Complete List of Way to Get Rich (62 Examples)

Nowhere on the web was there a complete list of ways that one could get rich, so we did the hard thing and built it ourselves. Any one of these, if executed well, could get you to financial wealth. So let's get started. Here's a complete list of ways to get rich with examples.

Welcome to alux.com, the place where future billionaires come to get inspired. Okay, so the first 10 are the obvious and illegal ones; after that, we get into some good stuff.

So first up, be born rich or adopted by a rich family. We don't choose our parents, but a small percentage of the population gets better cards at birth. Before you judge them, think that this is the same thing that you want for your kids. You work hard so they don't have to struggle the same way you did. Actually, some of the most successful people in the world were born into middle-class families. Think Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk—richer middle class. They all had access to basic opportunities to build from; they went to university in a developed city, which gave them access to tools and networks. They might not have been born into a rich family, but that can change with you.

Win the lotto. They say the lottery is a tax for people who can't do math, but you know, every once in a while, the planets do align, and you end up with a big winner. People will waste fortunes away, hoping that one day they might be the ones who win big. By the way, 70% of lottery winners end up broke and even more sad than they were before winning the lottery because they had a taste of the money and blew through it all. Now they can't deal with being broke again.

Win your way to riches through competitions. Who wins Who Wants To Be A Millionaire or some other random raffle, and you find yourself the big winner of some prize? Some might be more skill-focused, while others might be more lottery than strategy. But by the way, whenever you win a car or something on a TV show, that prize doesn't include the tax, so you have to pay that tax out of pocket if you want to receive the actual prize. Most TV game shows never actually give the player that prize; instead, they settle for a smaller cash amount.

Marry rich, divorce someone rich, or have the kid of someone rich. Do you feel some people watching this video getting a bit uneasy when we say that? Well, it is the truth. Out of the top 10 richest women in the world, nine of them got the money from their husbands through divorce or death, and the other one had a sex tape leaked. Trapping a rich partner by having their child is, unfortunately, a real way that some people accumulate wealth and fame. You can ask Nick Cannon about it.

Inherit the money. Your rich uncle hit it big and then passed away with no next of kin. We're not talking about the scam emails you get pretending to be from a bank manager, but a natural succession of financial wealth. You never know which side of the family doesn't have a will in place, and you might find yourself in a windfall.

Have people donate you the money. This is how some pastors get to own private jets. We actually have a video where we break down their entire operation in detail here. Beings are caring by nature, which can spiral out of control once there's an economic incentive added to the mix. Speaking of churches, here's a terrible map of all the churches in Poland we found while researching this video.

Illegal activities like robbing someone rich—well, we'll bundle all of these up right here. You've heard about them; you've seen people in the news because of them. Illegal activities are highly profitable, which is why people are willing to risk everything to do them. For everyone listening thinking that you'll get rich and successful doing something illegal—look, okay, going to jail disqualifies you from the game of success. If you can't do it in the light, you shouldn't be doing it at all.

Suing someone rich and winning. Someone rich is usually a company. Back in '92, a woman spilled hot McDonald's coffee on herself to the point where she got third-degree burns, totaling ten thousand dollars in medical bills. She asked McDonald's to reimburse her for the costs, and Mickey D's declined, so she sued. Long story short, she won 2.7 million dollars, and McDonald's was forced to change their practices. A lot of people sue big companies and win, but most cases end up with a large financial settlement outside of court.

Remember the Red Bull commercial where they said, "Red Bull gives you wings"? Ever wonder why those commercials stopped airing? Well, a guy sued Red Bull and won 13 million dollars because the energy drink didn't give him wings. You know, sometimes you just can't make this stuff up.

Sell your body. Physically, you don't call it the oldest profession in the book for nothing. Highly lucrative, with a running clock on it based on your beauty and willingness to, well, please. The highest-paid workers flock to big events where rich people hang out. Throughout the year, the Cannes Film Festival is a great example, where workers from all around the world rush to provide their services. The highest-paid ones can earn upwards of forty thousand dollars a night.

Sell your body—looks or appeal online. Attractive people have a massive unfair advantage in life if they know how to use it before it goes away. Some people have managed to build fortunes off the way they look. With the Internet being a content machine, subscription platforms like Patreon, OnlyFans, Fansly, etc., have become private membership clubs. These creators leverage other platforms to drive people to their X-rated content. Amaranth earns one hundred thousand dollars per month streaming on Twitch but 1.5 million a month on her OnlyFans. Vlog Squad member Karina Kopp also earns around a million a month. Do you remember the Dr. Phil catch me outside girl? 50 million in earnings. The highest-paid male adult creator is probably the rapper Tyga, who reportedly earns around two to three million a month.

Now that we're finally done with the weird ones, let's jump into the stuff that's not gonna get you banished in society. Someone rich badly wants something that you have, and that's luck. It might be the case that by some mere chance you find yourself in possession of something someone with a lot of money wants or needs. They're used to overpaying, so they'll throw money at you. It’s the case for this family in Australia where they refuse to sell their home and move. They purchased the land and property 11 years ago for around one million dollars and refused to sell it. Every year the property developer came knocking; the last offer was for 33 million dollars.

This also happens with cars. Some collector wants that one piece that's missing to complete their collection, and you just so happen to have purchased it at retail years ago. This is what all those auction sites are for, and why a first-generation iPhone sold for 190,373 dollars.

Hold a high-paying job for an extremely long period of time. Climbing the corporate ladder can be an extremely effective way to go if the industry you're in allows for a six-figure salary. All you need to do is stick it out for over 10 years to earn your first million. A lot of software development jobs, higher-end legal work, or medicine pay over 100 grand a year. Now, you might be thinking that these are fairly complicated jobs, but due to inflation in market conditions, salaries are growing across the board. UPS was in the news recently when it came out that their top UPS delivery drivers earn up to 172 thousand dollars a year.

Be an early member in a startup that takes off. You get rich when you own something that goes up in value over time. If you're skilled enough to build something, you can do it yourself or join a team that builds a company. Depending on your role and the different value you add, you'll deserve a different percent of the company. Many people don't realize the value of shares because they're pretty much useless in the early days until they're not. If the company blows up, those shares will be worth a fortune. Some of you know graffiti artist David Cho, but few know how he got rich. Well, one day he was asked to do a mural for a company in the valley. The gig was worth around twenty thousand dollars, and since the company wanted to minimize monthly expenses, well, they offered to pay David in stock, and he accepted. Well, that company, my friend, that company was Facebook, and when Facebook went public, Cho's stock in the company was worth 200 million dollars.

Be a professional athlete. If you have a competitive advantage physically, if you've got the discipline required to go the long haul, and are lucky enough to not have a career-ending injury, well, you can acquire both fame and fortune before the age of 30. You earn money on your salary, bonuses on performance, product endorsements, and other commercial work where you sell your likeness or people will grant you partnership deals just because of the credibility that you bring. Before going to the Middle East, Cristiano Ronaldo only earned around 50 million from soccer but over 100 million from commercials and endorsements. The goat, Michael Jordan, he didn't earn his fortune through his salary playing basketball. No, the inflection point happened when his mother negotiated the Nike shoes deal on his behalf and demanded he be paid a percentage of the sale of the shoes bearing his name. This quote still gives us chills: "A shoe is just a shoe until my son steps into it."

Seventy percent of athletes end up going broke or through a financial crisis because they spend so much time focusing on the sport they fail to ever educate themselves financially. The richest professional athletes are able to transform from athlete into business owner.

Be a one-hit wonder. You just need one big success, and your life could change. Whatever it is you do, one can change everything for you. Remember the Gangnam Style hit, Psy? We estimate that PSY made around 25 million dollars from that one hit alone, ballpark of around 10 million dollars on YouTube alone. Vanilla Ice's Ice Ice Baby—that's also another one-hit wonder moment. It doesn't have to be singing either; one-hit wonders can happen in all creative fields. Write a good book, one good invention, one idea—that's the thing about money; you only really need to get it right once.

Be a high in-demand entertainer. The superior form of the one-hit wonder is the long-haul entertainer. Year after year of hard work, and your portfolio of work goes up and so does your fan base. Taylor Swift is a great example of this; her Eras tour is the biggest tour in human history so far. Before this, the highest-earning tour was that of Elton John, who brought in 800 million dollars in total. Are you ready to have your feelings hurt? Here, Beyoncé's tour is happening at the same time as Taylor's. Beyoncé is estimated to bring in around 500 million dollars, definitely putting her in the top 10 of all time. But Taylor Swift—oh boy, she's estimated to bring in, are you ready for it? 1.4 billion dollars. Not only does she take number one, but that's three times as much as Beyoncé and 50 over Elton in second place. If we just look at the scoreboard alone, Taylor Swift is—and we can't even believe we're saying this—she's the GOAT.

Undeniably, talent management. Let's just say you don't have the talent to write your own songs, perform them, produce them, market, and anything else that goes into the entertainment business, but you do have a brain for business. A talent manager makes between 10 to 20 percent of an artist's earnings—about 15 percent is the standard deal. They find the artist and get them the opportunities to become big. Scooter Braun is one of the most successful talent managers right now; he's the one who found Justin Bieber and helped him to get international stardom. Other artists managed by Scooter are Demi Lovato, the Black Eyed Peas, the Call Me Maybe girl, David Guetta, Usher, Hilary Duff, Quavo, Kelly Rowland—the list goes on. If you've ever watched Entourage, think of these people as the Ari Golds of the industry. By the way, the guy the character Ari Gold is based on is named Ari Emmanuel. His most recent play was acquiring the UFC from Dana White for four billion.

Patent and invention. If you're able to figure out a better way to solve a problem that nobody else has solved so far, well, you should patent that idea in order to protect it. Companies will come to you and license the idea from you if they want to deploy your solution, or you could go to the market yourself and make it a successful company. The Snuggie is one of our favorite examples—it's just a blanket but with sleeves and holes to put your hands through. It's sold for 200 million dollars. Shark Tank's Scrub Daddy crossed one billion dollars in lifetime sales, and that’s just on the idea front. Did you know that Nokia? Yeah, the old phone company Nokia, they've got more than 20,000 patents including 5,500 patents that are related to 5G technology. Apple is paying Nokia a licensing deal to be able to use that tech. Other examples include the invention of the stapler, Post-it notes, where the inventor invents the idea and gets paid two to three percent of whatever money that product is bringing in when produced by a different company.

Trademark a name, phrase, logo, or copyright a piece of work. There's a reason why you can't just use the Nike logo on your products; the visual logo is owned by the Nike Company. Michael Buffer owns the phrase "Let's get ready to rumble!" so every time you hear that at the beginning of a boxing match or a fight, you know that Michael is getting his fifty thousand dollar check. It's the same with many other creative works. The Alux logo is trademarked, meaning nobody else can use our logo. Last year, we trademarked the word Alux in association with media and digital products. Right now, we're in the process of trademarking the phrase "future billionaire" from our catchphrase—the place where future billionaires come to get inspired. These are unique pieces of intellectual property that we're looking to protect. Samsung was granted over 6,000 patents and trademarks last year alone. All of this IP adds to the company value.

Write a best-selling book or a bunch of medium-selling books. If you've got a talent for writing and short stories, the barrier to entry has been completely eliminated. The Martian by Andy Weir was fully self-published. The Twilight series was a passion project that eventually got picked up by the industry. Robert Kiyosaki made his fortune selling books, and he still earns over a million a year from Rich Dad Poor Dad. The thing is, you don't have to be ultra-successful to make a bank through your writing; you just have to have a niche fan base and pump up the numbers. Mark Dawson earns around 450,000 dollars a year from his self-published portfolio on Amazon. He's written 43 books so far, and they're all selling well enough. If you write a book per year, you'll end up with 20 books in 20 years; your entire family will be receiving checks from these books, even after you're gone.

Be an influencer on social media. If you've got a loyal following that trusts you to be their guide, you can leverage that to build wealth. The word influencer no longer carries any power since now we've got large, medium, and small—even micro influencers. When everyone's an influencer, nobody is. The value lies in just how much sway you have over your community. The easiest way to measure this is to ask your community to buy a one-dollar product. In theory, everyone can afford it, but you'll be shocked at how few you're able to convert. This is why people like Kiara Faragani or Mr. Beast are on a different tier; when they launch something, people show up with their wallets open.

Content creator—YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Rumble, Medium, etc. We are entering a new age of media where platforms will be forced to pay out creators. You've been on Facebook and Instagram for years now, and they've never paid you a cent despite generating tens of thousands of dollars for them. YouTube pays its creators 60% of what they make. Twitter, now X under Elon Musk, switched to a similar model where creators are getting paid to post on Twitter. When people turned on monetization, they realized just how much money there is to be made there. X shows ads in replies of a thread, and you get paid based on them. Rumble is a platform looking to compete with YouTube that has a similar pay framework but are more lenient in the type of content they allow on the platform. TikTok is also paying creators, but disproportionately low because the content is light, and the volume of content consumed is extremely high—two to four cents for every one thousand views, which adds up to only twenty to forty dollars for a million views. To put things in perspective, a million views on YouTube will get you between five thousand and ten thousand dollars.

Sell an online course. The goal is to build a business where you can build once and sell a million times. An online course is a great example to do it. Platforms like Thinkific, Teachable, Kajabi already make it super easy to just upload your content and sell it as a course. By the way, YouTube will soon launch this functionality directly into YouTube where you can buy an online course to the side of the video. alux.org is our course platform, and since it takes us an entire year to put together a course, when people get it, they actually get great value out of it. This year we're launching "Reinvent Mastery," which helps people to relocate, change jobs, and change the way people see and treat you. It basically is a complete lifestyle upgrade in six months—step-by-step tested frameworks with an incredible guarantee. If you go through the course and the change doesn't happen for you, we'll give you your money back. The only way we're able to provide this kind of guarantee is because we know it works, and soon you will too. Go to alux.com/reinvent and join the waiting list. We'll give you an exclusive discount code when we launch if you're already on the list, so get your name on there.

Build an online game. If you're a decent programmer and have a great idea for a game, it can scale up fairly easily. Although the age of Doodle Jump, Angry Birds, or Cut the Rope's over, there are still games out there that do incredibly well at the top. Candy Crush was bringing in 4.2 million dollars per day. Merge Mansion is making around 10 million dollars per month. Clash of Clans brings in a half a billion dollars per year. Now, a lot goes into making a great game, but the new monetization tools like microtransactions or simply filling the game with ads for in-game perks have allowed mobile games to go to a whole new level, and we're not even talking about Fortnite, Roblox, or Minecraft, who've become their own universes. Just to put things into perspective, Fortnite generates over 6 billion dollars per year in revenue, while Kentucky Fried Chicken, KFC, they earn 6.8 billion. Yeah, e-gaming is pretty big.

Commerce—sell actual products. Any product that you can literally put together yourself, you can sell for a profit online. Physically, there are millions of stores and millions of types of businesses that rely on you having a product and selling it for profit—taking the money from that sale to create more products and repeating the cycle. If we were to go through every single thing you could sell online, this list would never end, so think of this as your default commerce business, be it online or offline. The more value you can add to a product and the more you can differentiate it, the better. People sell from normal products to waifu pillows, memorabilia to bath water in jars—the marketplace is so wide and kind of weird, and it's growing, so there's a market for literally anything.

Sell advertising for your blog. The concept of a blog has evolved over time; it used to be an online place for your own articles, then it became a vlog, a video log. Now, everywhere you put together content is basically your blog. If you own the platform and have regular visitors, businesses will want to place their ads next to your content. The most successful blogs have evolved to compete with mainstream media platforms. Ariana Huffington started the Huffington Post. Mashable was a blog too. Perez Hilton started off as a tabloid. All you need is traffic. Google exploded as a business when they launched Google AdSense—a way for people to monetize their blogs, and it's all at the core of how YouTube works today.

Sell consulting services. We know people who are really good at what they do; they're experts in their field, so they sell their expertise. These are not full-time employees, but they jump in now and then or for fixed periods of time where their expertise is valuable. Some of the biggest businesses in the world are consulting businesses—PWC, McKenzie, Accenture. They all make their money as consultants, and these are multi-billion dollar businesses. Actually, most employees can immediately increase their income if instead of being an employee, they incorporate and contract their former workplace as a customer for their consulting services.

Start an agency business. If we were to start today from absolute zero, we would probably go for an agency business ourselves. We've got enough expertise to be able to add a lot of value to any digital business. You basically create a package of services that you sell to other businesses as an ongoing relationship. For example, five thousand dollars a month for content creation—we could take care of all of your content. For five thousand dollars every month, we will measure the success of our relationship. If our content generates you more than five thousand dollars in profit, sign one to two clients per month and in a year or so, you end up with one hundred thousand dollars per month in business. At the end of last year, we acquired zary.com, a digital marketing agency that we're transforming into a top marketing agency in order to expand our own portfolio of companies. The goal here is to build you an actual business. We charge between ten thousand to fifty thousand dollars for a website that we know will make you money, and then leverage our marketing division to drive you customers to the website that we built. The average is our clients see an 8X return when working with us, which justifies our pricing.

Start a podcast. Starting a podcast became more mainstream once people saw Joe Rogan take over the world with JRE. The Joe Rogan Experience podcast brings in around 40 million dollars per year in advertising alone. We'll talk about his licensing deal in a second. This is why everyone you know has started a podcast. There are around 2 million podcasts online. This might feel overwhelming, but if you zoom out, you'll also see that ninety percent of podcasts don't get past episode three—that’s 1.8 million who quit. Of the 200,000 left, ninety percent of podcasters will quit after 20 episodes—that's another 180,000 gone. To be in the top one percent of podcasts in the world, you only need to publish 21 episodes of your podcast. Your competition is not the 2 million podcasts; it's the 20,000 podcasters who didn't quit. So even today, the market for podcasts isn't that competitive, but since everyone has a limited amount of hours in a day where they could actually spend listening to podcasts, well, you end up with a situation where the few best absorb all of that time to themselves. The more niche you go, the higher the likelihood you'll develop an audience that Joe Rogan, Lex Friedman, Andrew Schultz, or Call Her Daddy isn't talking to.

Sell a one-on-one coaching. This is the fitness trainer model applied to anything and everything. If someone wants dedicated coaching in order to achieve their goal, you can be that person for them—therapists, psychiatrists, personal stylists, celebrity trainers, voice coaches, etc. There are a couple of people who are so valuable to you that you're willing to pay them a premium. In the business world, these are called executive coaches. People who have extensive experience and can help you to evolve—every big CEO has worked with several executive coaches in their career, and each of them helping in the evolution of the business at that stage they're in. For example, Matt Mochary, coach Naval Ravikant, the CEO of OpenAI, the CEO of Coinbase, the CEO of Bolt, and a bunch of other heavy hitters. It used to be that Matt charged 12,500 dollars for one Zoom call per month until he eventually grew so popular that even at that rate he no longer took clients. Executive coaches cost between twenty thousand to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars per year, depending on what kind of impact they have and the stakes the game is played at. Most entrepreneurs can't afford them, and they're the ones who need them most, and that's why we created the Alux app.

Build a subscription app or membership site. Because years to go through most business models related to our business until we figured out that subscription models are S-tier. As long as people pay, they get access to the service. Netflix is an absolute beast, which is why we launched the Alux app. Remember the really expensive executive coaches? Well, we pay them on your behalf, have them break down exactly what you need to do so you get the exact same thing they coach their one-on-one clients in our app for only 99 a year. If you go to alux.com/app and get a subscription, you are literally getting over a million dollars worth of value for 99 a year. No matter what you do, try to get your customers to stick around on a reoccurring basis. This is why we were also interested in an agency format that we could switch to a subscription style.

License your content. Once you've got something cool, other companies will want to pay you money to show your work on their platform. Here's an example: A couple of years ago, Emirates Airlines approached us to license our content for their in-flight entertainment system. So basically, they'd be paying us to showcase Alux's content onboard their airplanes. Joe Rogan's famous 100 million dollar deal with Spotify wasn't a buyout; it was a content licensing deal, meaning Spotify gets exclusive access to Joe's content for five years. Clips not included; those still go up on YouTube. But in exchange, Spotify pays Joe 100 million dollars. Once those five years expire, Joe could put all of his content back on YouTube or renegotiate an extension. Before you think it's stupid to pay someone this much, the announcement added over a billion dollars in value to Spotify's market cap because more people than wanted to own shares in the company.

License your likeness or other attributes. You see it all the time. Brands want to align themselves with celebrities in order to maintain relevance and boost up sales. Sometimes it works because of your performance in a field—think Federer with the Wilson tennis racket. It makes sense to be sponsored by Wilson when you win with their product—or how J-Lo is known for her legs because of the one million dollar leg insurance and because of Gillette. Sometimes partnerships are a great fit due to someone's reputation. Think of someone with a pristine reputation partnering with a private clinic. The examples can go on, but you do have to be careful of who you associate with, both as an individual and as a brand. Tom Brady and his then-supermodel wife Gisele Bundchen endorsed crypto exchange FTX publicly, and it turned out to be a massive fraud and mismanagement of investor funds. Other times it plays out poorly for the brand. David Dobrik used to be one of the biggest names on this platform, bringing in five million dollars a year in sponsorship deals until his scandal hit, and his name became toxic, so brands dropped him.

Affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is when the commercial relationship between creator and brand are intertwined. Let's give you an example: Shopify makes it easy to create an online store. We've got a community of entrepreneurs in our audience, and if you go to alux.com/sell and you join Shopify through our link, we get a commission for every sale that we generate for them. And it's the same with Audible; since we've got an affiliate partnership with them, if you go to alux.com/freebook, and this is the first time you sign up with Audible, you'll get a free audiobook, and we'll get a commission. Audible gets a new customer. It's a win-win-win kind of deal. But we try to choose very carefully when we pick long-term affiliate partners. Amazon, Commission Junction, and ClickBank are three of the most popular affiliate platforms.

Start a newsletter business. Newsletters are the podcasts of the writing world. Substack, ConvertKit, Beehive, MailChimp, and a bunch of others are great enough to keep a newsletter going. Substack is the one that we feel we've seen most of our favorite newsletters on. They make it easy for users to subscribe to a newsletter, and newsletters are the modern evolution of the blog. As long as the content of the emails are valuable, people will stick around. We're fans of the My First Million podcast, and we were happy when we heard that Sean Perry sold his newsletter, The Milk Road, for several million dollars just 10 months after launch. At the moment of sale, they had 250,000 paid subscribers and were earning around 1 million dollars per year. For app insights, we subscribe to Lenny's newsletter as well; he reportedly earns around 1.5 million a year. A friend of the channel, Anthony Pompliano (Pomp), also has a good one. And if we didn't have the billion-dollar-plus goals we have for the app, we would definitely monetize YouTube through a paid newsletter. We still want to launch one that's super valuable, but since it's a thank you to you guys, we really want it to be absolutely free. It'll be available at alux.com/letters.

Day trade or invest in stocks. Warren Buffett famously said that if he was young again and had under a 10 million dollar portfolio, he would average between 50 and 100% return year over year simply by investing in stocks. Investing in stocks allows you to share the profits the company makes. Investing regularly will help you to build wealth. Pick the companies you use the most and buy shares in them. eToro, TD Ameritrade, Interactive Brokers, Capital.com, Plus500, or whatever is available in your region—they've got guides that can easily help you get started. Even retail platforms like Revolut, Acorns, and Gemini, they allow users to buy and sell stocks fairly easily. It's no longer a thing that specialized investors and math geniuses only can do, but do know that markets are volatile. Maybe Nike or Starbucks had a good year this year, and next year won't be as good. Investing is risky.

Invest in ETFs. If picking up stocks yourself is risky, the way you minimize that risk is by investing in an entire category as a whole. Investing in green energy, in transport, in the banking sector, or in the best-performing 500 companies in the US at the same time. These baskets of companies are called ETFs. The most popular is the S&P 500, which bundles basically the American economy into one stock. Historically, the S&P 500 has returned around 10 percent per year since the beginning. Now, you're not going to get rich overnight because you need compounding to work in your favor, but paying attention to this could literally change your life. If you have a newborn child, when they're born, invest seven thousand dollars in the S&P 500 and allow it to compound. That seven grand is going to be worth over a million dollars by the time your child is 65, which should be enough for them to retire comfortably.

Don't rush to get rich and allow compounding to work in your favor. Invest in art. If you're looking for something to grow a little bit faster than the S&P 500, well, you could do what the rich do and invest in Blue Chip art. The rich buy art because it outperforms most traditional investments. The line in green is art, and the red one is the S&P 500 over the last 23 years—Blue Chip art is crushing it for investors. Historically, this was an investment vehicle with a big barrier to entry. Poor and middle-class people don't have five to ten million dollars to buy a Picasso, wait a couple of years, and then resell it for profit. But that's no longer the case. Masterworks is an art-focused investment platform that allows anyone to invest in Blue Chip arts starting at one thousand dollars. They buy high-end paintings vetted by experts and divide them into shares. You buy some of those shares, and when the painting is sold, the profits are distributed among shareholders. They've got almost one billion dollars in assets under management. Almost 1 million people invest with Masterworks, and all of their recent sales return to profit for investors. You know, normally there's a waiting list to join such a service, but since you're an Aluxor and Masterworks was kind enough to sponsor this video, if you go to masterworks.art/alux, you can skip the waiting list and someone from their team will get in touch with you to help you get started. That's masterworks.art/alux.

Invest in real estate directly or in REITs. The highest number of millionaires in the world were made because of real estate. It's also the least complex way of getting rich. You buy property, the property rents out, and also appreciates some value over time. You only need two hundred thousand dollars for a down payment to buy yourself a one million dollar property. You borrow the rest, rent the property out, and the tenant pays for your mortgage. In a few years, you qualify as rich. If you know what you're doing, you can buy the property with a small down payment, fix it up, rent it out, get it reappraised for a higher value because you did all kinds of improvements, and then refinance it, pocketing the difference. If this all sounds complicated to you, and you don't want to bother with finding the right property or dealing with banks and tenants, well, know that there are funds called REITs—Real Estate Investment Trust—where people pool money together and it all gets invested on your behalf. You just get your checks in the mail. Actually, you know, we feel like that expression doesn't really hold anything anymore. Who gets checks in the mail nowadays? It's a notification on your phone or, at most, an email, right? RIP to checks in the mail.

Develop real estate. When it comes to real estate, the way you generate most value in the shortest period of time is through development. You buy the land, build something on it, and sell it for a profit. The risk lies in the management of funds, on how long it takes to complete the project, and finding the right buyer. If all goes to plan, you 2x your money; with every development, thirty to fifty percent annual return is average, and it takes two to three years to go from where you go in to where you get out. Here's a graph of the average cost distribution of a real estate development play.

Vacation rentals. The current most profitable real estate investment in terms of rent is in short-term holiday rentals—listing great properties on Airbnb and Booking and renting them out to tourists returns 4 to 10x what you would get for the same property through long-term renting. Outside of everything digital, this has been our go-to investment. We find properties near the city center; we have an interior designer refurbish everything to make them high-end properties, and then we have our property manager take care of the day-to-day rentals. We've made it a habit of adding properties every year. Here's how the math plays out: These holiday rentals act as a baseline for our lifestyle, returning between 10 to 20 percent per year in rental income and also a great store of value because of their location; they appreciate about six percent on average every year. There are many people who sublet the property for other people just to monetize it themselves, but since this isn't our main business, we prefer to straight-up buy the property up front. Twenty decent Airbnb apartments will get you at least one million dollars a year—almost anywhere. Really, really nice properties in high-demand areas can bring that on their own. Think multi-million dollar luxury villas that rent out for three to four thousand dollars midweek and five to ten thousand per weekend. At that point, you no longer think of the place as just a rental but more as an experience. The highest level of what technically is a short-term rental are theme parks. Technically, when you go to Disney World, you rent out the experience for the day and then you go back home.

Flip things for profit, both online and off. This is another one of those staples of money-making, and your life changes once you understand that every business is a buy low, sell high business. The only difference is in what you're trading. The most basic one is straight-up commerce: buy something where they have a lot of it so you can get it cheaply, then take it to another place where it isn't as readily available, and then sell it for a profit. If you've been a fan for Alux for a while, you know that location changes value. A bottle of water is more valuable in the desert, demanding a higher price. The modern equivalent of flipping products for profit is buying things directly from the factory, usually in China or India, getting the product, repackaging it to look nicer, and then selling them on the local marketplaces in Europe or North America. The more evolved version of that is called drop shipping, where you just generate the orders, and the factory fulfills them on your behalf, taking care of packaging, shipping, and everything else. Anywhere in the world, you can find a product that you can afford to sell for a profit, if you're willing to put the time in. You could flip sneakers; you could buy a car, wash it, take some better photos, and then sell it for profit. Washing it and the better photos are where you actually are adding value. Repeat that until you can generate more expensive things, like buying a property, cleaning it up, and then reselling that for a profit. Even the agency businesses we mentioned earlier are technically buy low, sell high businesses. You buy services at a lower price than you charge a client and you pocket the difference.

Start a product brand. Brands are valuable because they add value to the thing you associate with them. A plain white T-shirt is worth one dollar. The moment you put a Mickey Mouse logo on it, it's worth ten dollars. Supreme is an example of solely brand play. A couple of years ago, the company was sold at a two billion dollar valuation to the folks that own Vans and North Face. The biggest businesses in the world are product companies with an established brand. Think Apple, Coca-Cola, BMW, Mercedes, Starbucks. The value of the brand is derived from the way they build and present their products. Both Toyota and Rolls-Royce make cars that have four wheels and drive you from point A to point B, but they don't do it in the same way, do they? Vending machine coffee is different from the stuff at Starbucks, even though they're technically both just water and ground coffee beans. With the exception of medicine, even if the product is identical, people still pick the branded version over the generic; the sale of cereal in supermarkets is proof of this.

Building a human-based service business. Service businesses are a one service, one payment kind of situation, where time and skills get traded for money. Usually, technology know-how and human capital are leveraged to grow the business. Think cutting hair, aesthetic work, having someone paint your house, or a hired contractor. If on the lower end, you paint someone's nails; on the higher end, you reconstruct someone's face after an accident. The more technology, the more knowledge you have, and the more people you can leverage, the higher the service-based business can be. The entire healthcare industry fits here. So does legal work, accounting, and even restaurants.

We'll talk about the software businesses next. Software as a service. Google is a software as a service business. Amazon makes most of its money from its server business, AWS. Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce—all of them are software-based companies where people pay an ongoing subscription to keep using them. Remember when we said the subscription game was S-tier? Well, software as a service is SaaS, and it's become a hot topic among tech people, where you can't go to a tech event without almost everyone talking about launching a SaaS business. There are big tiers to software businesses: Enterprise, meaning they sell software to other large companies, and Retail SaaS, where they sell software to individuals or small businesses.

Raise money for an idea. Reputation and trust can be worth a lot of money. Let's say you've got an entrepreneur who successfully sold two businesses in the refreshments industry, and now they're starting a third one. Their track record will get investors to give them even more millions of dollars, even if they're in the idea stage, for a percentage of the company. We've seen this play out over and over again in Silicon Valley. Some companies are even losing money year over year and still get money from investors because of the long-term potential. Uber is a great example of that. Uber lost nine billion dollars last year, and is still going. Uber's been losing money every year since inception. Their operating costs were just too high. But investors in the company are betting on the performance of the company long term. Slowly rising fares, as you've probably noticed, and in Q2 2023, they had their first profitable quarter, bringing in 323 million dollars. Uber burned through 31.5 billion dollars to finally get to profitability. Now they can work on recouping those losses—it'll be a while until they get back to zero and be a profitable investment for those backers, but it seems like things are on the right track.

Get lucky with crypto. You've heard the stories—genius kid invents a new kind of money. People bet on it online. Some people make millions and others lose millions—very little value added. Crypto as a whole is more volatile than the stock market, which means traders can make even more aggressive plays in order to build up their portfolio value. The technology has a lot of potential to help a lot of people, but it feels like in the rush to get rich, it's all been sabotaged by greed. Everyone should do what they want with their hard-earned money as long as they don't hurt anybody else. For the past four years, we've been on board with a crypto fund backing early-stage products. 2023 is the year we walked away from it. Personally, we're still believers in blockchain technology, but it's too time-consuming for us to be actively managing the investment portfolio. We've sold all of our crypto holdings and bought Bitcoin. We put it in cold storage and locked it in a safe. Bitcoin acts like the S&P 500 of the crypto industry. 10 to 15 years from now, we'll check back and see what has come of the investment. It's either going to 10 to 20x from here, or it'll go to zero. We've already made our peace with both situations and how we sleep much better at night because of it. If this is something you'd want to do, go to alux.com/bitcoin because it teaches you exactly what Bitcoin is, how to buy it, and how to store it for the long run in the shortest time possible. Use the promo code "aluxer" for 25% off.

Ride the next technological trend—AI. Since we've been in business, it feels like every five years there's a new tech trend: networks, then blogs, then social media, then crypto, now AI. The people who jump on early make a lot of money and get to position themselves at the forefront of the new wave. There are thousands of AI companies that are basically ChatGPT wrappers, meaning they tap into ChatGPT and channel it for a specific niche: ChatGPT for lawyers, ChatGPT trained on financial models for investors, etc. You can basically take a language model, feed it a large data sample, and have it spew answers based on that sample.

We've been around long enough to know that trying to predict what the next one will be is a futile endeavor. Remember when everyone thought the metaverse was going to be a thing? Zuck remembers. Although the Apple Vision Pro might hint at the future of work, right now it feels like longevity is a big one—health hacking, sensors, infusing AI into everything electrical, think Internet of Things 2.0, quantum computers might actually be a thing soon if the LK-99 thing turns out to be legit, but it doesn't really look like it right now. They really had our hopes up. By the way, none of our content is written with ChatGPT. At Alux, we pride ourselves on only speaking from experience. We've literally lived through a bunch of these businesses, and it's the reason why we can so clearly tell you what each one is about and what it feels like to go through them. Over 4 million people subscribe to us because of our perspective on things. Thank you if you're one of them. We're also, you know, we're kind of funny sometimes.

Peer-to-peer lending. Peer-to-peer lending is basically loan sharking but legal. You give someone money, and they lock themselves into a contract to pay it back with interest. There are hundreds of peer-to-peer lending platforms online. For some reason, all of them felt too shady to us, despite some of them being 100% legit and have been around for a while. Lending Club, Kiva, Pureform, Upstart, Prosper are just some of the platforms that you can use. Some of these call themselves microfinancing businesses, but the math is simple: you lend out money and get it back with a five to fifty percent interest depending on the duration of the loan and the amount of risk. Believe it or not, peer-to-peer lending is actually quite common among the rich who finance each other very often. The difference is they do it with much larger amounts.

Commission-based skills. We love all commission-based work because it's dependent on outcome. Here's an example: let's say you are the most skilled diver in the world. Someone found a treasure on the bottom of the ocean and needs your skills to get it out; you're the right person for the job. If the dive is successful, they're willing to split the fortune with you. You find these in every industry—the higher the treasure, the higher the commission you earn for your effort. Russell Brunson is the founder of ClickFunnels, an online business that brings in over 150 million dollars per year. Russell is the OG funnel builder, and for a long time, you could commission him to build you a funnel for one million dollars. Businesses who needed it would do it because the reward was higher than the cost.

Industrial agriculture or livestock. There is a lot of money in cattle and agriculture. A sheep gives wool plus milk, which you can sell for profit and also reproduces. Cattle is one of the few asset categories that not only can be exploited for profit, but also increases in numbers. You can start off with a few, and over a couple of years, you've got a lot, and the same is true for most livestock. By the way, the fastest way for the poorest people in the world to get out of poverty is to raise chickens. With agriculture, it's similar—seeds have become more efficient with higher crop density and shorter bloom periods. Rotation crops are also safer for the environment, and with the way commodity prices are going, you can find your yield highly profitable. The average small farm can support a family, which is why for the longest time most people were farmers. Today, we live in a more industrialized and technology-first world, and you can see that with farming as well. Bill Gates is the biggest private owner of farmland in the U.S.

You'll never go poor if you own something people will consistently need. Specialized agriculture or mineral exploitation—there are some crops that only grow under very specific conditions that are limited to a certain geography, so other countries are forced to import them. West Africa, more specifically, the Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Ghana are all responsible for 70% of all the cocoa in the world. For a long time, the Middle East was the only region in the world where natural pearls could be farmed until Japan figured out how to mass-produce them. The world is building itself up; raw materials and minerals are needed more than ever in many countries. You can buy the mineral and exploitation rights for natural resources. Getting the value out of the earth is highly profitable.

Customization, repair, restoration, garbage, and recycling—value can be added through know-how, and there are big opportunities for those who can do it well. Home repair, technological repair, furniture restoration, reloving—anything. Waste management is one of the biggest industries in the world that's only growing with our population numbers. Waste management is a 1.6 trillion dollar a year industry and is expected to double in the next 20 years. To put things into perspective, recycling right now is barely an 80 billion dollar industry. And also, when we say waste management, we mean actually waste management, not the "wink wink nudge nudge" Sopranos kind of waste management.

Import-export business. Since some things can only be found outside of a country, there's a market for those who are able to bring those desired products within. In every country, you will find a handful of people who made billions in the import-export businesses. Koch Industries in the U.S. brings in over 100 billion dollars per year. Vitol is a Swiss-based company that operates in over 40 countries. India's Gautam Adani made his fortune in the import-export business and is now worth 55 billion dollars. Just Google your country plus import-export, and you'll find out just how potent that industry is.

Franchises. If you've got a repeatable system, you've got two options: you either one, open up locations around the world yourself, and you own all of them. A great example of this is Andrew Chung, the founder of Panda Express—2,300 stores, 47,000 associates, and three billion dollars in sales. They own everything. Or two, you franchise the model—McDonald's, Dunkin' Donuts, etc., and you collect a portion of the sales while other people manage them according to your system.

Put on your own events. Festivals have gotten bigger and bigger in the last couple of years. Small clubs booking an artist over the weekend for a party are the entry level, and then you go up based on the number of people who get to attend and buy tickets. Tomorrowland, Coachella, South by Southwest, Untold, Burning Man—the list just seems to get bigger and bigger. On average, Coachella grosses over 115 million dollars in ticket sales across both weekends and makes tens of millions more in food, beverage, and hospitality services.

Private equity. Invest in other people's businesses. If you've got a little bit of money, buying businesses and growing them can be incredibly lucrative. If real estate gets you six to ten percent per year, buying a boring business can get you 30, 40, 50% returns per year. Cody Sanchez has made a name for herself online by doing just this. You can buy them fully, and you become both the owner and the operator, or you could buy a portion of the business and just help the founder scale up. Business extraordinaire Alex Hormozi gathered a 200 million dollar per year portfolio of businesses, and like them, there are a bunch of other people you've never heard of. You buy a business, fix its operations, upgrade the way it does business, and then you keep the profit or sell it for 20 times what you paid for it to another private equity fund that plans on doing the same thing.

In the digital world, you've got platforms like Flippa or acquire.com where you can browse real businesses that others are selling. Move things and people from one place to another. The cargo shipping industry alone is expected to top four trillion dollars in the next seven years. Moving people around—from taxis to planes to ships—is similar in numbers; there's a lot of money to be made here. Starting a logistics company doesn't have to be complicated either. You start with a truck, and then you add a couple more. It's not easy work, but it's also not mining or roofing.

In July, the name might not be as well-known in the U.S., but before we had tech, everyone knew who Aristotle Onassis was. He was the richest man of the 20th century, and he built all of it on a shipping empire. In the 1920s, at the age of 25, he'd already become a millionaire. The man is fully self-made and built his entire fortune on one strategic deal at a time. He built a cigarette company, introduced smoking to women. That made it his mission to be the only person to ship goods around the world. At the peak of the Great Depression, he buys his first ship for half of what they're worth. The business started booming when he negotiated directly with the kings of Arabia to be the only one allowed to transport oil out of the region. The U.S. government had to threaten military war to stop Onassis from becoming the largest figure in human history. From Athens, he settled in Buenos Aires, taking over the region. He then eventually moved to New York when the Suez Canal was blocked. The demand for goods and oils skyrocketed. Onassis was the only person who had a fleet large enough to keep the world going. Reports say that at the time, he was making two million dollars per tanker per trip. This is at the time when the word billionaire wasn't even invented yet.

Be a matchmaker. There is money to be made in the ability to find matching puzzle pieces that need one another but don't know one another. Some of the richest people in the world are just incredibly well-connected. Think of these matchmakers like the real estate agent of the business world but less brokery and with more finesse. You want to have a champagne business? Someone else has a chain of nightclubs? The matchmaker makes the deal happen, so everyone wins and gets a slice of the pie. They facilitate company sales; the world of investment banking was built on this model. You want to sell a business? I'll find you a buyer to pay even more than what it's worth, and I'll get 10% of the deal. And for smaller companies, it drops down to one or two percent, or even a flat rate on multi-billion dollar deals. Got a lot of friends in the investment banking world in Manhattan, and we were shocked to learn that a small business is a company valued between 50 and 300 million dollars.

Power broker. Politicians—have you noticed how politicians are some of the richest people in the world despite earning less yearly than a high-paid UPS driver? We wonder how they managed to do it. We all know power brokering has its roots in elections—someone who has the ability to sway the outcome of a vote. But more recently, it's become widely used in the business world. It relates to people who can make the deal happen at a cost. The world is corrupt; government contracts aren't always awarded fully transparently, and guess what? There are people who open doors for others. Some folks even get into illegal ways and then blackmail others into getting what they want based on privileged information. Jeffrey Epstein was one of these power brokers, getting rich and influential individuals to compromise themselves and then slowly taking over their resources. Epstein did this with Victoria's Secret owner Leslie Wexner. It had gotten to a point where Epstein was fully in charge of Wexner's finances. He could borrow money freely; he was in charge of spending and acquisitions, signed his tax returns, and even gifted himself mansions and properties. In a couple of years, the gifts added up to around 100 million dollars. All of this power brokering gathered him over half a billion dollars in total, and then he pissed off some people with a lot more reach than he had. We feel like this story simply went away, but all the evidence showed that Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself.

Insure. People are willing to pay a premium to mitigate risk. If you pay me this amount, I'll take the risk for you. You're transporting one hundred thousand dollars worth of fragile china from one country to another? I'll take that risk for you for three thousand dollars. If they break, I'll pay you one hundred thousand dollars. If they don't, I keep the three thousand. This is how insurance companies have become some of the richest in the world. The global insurance industry is estimated to be around six trillion dollars, and it spans everything you can think of. Whenever there's a risk, an insurance company is willing to throw their hat in the ring. You all know about life insurance or shipping insurance, but if you're a farmer, there's crop insurance—where if the weather ruins your crops, you still get paid. People ensure anything they want. You can ensure your wedding; if an accident happens and ruins the venue, you are not on the hook. Kidnap insurance is another one where if you travel to a dangerous place, you want to make sure there are funds available to get you back safely. Football players ensure their legs; artists ensure their special talent—like if their voice were to be affected by an accident and they couldn't perform.

In the high-end business world, it's actually common for the company to take out an insurance claim on key business individuals. Apple is ensuring Tim Cook because his potential death would affect the stock price. The insurance world has always been fascinating to us because, on a macro scale, they're very much like a casino where the odds are stacked in the house's favor. Insurance is just math, and it's one of the safest businesses to build, but it does come with a high barrier of entry.

And last but not least, invest other people's money. If you've ever heard the term private banking or hedge funds, this is it. Rich people give you their money, and you invest it on their behalf, and you keep a cut. The average hedge fund operates on a 2 and 20 rule—two percent is a standard fee of the amount invested, plus 20 of the profit they make for you. This formula allows hedge fund managers to grow wealth incredibly fast. The biggest hedge fund of this kind is Blackrock. Chances are you haven't heard of them, but they basically own everything you touch. People don't realize just how big this fund is—9.5 trillion dollars of assets under management. They're so big they’re able to fund countries, wars, sometimes even both sides of a war. They're one of the largest investors in the biggest companies in the world; they partially own these companies. Blackrock has gotten so big that even governments bend to their will. For example, after the war ends, Blackrock will lend 100 billion dollars with interest to Ukraine in order to rebuild. And they're just one of a bunch of these funds that basically hold the wealth of the world. Most likely, your pension is in their hands as well. Blackrock has 9.5 trillion dollars under management; Vanguard has 7.6 trillion. Starting your own hedge fund is quite complicated, and you need at least five million dollars raised to get started.

Now, hey Alux, we did our best to bundle up multiple industries and smaller businesses into buckets. We think we covered basically everything. What did we miss? Anything? Leave a comment and let us know. And since you are an absolute champ and watched the longest video we've ever made until the very end, of course, okay, of course, we've got a bonus saved for you. Your hedge fund manager is getting richer way faster than you are. This is why the space is so incredibly competitive.

Let's give you a long-term example, and you'll learn a valuable lesson about the importance of thieves. At the age of 25, you give your hedge fund manager 1 million dollars to manage, and they produce an annual return of eight percent. Assuming a 1.5 management and 20% performance fee, by the time you retire at 65, you'll have 7.64 million, but the manager will have 12.4 million, even though they didn't put a dime into this fund in the first place. This is what your graph looks like, and statistically almost none of the hedge fund managers can beat the market consistently for 40 years. If you've got time on your side or money on your side, do the boring thing and go with an index for as long as you live. Remember this rule: Okay, you get rich by taking a lot of risk with a little money; you stay rich by taking very little risk with a lot of money.

If you're still here with us, we want to personally thank you for taking the time today and watching 100% of this video. If you're seeing this, please write 100 in the comments since this is the longest video we've ever done. We're really curious to see just how many of you got to the very end. You are awesome, my friend. [Music]