What skills does he have that I completely lack?
Even this site is maybe a good example. You can apply to YCombinator with little more than a partner, plan, and pitch. The worst that happens is they say no, and if they say yes then you get a $500k funded shot at your idea with lots of advice on top and people trying to help you succeed. Yeah the chances of acceptance are low, but if you've ever read applications for pretty much anything, a ridiculous amount are just complete garbage, so your chances are better than the numbers suggest if you're halfway competent.
At the same time, I think going from mid-6 to 7 figure income is a lot less controversial than 10 figure net worth. It's still unlikely to be related to whether someone is a scaled up version of another, but at what point you consider the reasons for earning that much "fair" tend to go a lot deeper than plain fraud.
(Don't get me wrong there are systemic issues with both of the examples above, but the point is fundamentally there's value in understanding and taking on risks that others might be less willing to take)
Also, just generally, the question is wrong. Perpetrating a massive fraud is very time-consuming and, ultimately, requires a level of self-deception that most people don't have the energy for. Milton, SBF, etc. did the things they did because they wanted to believe they were someone other than who they were. There is nothing wrong with knowing who you are and just being that person. To say this another way, Milton was clearly unwell, he is now unwell with more money than can be actually used, being unwell is not an example for anyone particularly when you trade it for something with extremely limited marginal value.
Jason Zweig:
There are three ways to make a living:
1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.
2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.
3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.
Also remember survivorship bias: lots of folks with "initiative and [high?] risk tolerance" fail, but you may not hear about them.
Obligatory:
If you clocked the hours they spent and compared it to a decent consulting fee then yeah - they're losing lots of money. But in reality they're doing that stuff during the time that most of us are shit posting, browsing the web, playing games, and so on. And so if you compare it to that, they're making a hefty chunk of change with the upside that they do have a chance, whatever it may be, of something really sticking and that being their to the Moon project. And you know, even just getting to the atmosphere is enough for a life changing result.
Or getting back to the Y Combinator thing. It costs $0 to apply, and the worst that happens is that they say no. All it takes is giving up a bit of time off our shitposting time. But that's somehow not an offer many of us are willing to accept, which is really pretty weird if you think about it!
That said, looks like this guy is actually more of a "self made man" as he started several businesses out of college with moderate success. The first was an alarm company (Spoiler, those are generally MLMs and there's 100 of them). Looks like he was just successful enough at it.
It's not shocking to me that someone who starts an MLM ends up in trouble with the SEC.
And it's not shocking that someone from Utah starts an MLM. MLM and other scams seem to be the main industry in Utah.
A non-snarky comment is in my experience the LDS church puts a great deal of emphasis on entrepreneurship, wealth, and "excellence in all things" that leads some to do great things and others to shamelessly steal and cheat.
This does not make it less wrong but fraud is essential.
> wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain
There is no reason entrepreneurship has to involve deception.
A lot of smart people get woo-ed by bad pitches or wrapped up in cults too. It's all about how the message is coded for the target audience. An astute MLM seller uses very different language to sell to a small farmer vs a young silicon valley graduate[1]. There's also the aspect of how vulnerable the audience is at that point in their lives, cults are especially good (bad?) at finding people in tumultuous periods in their lives, looking for any sort of hope and/or support system to pull them through it. Then the cult provides the community and short-term structure they crave at the time, to their long-term detriment.
Personally, how relatively smart and even generally skeptical people fall for cults and conspiracy theories is one of the most fascinating sociological phenomena out there.
[1] leaning somewhat on general stereotypes for the sake of argument, not insinuating all these people are the same, or implying anything about the relative intelligence of a farmer vs a silicon valley graduate.
The truly great founders, CEOs, and investors of our generation have generally been people who could see the difference between articulate and intelligent, and valued intelligence as the driving characteristic of people who built their products.
He certainly could have made billions if he had been greedy (not given any away) and lazy (just lived off the dividends and never sold) and never done another thing in his life - more billions than Bezos.
I'm going to have to disagree. There are many things that make the two Steves different. Woz was just never interested in the same things Jobs was. Woz wanted to make cool shit. Jobs wanted to have his products rule the world.
As George Carlin would say, it's a big club, and you ain't in it.
1. The ability to lie shamelessly.
2. Charisma.
3. Confidence.
The last two (or all three, really) can be combined into ‘salesmanship’, more or less.
Key point is to not let yourself forget what is that you're doing: manipulating people. Or in other words, don't forget that there is such thing as reality. Many fell into this one trap.
Shameless Conviction.
You'd be amazed how "successful" one can be if willing to lie, cheat and/or steal.
It does not take any special skills to do this. All it takes is having no integrity.
The ability to tell tall tales that are completely disconnected from reality. And be able to do so with utter confidence.
Either way, it's maximum corruption.
And we, the people, continue to choose "public discourse" as a mechanism to bring awareness and, perhaps, attend to the issue; yet, the discourse available to the people is limited, both economically and even in social media, algorithmically.
I hate to sound like a decentralization fanatic, but decentralizing power away from centralized actors is the only way we will be able to right these wrongs and essentially bring fairness to society.
We, the people, deserve to reap rewards based on skill and the proper application thereof.
And if you think decentralization brings fairness I suggest you visit some of the more decentralized parts of the world. Decentralization can solve some problems, but that's not one of them.