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Comment by trollbridge | Hacker News Reader

Circa 2010, I met Tai and he wanted some work done for his portfolio of dating websites he had back then. (He had a whole bunch of them targeted to various ethnic groups, religious subgroups and so on.)

It became apparent that (a) he had a huge pile of messy PHP, WordPress-based sites, and then (b) expressed contempt for paying $35 an hour for programmers since his opinion was you could get programmers in the third world for $5 an hour. He negotiated me down to $25. I ended up declining.

Like many people who crow about how they’re a “millionaire”, when it came time to show the money, he was suddenly really concerned about very small amounts of money here and there.

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Never met him personally, but one of his companies tried to recruit me for a database migration project. Part of the interview process included responding to the question "I enjoy having sex with people I hardly know" on a scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree.

Dude what the actual F. This is a crazy thing to put into a job interview.

Unless it's for a job in the adult entertainment industry.

Or if the ”recruiter” is foreign military intelligence looking to compromise people who may land in positions of interest during the next 20-30 years.

People such as database administrators.

Lol great point!

This guy loves court cases I guess?

Lately he has been promoting “AI automation agency” course.

He says anyone can label themselves “AI automation expert” and charge thousands of dollars for it, then just use vibe coding tools to do the job or outsource it.

He also says he built an entire app using replit.

Unironically the gap between his AI automation agency and VC backed "Enterprise Automation" startups is smaller than you think..

It is kind of fundamental to the nature of bubbles that near their peak they tend to feature more traditional investors backing ventures that in any other context everyone with any common sense would stay away from because the ratio of scam red flags to rational bases for believing it was a good investment are too high.

Quite. Sounds as much like Builder.AI, the London startup where AI genuinely did stand for "actually Indians", as it does Amazon Go, whose pick-and-go stores had their cameras monitored by people in India to ensure it all worked as they said it did.

Don’t forget most vertical AI “agent” startups

I am so shocked someone like this would jump on the AI hype train!

I don't know Tai Lopez and he seems like an asshole based on his public persona but I think you'd be surprised by the number of (especially first generation) millionaires who will negotiate over pennies. The easiest way to have a lot of money is to earn a lot and not spend a lot.

Having money allows you to spend time elsewhere, like cherry picking desperate employees. I know temp agencies that have it as the whole business model. If you aren't desperate you don't fit.

A friend is in commercial real estate. If you own office or warehouse space, he finds you a company to rent the space, and help negotiate the deal. Then after the deal is done, the (very wealthy) building owner often will try to re-negotiate down the agreed to fee, or say he'll pay it in four years. The guy works for 6 months getting the deal done, is supposed to get like $25K, then the wealthy building owner says he'll give him $10K and will pay over 4 years. Crazy business.

Earning a lot does the heavy lifting here (and rent of various kinds does the heavily lifting of that in turn). It's far, far easier to be "frugal" in % of your income when your income is high.

People like this Tai guy pay a premium for screwing people over, they pretty clearly could have made more money, more safely, if they didn't love the feeling of getting one up on you. That explains their attitude better than some virtue of frugality.

I've known several very rich people and the first thing I learned was that they are rich because they never spend their own money on anything.

A study found that most American millionaires lived in modest homes and drove used American cars. They made their wealth by being concerned about relatively small amounts of money because it adds up. When we think "millionaire" we think of the dream that is sold to us by Hollywood—mansions, fancy cars, endless parties. But entertainers are paid in the millions and then encouraged to live like billionaires, so that they're desperate enough to continue being slaves to the entertainment-industrial complex to keep the gravy train going.

But $35/hr was a pittance for a programmer even in 2010. Tai Lopez is a gigantic tool for cheaping out on that.

Well actors have a very strong union in the US, they used to be paid peanuts. When you have that kind of labor power, your security comes from the union, not your stored wealth, so they can afford to spend because they know they will be well compensated for their work.

Acting is notorious for being a bad career choice, and the small fraction of actors who become wealthy through acting do so because of the structure of the market for entertainment (namely, fame sells tickets, so the employers of entertainers all want to hire already-famous entertainers, making it very difficult for unknown entertainers to become famous, which is necessary to start earning good money), not because of anything to do with any union.

Since ancient times, acting and prostitution have been considered closely related industries and I think this probably never changed. The actors who "make it big" are the ones that win favors with producers one way or another, probably in many cases by sating their perverted desires. Some of this was revealed in #MeToo cases, like all the Weinstein stuff.

And there have been many books written on this topic well before Weinstein came in the scene so it's not a new thing in Hollywood at all.

There is no security. The actors' unions set minimum wages for union productions. But they don't guarantee work to anyone, and many productions are non-union. Every experienced actor is aware that they might never get another role.

I'd be interested to know what proportion of these millionnaires' net worth came from inheritances. That's the real dream Hollywood never tells you about.

Probably not as much as you probably think. Most "millionaires" today are just boomers from working class backgrounds who bought a modest property back in the 70s and now 50 years later all their illiquid assets, primarily their property, can be added up to one or two million.

Those assets are typically not counted when counting millionaires, IIRC.

Basically, your net worth is total asset minus your primary residence.

> Basically, your net worth is total asset minus your primary residence.

Net worth includes equity in your primary residence. That is the value of the property minus outstanding mortgage amount.

There are some investment scenarios where net worth is calculated minus primary residence, but those are specialty cases that are explicitly called out.

I think the point is someone who has 500k after a lifetime of putting money in a 401k along with 600k in home equity is not the same as someone who lives in a mansion and has a few exotic cars.

Tai posed as the latter, so suddenly caring about $35 an hour is very suspicious.

Precisely. It’s quite funny how any time this comes up - a person of dubious wealth who claims to be rich being a penny-pincher - people are quick to chime in with something implying they got rich by doing that. It’s like the inverse of the whole “maybe if you didn’t eat avocado toast you’d afford that $500k house…” thing

"Millionaire" is now practically synonymous with "professional nearing retirement". About 1 in 15 Americans have a net worth of over $1m.

A million dollars isn’t cool anymore, it’s like $500k a few years ago.

It starts to be cool when you have like $10 million dollars. We need a term for people who have 8 figures now that 7 is so common.

Rich?

Decamillionaire?

Da-millionaire

India provides crore for 10 million but i can’t tell if it should be croraire or croreaire

You know what's cool? A billion dollars.

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