/how-rookie-contracts-work...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/240102/average-player-ca...
so it's for guys like mahomes (in a couple years) or rodgers (a few years ago) that are first-ballot hall of famers that have become the face of the franchise.
- management can't rebuild while paying their huge contracts. - they've already earned a ton but they'd love one more shot at a championship, so they'd glad trade some salary-now for equity-later if it means some young talent could get onto the team next to them - this also saves some of these guys from the same of having to take a paycut and admitting they're past their prime - fans would love to see their guy hanging out in the owners box ten years later