Becoming a billionaire: what does it really take?

[conquistaDan]

@complich8
Yeah but did you notice how long it took him? The stakes in Berkshire keeping rising, but value investing takes fucking forever to get your self anywhere decent financially. It could take at least 8-10+ years to become billionaire from it. Thats a long time. Too long. Point being BSE's only make you get rich faster than regular means. And it's been proven that in business most BSE's have been tech rises. Hence Jim Cramers reasoning behind the 4 horseman of tech.

Carlos Slim (#2) also wasn't a BSE event. He bought the Mexican land line system (90% market share). And look where he is.

Plus Buffett wanted to become wealthy. BSE's only make you rich if you want to be. And building a business out of it still means getting (having in most cases) a crap load of business sense, and drive to know what you're doing. Now thats rare.


@Assert

1)
You'd have to have to be really stupid to not benefit from a black swan event. I mean a real capital A grade dumb-ass not to attach yourself to it early on. I mean c'mon, if we knew Gates in the 80's, we'd be getting some capital to ride that train out.

2)
How can they suffer from investing in them? I'd love to see you explain that one. (I'll use reason number 1 as my back up reasoning for this)

3)
If they were discovered on accident. Don't you think that god had something to do with it in one form or another? That accident doesn't just happen to anyone.

However. One could argue that AIM, online chatting and chat rooms could be the prelude to what Facebook and MySpace have brought to the table. So Zuckerberg wasn't bringingthat big of a BSE (black swan event). In fact what he created wasn't useful at all really. We don't need to network online. We needed an operating system, so Gates on the other hand, now that was a BSE of monumental proportions. He wanted to be rich and knew what he was doing.