(singing) I wanna be a billionaire...
(singing, technically) So freaking baaad
And maybe you do too.
The idea of becoming richer is so ingrained in US culture
that it's actually the central theme of the American dream.
The idea of the American Dream is of course that anyone
from any background can get to the top of American society.
But you don't have to take his word for it. Listen to these politicians try to sell you on it.
The condition of your birth does not determine the outcome of your life in this country.
We have never been a nation of haves and have-nots.
We are a nation of haves and soon-to-haves.
Or look at music and movies from literally any decade.
(singing) And if I had a million dollars
(singing) If I had a million dollars
Show me the money!
Show me the moneeeey!
Bling bling. Every time I buy a new ride -- Bling bling.
Hey, fam. I'm Imaeyen, and this Sunday we're explaining how to become a billionaire,
Your odds of becoming the next Jeff Bezos,
And how you can acquire so much wealth, you'll never ever have to worry about saving money
by filling your gas tank only half way so you can drive to work to film a video all about becoming a billionaire.
Yaaaaaay, let's do this!
If you're watching this video, then you're probably in the top 100% of all income earners.
And you want to get into an even more exclusive tier.
There was a time when a million dollars was big money.
Like that time there was a show dedicated to that premise.
Okay, you ready?
Yes.
Ok, here we go, let's play "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?"
(dramatic music)
Now a million bucks is just something a billionaire feels like when he's sick.
The sad truth is that from the perspective of very rich people today, a million dollars is not a lot of money.
That's venture capitalist and early Amazon investor Nick Hanauer.
And he's one of the more than 1,500 billionaires globally.
It's a very exclusive and elusive club that includes these names:
Cue money music!
(baller music plays)
The billionaire crew is a group where right now there are 8 people who have as much money
as 3.6 billion of the world's poorest people.
Hanauer says that type of income disparity is bad for the wealthy and the poor
The challenge for business owners of wealth inequality
is that if most people have no money, then who will buy the stuff?
Sometimes it can be difficult to visualize just how big the financial discrepancy is.
Trigger Warning!
I'm about to break down just how much money you'd have to have to be a billionaire.
The average income for the top 1% is more than 1.1 million dollars.
It's about 554 dollars per hour for a typical work week.
And that's just the 1 percent's earnings.
Billionaires are the top .00001%
They're making way more than that petty 554 dollars an hour.
Let me give you some examples.
Legendary investor Warren Buffett made what averaged out to be about $25,694 per minute in 2013.
If that was your hourly rate, you could retire a millionaire in just...
40 minutes.
Hashtag retirement goals.
Here's president Donald Trump's favorite billionaire campaign callout in 2016.
I have Carl Icahn's already endorsed me.
Well, he made a lot less than Buffett -- just 14,492 dollars per minute, which makes him -- wait for it...
Still a billionaire.
Meanwhile, the federal minimum wage is 7 dollars and 25 cents per hour.
It'll probably take less than 25 years for the world to get its first trillionaire,
And it'll likely be either this guy or that guy
Economist Mark Blyth says that's a problem.
If I'm a trillionaire and I can buy politics, and we live in a democracy?
That's a problem.
Before you get to trillions, you have to make a pitstop at billions
How easy is it for you to meet Bezos in the billionaire baller bracket?
Well, wikiHow says it's as simple as a 3-part plan,
which includes creating opportunities,
investing in a business,
and maintaining wealth.
What the article seems to imply is that everyone working on being in the 3-comma club
is already in the 2-comma club
But most people aren't.
And the real very first step to being a billionaire
is taking a look at where you're starting
according to Richard Wilkinson, who's spent his entire career studying wealth.
In countries of bigger income difference,
a father's income is a much more important determinant of how well children do.
So the tendency for rich fathers to have rich sons and poor fathers to have poor sons
is much stronger in more unequal societies.
Got it.
Classic life hack:
Have wealthy parents.
And certainly if you take a look at the life paths of the wealthiest people in our country,
not a one of them started at the bottom.
From Bill Gates to Jeff Bezos to Sergey Brin to Larry Page
You know, these are people who came from families with resources, stability, and privilege.
There are so many ways it's easy for wealthier people to make money versus their less rich counterparts
They have the benefits of financial safety nets if investments fail.
And they sometimes decide their own salary.
Think powerful CEOs
The average CEO makes 271 times what the average worker earns.
The gap between CEOs at the top and the average worker in the same company
has increased enormously over time.
And it looks as if CEOs' incomes are not related to company performance.
A discussion about acquiring vast, golden, diamond-encrusted mountains of wealth
is also a conversation about income inequality.
And good display of how this wealth gap has developed starts in the post-World War 2 era.
(1940s radio voice) And the return of happier days.
(back to Imaeyen's voice) Earnings grew fast.
And at the same rate on all rungs of the income ladder.
If you adjust for inflation, the money doubled.
The gap between people higher and lower on the income ladder
was still substantial, but the disparity didn't actually change much during those decades.
Then the economic slowdown of the 1970s happened.
(1970s news anchor voice) A long line because the recession here has caused a 10 percent jump
each month in the number of those needing help.
Those at the top continued to see their dollars grow,
but the middle and lower income households saw their gains drop sharply.
The disparity between the groups got bigger,
which means you'll need to have stronger thighs to jump across that wage gap.
There's basically been a slowdown to complete halt in terms of mobility between classes in the United States.
It's as if the social ladder was much steeper or the rungs on the ladder further apart.
Check out this chart.
It shows just how much and how quickly
in the last 40 years the divide between the haves
and Marco Rubio's so-called "soon-to-haves"
has ballooned.
The data basically says the easiest and most recommended way to become a billionaire...
Is to be a multimillionaire.
The American Dream is based upon the idea that everyone and anyone in the US
has an equal opportunity to gain success and prosperity.
It's code for "You too can be rich!"
But for regular people, how much do the stats support the implication of the American Dream?
How realistic is the American Dream? Wow, well, most dreams are not very realistic, are they?
The US is behind countries like Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Spain when it comes to social mobility.
Our Northern neighbor, Canada, is better at seeing people rise in wealth and class.
Even the developing nation of Pakistan is beating us in this department.
The US has many obstacles that disproportionately keep the poor from gaining wealth.
There are payday lenders targeting the less financially flexible,
And charging them interest rates as high as 1,900 percent;
credit card companies wooing applicants who aren't fiscally stable enough to pay on time,
and charging them higher interest rates;
and banks charging late fees and overdraft fees that can bleed already anemic accounts.
It is extraordinarily expensive to be poor.
It is expensive and difficult, for instance, not to own your own car.
It is expensive to need to live far from your job because housing prices near your job are prohibitively expensive.
The poor often regard themselves as poor because they didn't have what it took.
People don't understand the wider social, environmental impact of inequality and social status.
Now impoverished people are 20 times less likely than they were in 2001
to believe that hard work will get them ahead,
and only 38 percent of Americans believe that their children will have a better life than they've had.
There are so many other statistics we could include,
like how race and gender affect people's average income earnings and chances of moving up.
That literally could be an entirely separate video,
and luckily we've already made those videos and have linked to them below.
And by the way, we tried to get commentary from literally all the minority women billionaires in America,
but we couldn't get ahold of Oprah.
But one thing you should know is that your quest to become a billionaire
may be affected by your political leanings.
66 percent of Republicans and those who lean right say hard work,
instead of a person's advantages,
have more to do with why they're rich.
Democrats and those that lean left feel the exact opposite.
60 percent say a person is rich because they've had more advantages than others
as opposed to just working hard.
There are a bunch of extraordinarily hardworking people in our society that are desperately poor
and kept that way for structural reasons, and there are a ton of people in our society who are enormously rich
who are lazy, good-for-nothing clowns and got rich because they were in the way of some
tidal wave of money, or they inherited, or got lucky.
The truth is that making the move to billionaire status isn't easy
unless you or your family are already multimillionaires.
And if you're not in the upper class, what you'll need to make it to the next stage of wealth
is much more than those above you.
We've spent so much time in this video talking about how to become a billionaire,
but the real question may be if you should become one.
Bigger income differences damages the health of the whole population.
You also see much higher rates of violence.
I think that it's very unethical to have these enormously inflated salaries at the top.
In the context of our economy today,
having people who are worth that much money is almost certainly a failure of policy and morality.
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