Ideas on how to become rich - How to become a billionaire, part 1

Ideas on how to become rich - How to become a billionaire, part 1

Welcome to this series on my ideas on how to become rich site. This series on my site is about how to become a billionaire, as promised earlier. I have done research into this field and will simplify my analysis and share some ideas about this topic. Then after this series, I should be writing more about investment and finance as usual, and probably have a series on how to make money on the stock market by borrowing ideas from fund manager Peter Lynch and his book "One Up on Wall Street", but that's all in the works and in the future. This series here is about "how to become a billionaire".

First up, my research methodology for researching on this important topic: regarding how to become a billionaire, the most obvious way seemed to me to have a look at Forbes list of billionaires and see how they made their money, where they got their sources on income and the like. And it shouldn't strike you as new or special or something innovative that all of them made their money in some field or other, and they are all billionaires because their companies are listed. Therefore, the question "how to become a billionaire" can be easily answered as "get listed on the stock market and do well there" (and with tongue in cheek, of course get listed on the stock market and do well there but not in a recession - get listed and make money when the stock market is doing well!). Clearly the direct correlation is between being a billionaire and having lots of stock, either in your own company or in Warren Buffett's case, in other companies. Thus this is not the answer we are looking for. We can definitely become billionaires if we have stocks in the right company and/or we own companies that are very successful, and we have stocks in those companies.

The focus will be on the fields that the billionaires are working in, what they do, and how they earn their money - because ultimately the stock price follows their companies' incomes and revenues. This is the main focus of "how to become a billionaire" - the ways in which the rich and famous earn their money, and how their companies made them rich.

Therefore the next step was for me to take a list of billionaires that I wanted to emulate and then observed how they made their money, and that was the basis of my case studies. However, in the case studies, those were rich men, and with the exceptions of Trump and Buffett, none of the others were billionaires, although they were millionaires. To summarise, in this series I correct my former case studies and now make instead a summary and a collation of various billionaires, but not on the billionaires themselves but on the way in which they made their money - in other words, their companies and what they did.

In summary: I will be writing on "how to become a billionaire". I looked at the list of billionaires and selected a few to research on. The focus was not on their stock price but instead on the ways and ideas in which they made their money and how their companies developed.

Some of the richest men and women got their money through court cases, lawsuits, and via inheritance. Those will not be considered here in my ideas site.

The billionaires that I looked at were:

Sam Walton of Wal Mart
Brin and Page of Google
(I got all their information off the internet, and as to the validity, well, I consulted Wikipedia... of all things)
Sergei Popov
Roman Abramovich - you all know this guy if you watch football, and by football I of course am referring to the English Premier League football!
Warren Buffett
Donald Trump

as well as
Jack Welch
Henry Ford
Thomas Edison - believe it or not!
among others

Therefore the main companies that we will be looking at are:

Wal Mart
Google
Berkshire Hathaway
Ford
General Motors
General Electric

We will learn how to become a billionaire from these companies and their founders, and basically this series is a case study series not of people and not of rich people, but superrich people and superrich and huge companies. In these times of 2008 and rapid economic change and problems in the international economy, it is important to learn what is timeless and what does not change - namely the skills of how to make money, the ideas behind the companies that make money, and the history of how some companies made it big and what we can learn from that. More to come here on my site on Ideas on how to become rich! Stay tuned, thanks for reading.

Ideas on how to become rich!