Why does it have to be a “major invention”. I interned for a guy who made a couple of million off of some stupid aluminum reinforcing strap you nail to the roof frame when building a house in a high-wind zone. He was a giant asshole and his family was all fucked up, but that’s a different story.
If only the desire to be rich made it so. 
I had to cut down the criteria to be included, otherwise it would take months/years to calculate “rich” including inflation.
I would classify this in the “luck” category, since it’s related to birth family.
I don’t believe it. I’d like to see anyone from that tv show about extreme couponing become a billionaire.
But, thank you for something that wouldn’t fit into the other criteria.
Because, quite simply, he wasn’t first. He lucked out that his model caught on. Google’s founders, on the other hand, aimed for innovation.
The evidence is fairly overwhelming that education is not the key to great wealth. I would recommend looking at the stats on high school diploma vs AA vs BA.
Alas, yes, I admit that I grasped on some of the categories. I didn’t feel, at the time, that I wanted to research about, for example, Columbian drug lords and converting their wealth into 2012 dollars.
Gimme a break. You basically plagizrized my list in your list. If you want to start a new thread, I would recommend waiting ~6-12 months for the STMB to forget this thread.
Look again, what you listed fits nicely in my categories already.
Luck, sorry.
I had actually already forgotten this thread.
Your list is so vague as to be meaningless. You basically said luck, stealing, or earning it (twice). Except that every possible method for earning it you then handwave as “luck”.
How do you figure that is “luck”? Winning the lottery is luck. Collecting an inherentance is luck. Recognizing a need for a particular product in your field (in this case, structural engineering), designing that product, applying for a patent, and then making a couple million off the sale of that product is not luck. At least it isn’t luck in the sense you are talking about where money just falls into your lap with no effort on your part.
What did Gates/Allen do that was fraudulent, unethical, or illegal? He provided a product that lots of people bought into. Who did he drive out of business. When IBM came calling, he was to provide a BASIC and he sent them to Kildall for an OS. For reasons that are still not clear (several stories have been told, but the most convincing was that Kildall didn’t want to sign a non-disclosure agreement) so they came back to Gates who bought a quick and dirty OS from Seattle Computing and modified it for IBM.
Yes, he was much later convicted of anti-trust violations but that always struck me as BS. There are considerable advantages to a small of OSs (one thing developers absolutely hate is being asked to develop for more than one or two OSs).
Most people will never get rich because they think life is too short to spend every last minute working.
If only to prove you have no idea what you are talking about, simply research what gates/allen did to Lotus. If you need a link, I will provide it. And, to make it especially ironic, I would provide you this link in Excell format.
These people are certainly rich ($1 mil or more net worth) regardless of whether YOU think they are “lazy” or not.
It’s actually much lower.
A million bucks will put you in the top 1% of Americans. There are only about 1000 billionares on the entire planet.
Life’s also too short to spend working some job that pays jack shit.