How to become a Trillionaire (without getting lucky)
A First Principles approach to Creating Gargantuan Wealth
Let’s imagine for a moment that life is a game, and the sole purpose is to join—or should I say create—the 4 comma club. How would you do it?
Rules of the Game
There are rules!
— Roger Sterling, Mad Men
There are other rules.
— Bert Cooper, Mad Men
There is only one meta rule when you're playing this game, and it is that there are no rules, only heuristics. That is what it means to navigate complex systems such as those entailed in the creation of wealth. Still, treating these heuristics as rules will be useful.
1: Do no harm: There are countless ways to make a ton of money, and a lot of them involve doing some of the most vile things humans are capable of. This is not the game we're signing up for. Acquiring wealth unethically (no matter how massive) means, by definition, that your gains will be fleeting because you're "gonna get got" eventually, either by your enemies, the state, or the people you wronged. Furthermore, creating wealth on this magnitude requires that you play iterated, positive sum games, and it's hard to do that when everyone thinks you're an asshole. If you're gonna play this game, you're gonna have to create wealth, not steal it.
2: Be money: Capital, like life, seeks to perpetuate itself, and it does so by sticking closely to those who: a) already own lots of it; b) demonstrate the ability to conjure it almost at will. Internalize this. If you want to make ungodly amounts of money, you have to become the type of person capital seeks endlessly to return to.
3: Do not chase a check: This may sound counterintuitive at best, and contradictory at worst, but the reasoning here is pretty simple: explicitly pursuing capital will ensure that your decision-making framework throughout your quest will be to optimize for more capital. This will result in an insidious kind of short-termism that, by the time you decide to shift tactics, will have become a mind virus you cannot rid yourself of.
Why is short term thinking bad for wealth creation? Because wealth compounds, and compounding can look counterintuitively small for a while before exploding into hyper-growth. As a result, short term thinkers will always be incentivized to leave money on the table because they do not understand the power of exponential growth. Just look at Wall Street bankers. Those guys wake up everyday with the sole goal of optimizing for money: turning $1 into $1.25 so they can buy that yacht to impress the caked-up, thick brunette who would have barely registered their existence in college. But when all is said and done, have any of these masters of the universe ever consistently created financial value in the Trillions? Of course not. They do not build anything—i.e, they do not create any real wealth or value for the world—they just move money around to accrue a little bit of interest here, and a little more ROI there, so they can cash a chunky bonus at the end of the year, all at society’s expense. You will not win by being one of those guys.
While the objective of the game is clear—make $1 Trillion or be ruined—it is one's tactics in achieving the objective which separates the wheat from the chaff.
Tutorial
As the title specifies, you're playing this game without the hope of getting lucky, so let me give you the bad news first: you live with your parents, own $8000 (at best) in total assets, and recently graduated college, where you learned jack shit and came out with a mountain of debt for the privilege (*in case you're wondering where I'm getting this picture, this is the profile of the average American young adult in 2020). Factor in some sociological disparities—depending on your societal context—and the picture can look even bleaker. The good news? You're basically starting out at 0-10 XP, so the only way from here is up.
Since we've established that you're fucked at the starting line, you should ask yourself what you should do about it. What's your next move? Get un-fucked. This will require re-educating yourself, but not to get smarter—smart people are a dime a dozen. The history of the world, alongside being the accounts of exceptional human beings, is also the history of the failed geniuses and smart-asses who were left in their shadows. No, your re-education is about acquiring the fitness to endure the kind of game you're about to play. You—and your time—are your most valuable resources.
In this order, you need to: make your health a priority; cut out all noise in favor of signal (cut off any kind of media with the explicit aim to distract you; seek any kind of media which respects you and your time); acquire the mental and physical endurance necessary to play a long, iterative game; read widely and obscurely (stop asking for book recommendations or checking out "top 10 books to read" lists; if everyone you know has read Sapiens, that is a negative signal of the value of that book); learn to see in the dark by developing a vision and point of view about the world; get really smart about risk and probability; and most importantly, in order to win the game, you must study the endgame; to avoid losing, you must study the edge cases of the game.
It's not enough to know all the rules, you must also know all the exceptions.
Strategy
Now that you've become sufficiently prepared for your journey, time to decide on a strategy. Making a Trillion dollars seems like an unsurmountable task; our brains cannot even fathom the number of zeros involved. But one can render any Herculean task manageable by breaking it down into achievable components. Specifically, you can get to $1 Trillion by:
Owning 100% of two $500 Billion companies (World Class)
Owning 50% of two $1 Trillion companies (Legendary)
Owning 25% of four $1 Trillion companies (Hall of Fame)
Owning 10% of a $10 Trillion company (GOD MODE)
If you're paying attention you will notice a couple things:
We have not left the realm of the possible. Right now in 2020, there are at least four companies that we know of who have cracked/are on their way to crack a $1 Trillion market cap: Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet. The latter two took less than 25 years to do so, while Apple did it in a decade (over 2/3 of Apple's Trillion Dollar market cap was accrued after Jobs' death). In other words, through the exponential nature of tech and the generous margins of its biggest successes, Trillion dollar companies are being minted faster than ever before in history. This isn’t an aberration. It’s the new normal.
Notice the emphasis on ownership. Wealthy people do not collect salaries; they own appreciating assets which consistently return greater amounts of capital to them. The surest way to own such assets is either by starting or investing in companies (or equivalent appreciating assets). Basically, there are two approaches to acquiring wealth: create it or buy it. That's it.
Since the point of the game is to win without gettin lucky, let's assume you don't have a rich dad or a powerful uncle who can let you in on some deals or connect you to a broker. All you have is yourself and your time, so you're gonna have to create some wealth. You're gonna have to build companies.
But that's still pretty vague. Gawker was a company, and they never came close to a $1 Trillion valuation. McDonalds is a as well, a pretty popular one at that, yet it hasn't done so either. No, it's not enough to just start a company. If you look at the examples of the $Trillion tech companies displayed above, all of them gave the world something it valued highly and distributed it at a gargantuan scale. This is the secret about startups: what makes them special is their ability to scale distribution faster and cheaper than ever before. Amazon did not invent the shopping cart. They scaled internet-enabled global commerce. The going rate for solving that problem was always going to be a Trillion Dollar outcome. That's the kind of company you need to build.
But hold on one minute. If it were that simple to do, obviously the world would have as many Jeff Bezos(es?) as it does bankers. Obviously that's not the case, so in order to build this company(ies), you can't just do what anybody else would do. That'll guarantee any gains are competed away. You have to create something that only you could deliver to the world at scale. You must develop a unique advantage, or leverage an existing one. In Thielian terms, you need to discover a secret. And to do that, you will need to significantly improve your Founder Taste. This will be the hardest part of the journey, believe it or not. Working on the right project at the right time is 90% of the game. You fuck that up, and you’re done—which is why just “solving problems” or “building something people want” is some of the worst startup advice out there. People didn’t want the computer until Jobs gave it to them. Don’t just build for the sake of building. Develop the nose and patience to spot the few moments of outrageous leverage that arise every century, then relentlessly exploit them to the best of your ability.
Following the prescriptions in the "Tutorial" section is a good place to start. Here’s a heuristic: look for burgeoning exponential curves, and design something that can leverage the curve in some productive way.
Taking all of it into consideration, you finally decide on a strategy:
Leverage a unique advantage to...
Build one or more innovative, high scale, high value (at least $1 Trillion) companies where...
You own at least 10%-25% of the value
There's one more issue. Let's assume you've figured out what you want to work on, and that you're leveraging a unique advantage to do it. Remember, you're playing this game without any luck, and you started out on the back foot (no rich parents or network). How do you get the seed capital to start your journey?
Most people in tech will tell you to look at Venture Capitalists. But since your network is trash and your credentials even worse, forget about this route. Despite the rhetoric, VC's rarely invest in unproven talent, at least not if they didn't go to Harvard, Stanford, or YC. Furthermore, VC is particularly vampiric to first time founders because they are really risky. Given that you're trying to optimize for ownership, equity is immensely valuable, so you shouldn't waste it chasing after VC's; they will come to you when you’re well on your Trillion dollar path (VCs are like beautiful women, they find you more attractive the less thirsty you are).
Your only option for seed capital, then, is to do things the old fashioned way: get customers to buy what you're making. The best thing about this strategy is that it will enable you to de-risk your project extremely quickly, saving you time. You don't even have to have a product ready. If it's software, learn Sketch, Figma, or Photoshop, cook up some mockups, prototype your product with Invision or Principle, and link to a buy button on a Squarespace landing page and using Stripe as a payment processor. If it's hardware, save enough money to hire a skilled CG artist or designer on Fiverr (no more than $500), create product mockups, package it all into a desirable presentation on a landing page site and start collecting pre-orders.
If the above sounds alien to you, look up all of the words you don't understand and educate yourself; the internet is your university. If it still sounds alien, then you may be playing the wrong game.
Game On
OK so you've read the rules of the game, you've gone through the tutorials, and you've sorted out the strategic elements necessary to win. Now it's time to play.
The beauty of high stakes games is that they're extremely binary: either you get the trophy or you don't. In order to win at this game—in order to become a Trillionaire—you cannot just play well. You have to be the greatest to ever do it. You're playing to become the Michael Jordan of acquiring wealth. In order to do that, you need to become an Infinite Player.
Borrowing from James Carse's Finite and Infinite Games, a finite game is a game you play to win, and an infinite game is one you play to continue the play indefinitely. Wealth creation—or capitalism or markets—is an infinite game. Nobody can ever "win capitalism", because so long as the human imagination exists, there are an infinite amount of desires possible, and so long as desire exists, so does the possibility of creating wealth by fulfilling those desires.
But wait. You will notice we've come to a paradox; if your goal is to win the game (finite outcome), while the game itself is an infinite game (indefinite outcome), then it stands to reason that playing to become a Trillionaire is actually not a game you can ever "win", but rather a goal you can only attain on the way to something else: the infinite game—which in this case is something like "delivering global wealth creation and prosperity at scale, forever".
In less abstract terms, if you play just to make $1 Trillion, you may attain the figure, but only fleetingly. Indeed companies like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet have all tasted, however briefly, from the four comma fountain. Yet not all of them have claimed the crown as an out-and-out $Trillion company because the game is still afoot. Nobody is taking their ball and going home, and if they have a say in it, they never will.
To reiterate, an Infinite Player is a person who plays to continue the play, not someone who plays to end the game. Further, an Infinite Player has the talent to see when someone is about to lose, at which point they are able to change the rules of the game or figure out a way to get that person back into the play. In other words, the game you are playing is not "how to become a Trillionaire", but "how to accelerate the flywheel of prosperity and keep it going forever". As you navigate this game, you must think not in terms of finite stakes ($1 Trillion or bust), but rather you must adopt the mindset and stamina that conjure $Trillion outcomes consistently. In more cliché parlance, you must think bigger. Bigger than anybody in the history of wealth creation has ever thought. No pressure.
To that end, there are things that you can do tactically to constantly generate such outcomes:
Prioritize Unexpressed Needs, not Expressed Wants
Beyond making something people want, the great companies often create products that most people didn't even know they needed. This is more art than science. No founder, no matter how great, can "Lean Startup" their way to the airplane. For the Wright brothers, manned flight was the goal from the beginning. There was no "pivot". Thus, great inventions seem to resemble works of art, as they are presented to the market as proposals that service a deep, unexpressed need, not mere product solutions.
Understand and Leverage Human Universals
Regular companies and businesses sell products and services in exchange for money. Sometimes they sell you products even when you don’t want them by manipulating your desires through ads. But great companies augment, accelerate, de-risk, or unlock human universals, scaling them to gargantuan size to fulfill the most people. What's a human universal? Food, shelter, security, love, knowledge, companionship, ambition, etc. Essentially, anything which could fit on the Maslow hierarchy of needs. This ability to leverage tech to scale deeply sated human drives is what makes startups civilizational entities. Google exponentially augments the discovery of knowledge and information. Amazon augments the commercial capacity for the world to trade and consume. Apple (under Steve) augmented our ability to do complex knowledge work.
Invention > Innovation
Innovation is about doing things better in the present state; invention is about creating new states entirely. Most people are rewarded in school (and at work) for solving problems, but true wealth creation happens at the margins. As computer pioneer Alan Kay theorized, most current problems are irrelevant because they come out of the current context; solving them only rewards you for finding another way to maintain the status quo. But true invention, along the lines of the first airplane or the computer, are not about maintaining the present context, but rather about going beyond it entirely. So forget about problem solving. Find problems to solve instead. This, by the way, is something that nobody will reward you for doing (who needs new problems?!), until way after you've done it. That is your advantage.
Capture Value
We all know the stories of inventors who brought so much prosperity to the world yet died with little recognition and pennies to their name. Tesla is the archetypal figure of the exploited, naive inventor. This doesn't have to be you. If you're going to generate Trillion dollar outcomes, it is useful to try to capture as much value as you create because it can enable you to create even more value for society (so long as you remain an Infinite Player). Peter Thiel has an equation for value capture:
A business creates X dollars of value and captures Y% of X. X and Y are independent variables.
Thiel's argument is that Y is almost always 0%. Most brilliant inventors did not capture the vast majority of the value they created, the reason being that extremely valuable markets are dynamic and incredibly complex to model, which makes it hard to know where the real value lies (this is often not obvious for years).
How do you avoid this trap? When inventing new markets, you must vertically integrate to capture most of the value you create across the entire value chain. Examples like Standard Oil, Apple, and Tesla show exactly how successful this strategy can be.
Seek Glory, not Success
Most people have very narrow areas of optimization in their lives. For the most part, they just want to make a little money so they can have a stress free life and pay the bills. Most founders/entrepreneurs do the same thing: they chase success, usually in the form of an exit. But the surest way to generate the kinds of $Trillion outcomes I'm talking about requires founders who aren't just chasing a buck, but are after something more ethereal; something like glory. I've discussed this previously in another essay on great founder archetypes:
Success here means the typical trappings of building a thriving company: a large exit, a successful IPO, or simply a profitable business. Probably 80–90% of founders fit in this category. Founders who are after success often concern themselves with pragmatic problem spaces. They’re not interested in going to Mars or re-inventing the wheel. They simply look for a problem, devise an elegant solution to solve it, build an organization to scale operations, and exit when the time is appropriate. These founders are often at their best building SAAS startups, creating products in large, known markets, or simply generating innovative business models at will. They are an investor’s best friend. Excellence, on the other hand, is the object of desire for the most anomalous of founders. Excellence here means a kind of supra-rational desire for building a company. Something that genuinely extends beyond making a buck. Usually, it is a result of that founder’s ego and own sense of self. This desire for excellence in that founder is often a quest for transcendence. The young Steve Jobs is known to have visited a zen master, telling him that he thought himself “anointed”. Chosen.
Chasing success will guarantee you will work on boring, non-Trillion dollar sized opportunities. Do not look for shortcuts. Pursue greatness, excellence, and glory, and the score will take care of itself.
Live long and prosper
Lastly, in order to play this game well, you will most likely have to work at a high level for at least two generations. So be mindful of your health, and the health of those you care about, for they will enrich your life as you carry on this arduous journey.
There you have it. A rudimentary playbook on how to become a Trillionaire, starting from the gutter. I'm personally fascinated by a world where Trillionaires are common mostly because of what it might mean in terms of the net societal wealth created to ensure such outcomes. If wealth is essentially an accounting metric for how much societal value is created, then creating even more of it is a net good. Whether that wealth trickles down or not is largely a question of ethics, policy, and philosophy, and something I will address in another essay.
Regardless, the race to becoming the first Trillionaire is on. In terms of real contenders—i.e people who are still young enough to acquire massive wealth and talented enough to keep playing the game at a high level—only Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg (youth is most on his side) presently make the grade. Then there's the long shots like you and I. Personally, I'm not shy about this: I'm calling my own shot. I have a specific point of view about the world, and I endeavor to acquire the means to actualize it. I'm playing the game.
It will be fun revisiting this essay in 20-30 years to see how things played out.
I’ll leave you with one last exhortation: never stop playing.
Hi Alpha, I loved reading this and would love to discuss more. My email is torkuradaniel@gmail.com. Please hit me up.