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Comment by littletimmy | Hacker News Reader

The single greatest factor in being a billionaire is luck.

Elon Musk and Peter Thiel would probably be languishing in obscurity if Paypal had not been sold off right at the edge of the dotcom bubble and given them a financial base to propel their future.

It is being at the right place, at the right time, with the right skill, finding the right investors/employees, partners and much more. When all of that aligns, you get a billionaire. It is only slightly less lucky than playing lottery.

PS: This does not apply to being a millionaire. You can be a millionaire by working hard, taking an upper middle class job and investing prudently.

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You will need a lot of luck to be a millionaire too, in fact for anything. If that wasn't the case bulk of the world population would be millionaires. Hunger and poverty would have been long eradicated.

Luck is the final ingredient, secret sauce of sorts that makes a hardworking person rich. A person isn't successful just out of hard work, its because they are lucky too.

And besides that you won't be rich if you are too nice, honest and sincere.

It's a product of how people look for solutions to problems. When people look at obstacles and constantly say to themselves "I can't do X because Y" they will never be billionaires. If you look at something and say "If I can find a way to circumvent or overcome Y, X will make me a million dollars, let's find a way to solve Y and provide X." That's the reason most people are not millionaires. So many look at all the hindrances preventing them from getting to the finish line that the solution never gets realized and they never make their millions.

While many people who don't start never make it. This doesn't mean every who starts does.

My point was you need to do all the hard work. But luck play a huge role after that or at that stage.

Either way you can still get rich if you are lucky. In fact that is what luck is about. Its an unfair advantage.

While you may not hit 100% of the shots you take, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

Luck is relativistic, though. It's far easier to become a billionaire when you've already established your success and connections. The fact that you can easily become a millionaire by working hard means that becoming a billionaire is easier from there than starting from scratch.

Paypal IPO'd in 2002.

Paypal got $3MM in VC in 1999, which is really what the OP should have said instead of "sold".

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