What Will it Take To Be the World’s First Trillionaire?

Many people believe Elon Musk is on his way to becoming the world’s first trillionaire.

According to a report, Elon Musk’s wealth has seen a 129% average annual increase since 2017; and if he keeps this up, he will become the first trillionaire in the next two years.

Indeed, Musk seems to check off most of the conditions, but it’s still unclear who will be the world’s first trillionaire, or if there should be one.

The world’s first billionaire 

John D. Rockefeller is credited with being the world’s first billionaire in 1916, owing to his ownership of Standard Oil.

Rockefeller influenced the way entire industries operate. He perfected the process of converting oil into fuel, which shaped modern America.  

He also owned the railroads that transported the oil, lowering costs and simplifying logistics.

He was the wealthiest person in the world at the time because of his direct influence on how everything in an entire country was done.

At the moment, there are 2668 billionaires in the world, yet only a few of them have had the same global influence as the first billionaire.

Here are 3 things it will take to be the world’s first trillionaire.

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1. The idea

It isn’t just the idea. Ideas alone mean nothing; everyone has one. Ideas are only worth a million after they have made a million dollars.

You will be inclined to say it is the execution, which is correct, but that will be only on a micro-scale because we are talking about trillionaires here.

Consider the case where you develop a working technology that can turn stone into gold at the touch of a button. Will you become a trillionaire because of that technology?

For starters, you’ll have to turn all of the planet’s stones into gold. Secondly, gold will have lost a significant amount of its value at that point because gold is valuable since there isn’t much of it and finding, extracting, and moulding it takes time.

Thirdly, you won’t be helping anyone. You won’t be adding value to people’s lives or solving their issues. Instead, you’ll be making something that no one asked you to make.

People are looking for a billion-dollar idea, something so revolutionary and transformative that no one has ever thought of it before, but the problem is that it does not exist.

2. Scalability 

Even if you develop a device that magically changes garbage waste into drinkable water, you will not become wealthy unless you can transform all of the garbage waste on the planet into usable water.

When someone wants to acquire a business, they don’t look at what you’ve done before, they want to see if you can do it on a worldwide scale. 

Is it distribution or logistics that will prevent the company from expanding? An agreement can be achieved if the answer is apparent and they give a solution.

When it comes to growing a business, scalability is the most important factor to consider. Can you do it again on a worldwide scale now that you’ve done something and it worked?

Tesla did not become so successful because it only produced one fully functional electric vehicle.

They figured out a way to mass-produce these on a budget, and people genuinely want to use them. So far, about 2 million Tesla cars have been sold.

Scalability is the main reason businesses don’t grow. They can’t make more of what they are making well without affecting the quality of the end product or without losing money, and this eventually leads to them going out of business. 

Your ability to manufacture something at scale determines how big you can grow, and in order to figure that out, you will need to solve logistics. 

3. Logistics 

One of the world’s problems is not over-population but unequal distribution. 

This is a really difficult problem to tackle, and no one has been able to do it completely so far.

Everyone who has attempted to handle distribution on a large scale has been enormously wealthy. Google is listed twice in the top ten richest lists. 

You can Google anything from anywhere on the globe. This indicates a global distribution of information is distributed globally.

The logistics of online shopping were solved by Jeff Bezos. Elon Musk solved the logistics of electric energy, from cars to batteries to houses. 

A major difficulty is how to deliver things from point A to point B in a reliable and sustainable manner; if you do it right, you will become wealthy. However, all of this will be useless if you don’t get the next step right.

4. Your product must provide value

The world’s first trillionaire will create something that will be of interest to a critical mass of people globally. 

Your efforts will be in vain if people are uninterested in what you have to offer. You might even discover that what others find beneficial isn’t what you originally intended to develop.

If you can find a way to add value to the world, you will become wealthy. A person with this thinking is likely to become a billionaire, if not a trillionaire, in the future.

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