OP wants to become a billionaire within 5-10 years of choosing a college major. That leaves just 1-6 years to earn after receiving a bachelor’s degree. Investment bankers are well paid, but they don’t earn $200M per year straight out of college.
Moreover, to become a high-earning investment banker, I suspect you’d have to get an MBA, so add another 1.5-2 non-earning years.
Study current billionaires and learn what they did.
I’d start with finance and investment banking. I’d use that to fund the nest egg that invests. Go for the long haul. Read The Snowball about Warren Buffett. He had LOTS of businesses, starting when he was a wee child, and invested continually. And he spent time as a wage slave. He used those early experiences to learn.
Now, he doesn’t have a high opinion of Business School (Charlie Munger’s opinion of B-school is worse) - and to a large extent both gentlemen are self taught.
But you are in it for the long haul. Its the surest way to becoming rich - save and invest wisely, but it isn’t going to happen in your 20s or 30s.
If you want it to happen early, you need some combination of incredible talent and incredible luck.
So, I actually know two billionaires. I’ve known them my whole life, from when they were essentially penniless through their inclusion on the Forbes list. They were hard working guys who had their own businesses. I grew up alongside their kids, slept in their tree forts with their kids, visited when they were living in a trailer out behind their dad’s place because they couldn’t afford anything else. As their businesses took off they started giving back, building new outbuildings for the church, eventually a full new sanctuary. As their fortunes rose they still gave lots back and you could still find them in church, playing guitar to accompany the hymns or playing volleyball outside afterward.
They sold their ownership stake in their oil and gas company(along with the hydraulic fracturing techniques their company had helped develop) for billions and they retired. These days they do church work and play with their grandkids and great grandkids. Understand, though, that these men were over fifty when they finally hit 1B+
So, my general advice, own your own business and work your ass off. My mom has always said healthcare would be a great field to go into for my generation as the aging, and wealthy, baby-boomers will consume it at astonishing rates. I predict, at least, another ten billionaires in the next decade from people who sold their businesses which came up with some useful innovation in the healthcare arena. These people may not have invented it and developed it into a useful product/process themselves, but they employed the people who did, and that will be enough.
Enjoy,
Steven
Or you can move to a country with a nationalised business and try to grab a piece of that business when it gets privatised. So what should you study in that case? Bribery and sucking up to government officials, I imagine.
The easiest way to be worth a billion dolllars in 5 years is to have 2 billion today - paraphrased
In terms of what to study, I believe econometrics has the highest proportion of millionaires. One in three econometrists (?) is a millionaire. Not sure how many are billionaires, and I rather doubt they came to their millions within 5 years after uni…
You guys never heard this joke?
How do you make a million dollars as a musician? Start with two million.
In your case, start with a trillion.