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We both have a crush on Lana Lang. However, Lex talks to her more . . . |
Posted on 03/10/2007 12:13:38 PM PST by Kimmers
The new Forbes billionaires list just came out. It’s always fun to flip through the names, ages and profiles of the billionaires.
I could give you a lot of details about how many more there are than last year, where they’re from, and how much younger they all are. But details like that probably wouldn’t answer your main question:
What could you possibly have in common with a billionaire? The answer is pretty exciting.
Of all the 946 billionaires in the world, 60 percent made their money from scratch. Think about that. The majority of the world’s billionaires once had just as much money in their bank account as you do (or less!). They took what little they had, sunk it all into that product, or service, or midnight notion and built it into a fortune. For all the talk about how unfair the world is, it turns out that pure gumption can be more important than family connections.
Now, that doesn’t mean that just anybody can become a billionaire, or that the process of becoming one is always fair and square. In the first place you have to have enormous concentration and energy. It’s not for nothing that so many of the new billionaires are under 50; it’s very hard to sustain the kind of output necessary to amass so much wealth unless you’re relatively young.
And then there’s the question of whether all these bootstrap billionaires played it on the up-and-up. The fastest growing country of billionaires is Russia, a country not known for its strict adherence to the rule of law. It’s likely that some of Russia’s 53 billionaires (ranking third worldwide, next to Germany with 55 and the U.S. with 415) bent or broke rules to get there.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Russia is making money hand-over-fist with oil and natural gas.
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We both have a crush on Lana Lang. However, Lex talks to her more . . . |
...unless he or she listens to Psychostick's "Beer is Good!!!"
That rather soundly puts the lie to the "disadvantaged" hogwash inherent in liberal classist diatribes.
I agree. And I'm surprised nobody has jumped on me yet! I love the part of that speech where she basically says you get the dreams you dream for. Dream small, and that's what you'll get. The more wounded the woman, the smaller the dream. Man, she's so right about that.
Every one of the new Russian billionaires are there because of oil or metals prices. Eight years ago they were crying in their vodka and looking to unload those assets.
I'm confused. My liberal friends told me that all billionaires got their money by stealing it from black people!
Oh yeah. That's where the big money is.
I haven't been able to read the latest issue of Forbes yet.
You're absolutely correct! Slow and Steady does win the race! That's the only way you'll make any sort of money is to go it slow.
You are right, and the biggest 'congenital deficiency' people have are they themselves.
Not sure if he's a billionaire by now, but this man became a millionaire and then lost everything, only to fight his way back to success. It's a very good book: Self-Made in America, Plain Talk for Plain People About the Meaning of Success.
Another good book on becoming successful: The Magic of Thinking Big.
For a millionairehood there is a guaranteed recipe: start in early 20s and keep maxing on 401k, and use index funds so as not to be led astray.- i.e. persistence, compounded interest over a long time, broad market tracking. But then, being a millionaire is not what it used to be. To get to a "b-" level, though, this recipe is plainly insufficient - there one really needs to know what one is doing.
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