Make Money Online

The Six Strangest World Billionaires

Of course, having more money than most people would know what to do with tends to make some people a little odd. And what’s the point of having all that money if you can’t do whatever you want, no matter how bizarre? Here are the extreme cases of people who would be oddities anyway – even if they were broke!

Nicolas Berggruen – the homeless billionaire

Nicolas Berggruen has  a net worth of $3 billion. He made that by being born into the famous family of art collectors. He made even more money through his involvement in private equity and hedge fund businesses. Yet he has no house, preferring to live out of hotels. Every meal he eats is at a restaurant. He doesn’t even own a car! In his interview, he explained, “Living in a grand environment to show myself and others that I have wealth has zero appeal. Whatever I own is temporary, since we’re only here for a short period of time.”

Bill Gates – the technophile

You’d expect the founder of Microsoft to be enthusiastic about technology, but he takes it to an extreme beyond all reason. His mansion includes an underground music system for his swimming pool, two secret bookcase doors, speakers hidden in the wallpaper so that music flows into the room from nowhere, and an RIF-chip system so that the house can adjust the thermostat in a room according to the preferences of whoever is in that room. Sometimes he pushes technology too far – he has been caught onstage with a 50-foot “blue screen of death” when he’s demoing Windows and it crashes, he spent his first night in his mansion trying to figure out how to turn off the TV, and he once wrote a blistering letter to his engineers when he spent a whole day trying to get his own computer to install a media codec.

Carl Icahn – the predator

Carl Icahn is self-described “corporate raider”. His specialty is hostile takeovers, his greatest being TWA in 1985. His latest move has been a years-long battle to take over Yahoo!, Inc., for pretty much no reason except he feels like it. While other billionaires build fortunes, he waits for somebody else to build one – then he goes in to take it away! He has also described himself as an “investor activist”. The Wall Street Journal is even up in arms about him, as written in their article “Why Carl Icahn Is Bad For Investors”: He pushes for strategies that raise prices in the short term while harming companies’ long-term prospects. Carl Icahn is a bad boy that won’t play nice with others. But he’s fun to watch!

Sultan of Brunei – the playboy

Bored? Well, just build your own amusement park! That’s apparently what Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah was thinking when he built Jerudong Park, a $1 billion theme park which boasts a steel looping roller coaster, carousel, pedal boats, pirate ship, skydiver, bumper cars, go-carts, shooting gallery, amphitheater, and a musical fountain show. Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston have performed at the amphitheater. Can’t he just watch TV like the rest of us?

Zimbabwe – the starving “billionaires”

OK, we’re cheating with this one. The “billionaires” of Zimbabwe are only “billionaires” in Zimbabwe dollars – a one-billion-dollar Zimbabwe banknote is currently worth one United States penny – and falling! Zimbabwe has inflation at the rate of 2.2 million percent. 80% of the population of Zimbabwe lives below the poverty line. It is an especially sad sight to see a filthy Zimbabwe child in rags and bare feet walk down a muddy path to the store to buy a slice of bread for today’s meal, while carrying huge armloads of worthless paper money to do so.

Steve Fossett – missing forever?

Billionaire Steve Fossett was a world-class adventurer, with five nonstop circumnavigations of the Earth to his credit including as a long-distance solo balloonist, as a sailor, and as a solo flight fixed-wing aircraft pilot. As a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Explorers Club, Fossett has set 116 records in five different sports. Now, how does a guy like this manage to lose an airplane over the bare, clear Nevada desert in September 2007 so thoroughly that no searcher can find him? The biggest search and rescue team in America’s history can’t even confirm he’s dead. Not a single bolt of his plane wreckage has turned up anywhere. Several reporters have brought up the possibility that he might have faked his own death. Lieutenant Colonel Cynthia Ryan of the US Civil Air Patrol, who has been part of the search effort, has stated, “I’ve been doing this search and rescue for 14 years. Fossett should have been found. We’re pretty good at what we do.”

Share The Love: Bookmark This Make Money Online Post, Thanks!

Popularity: 2% [?]

Eight Ways to Think Like a Billionaire

In our studies of world billionaires and how they got that way, we’ve noticed many traits that many billionaires in general have in common. So if you’re looking to make your first billion, these are some good ways to think:

1. Have a dream.

The vast majority of billionaires in the world are all self-made. Most of them were born middle-class or lower and a few started out in poverty. Without exception, every self-made billionaire had a dream, an idea, a vision, or a plan and they stuck to it. They failed first, but they tried again. They failed ten times, but they kept trying. Some of them stuck to the same idea for forty years or more before they had success, but they succeeded.

2. Never be satisfied.

The movie “Scarface” is a unique story, because the plot revolves around the lead character never developing. Al Pacino’s character ends the movie as the same low-class street hustler that he was when he started, regardless if he’s washing dishes or smoking $100 dollar cigars in a hot tub in a mansion. Without the “say hello to my little friend” and the dying part, lots of billionaires are like that, too. They decide that they can never be too rich, and they just start making money and never stop.

3. Be nice to your relatives.

Inheriting money is still the easiest way to make it, and the billionaires who aren’t self-made usually inherit it. But no matter what, most billionaires are in close with their blood relatives. Many of them just needed that $5000 investment from dad to seed their start-up. Others ended up having their brothers or kids around to co-found and manage the business.

4. Make other people listen to you.

Without a doubt, all self-made billionaires have powerful instincts. The problem with instinct is that it’s hard to argue with other people when they doubt you. A hunch is your brain telling you something without bothering to explain the details to you. That’s hard to explain to somebody else. Follow your instinct, and when others question your plan, just say “I’m following my instinct! You should follow it, too!”

5. Sell cheap.

The cheapest price often wins the sale. Many of the world’s billionaire entrepreneurs based their business success on selling their product cheaper than anybody else. How simple, and yet many, many penny profits amounted to billions of dollars over time. You can’t argue with a price that’s a dollar less than any other price.

6. Look ahead.

It seems like luck when you look back on it – but it was vision. Most billionaires saw where the market was going and moved fast to be there first. Look around right now – is there a niche that nobody’s exploiting that can develop into a big market soon? Many times, the silliest idea in the present – something you think nobody would be willing to pay money for – ends up being the next hot world-wide market.

7. Reinvent.

Almost no-one in the billionaires club came up with a brand new product. Instead, they made improvements to existing products. They build a better model, they changed the way it was made, they changed a process, they streamlined something, or they just re-organized the assembly line.

8. Stay humble.

Here’s a big idea that nobody seems to think of: Part of having money lies in not spending it! Many self-made billionaires stick to their old spending habits even though they can afford better now. They fly passenger-class, drive their own cars, live in apartments, even wear worn-out clothes. But they put the money back into the business, where it could make more money. In fact, only the billionaires who inherited their fortunes tend to spend it in big ways.

Eight Ways to Think Like a Billionaire By Make Money Online With Ross Dalangin

Share The Love: Bookmark This Make Money Online Post, Thanks!

Popularity: 37% [?]