How Do You Become a Billionaire?

Not by working. By ownership, toll gates, other people’s money and the right rules, yes. And in the end it is no longer about money, but about two older wishes: to make the puppets dance and to be like God.

Addendum of 26 October 2026: Putting It to the Test

Preliminary note

Our “Building Instructions for a Cult” described how to relieve people of their judgement. These instructions describe how to relieve them of their money, entirely legally and to their applause. The form is the same: each step is described as if one wanted to copy it. Instead of the counter-check, this time the bill follows: who pays for the step.

One thing first, so that it is not lost. There are people who have built something new and become very rich doing so. According to the report of the Swiss bank UBS, 196 new self-made entrepreneurs joined the ranks of the world’s billionaires in 2025. These instructions do not dispute that they achieved something. They show which rules turn an achievement into a billion, and why the same rules also work without any achievement.

Step 0: Forget about work

Whoever earns 50,000 euros a year after tax and puts aside every cent of it, without eating and without paying rent, owns a million after twenty years. For a billion he needs 20,000 years. He would have had to start during the last Ice Age, when mammoths still lived in Central Europe.

So one does not become a billionaire by working, not even by working very well. No surgeon, no engineer, no top lawyer comes anywhere near. What is needed is something that works while one sleeps.

The bill: none. This is the only step that costs nobody anything. It merely explains why all the following ones are necessary.

Step 1: Get yourself born

The most reliable route is the shortest. According to the UBS report for 2025, 91 heirs inherited a combined 298 billion dollars in a single year, more than ever since the survey began in 2015. Over the next fifteen years, billionaire families are expected to pass around 5.9 trillion dollars on to their children.

Even someone who founds a company himself should not start entirely without parents. Jeff Bezos likes to tell how his parents put around 250,000 dollars into Amazon in 1995, a large part of their savings. That was brave. But it was starting capital that most people do not have.

The bill: In Germany, thanks to the exemption rules for business assets, large heirs often pay a fraction of the tax rate a nurse pays on her salary. The figures are in “We Will Keep Inheriting”.

Step 2: Own instead of working

Wages are paid for an hour and are then used up. Ownership of a company is paid for every hour of every employee, every day, without the owner having to be present. That is not an accusation but an arithmetic rule. Whoever employs ten thousand people and earns five thousand euros a year from each of them has a billion after twenty years, without working any more than one of them.

The bill: The ten thousand pay it. Not because they are cheated, but because the value they create does not belong to them. How an inventor can be relieved of his own invention along this route without anyone breaking a law is described in “Legal Expropriation”.

Step 3: Build a toll gate

Invent nothing. Stand where everyone has to pass. A marketplace through which all traders sell. An operating system on which all programs run. A network in which all your friends already are. Beyond a certain size the customers come by themselves, because everyone else is already there. Economists call this the network effect. One could also call it a road toll.

The bill: Everyone who has to pass the toll gate pays a little. The trader with fees, the user with his data, the competitor with his demise. The inventor, by the way, does not appear in these instructions. Whoever invents something rarely becomes a billionaire. The billionaire is whoever builds the toll gate in front of the invention.

Step 4: Take other people’s money

Whoever speculates with his own money can lose everything. Whoever speculates with other people’s money keeps the profit and shares the loss. Leverage is the oldest tool of the financial world: with ten per cent equity, every gain is multiplied tenfold. And if the loss is large enough, it becomes the public’s problem. In 2008 states rescued their banks with hundreds of billions because they were “too big to fail”.

The bill: The taxpayers who stood guarantor for the rescue, and the savers whose interest was abolished for a decade afterwards. How asset prices have risen since then and whom it has benefited is described in “Expropriation or the Next Raid?”.

Step 5: Never sell

Tax is paid by whoever has income. Whoever owns shares that rise in value has no income as long as he does not sell. So he does not sell. He borrows money against the shares, and loans are not income. When he dies, the children inherit the shares at their current value, and in the United States the gain of a lifetime remains tax-free. In America this is called “buy, borrow, die”.

In 2021 the investigative newsroom ProPublica published tax data from the US Internal Revenue Service. The wealth of the 25 richest Americans had grown by 401 billion dollars from 2014 to 2018. In income tax they paid 13.6 billion over those five years. That corresponds to a true tax rate of 3.4 per cent. Jeff Bezos paid not a dollar of federal income tax in 2007 and 2011, and neither did Elon Musk in 2018.

The bill: Everyone who has to sell because they live on their money. In other words, everyone else.

Step 6: Let the state pay

Whoever is big enough negotiates with governments as with suppliers. Subsidies for a factory, state contracts for rockets and satellites, tax credits for electric cars, rescue packages for systemically important corporations. The entrepreneur who declares the state incompetent in interviews is often its best customer. How private profits can be secured by public guarantees is described in “The Guaranteed Winners” and in “Plunder, Lease and Inheritance”.

The bill: The taxpayer pays twice, once for the subsidy and once for the tax the subsidised party does not pay.

Step 7: Buy yourself the rules

Up to this point one has only used the rules. Now one begins to write them. Lobbyists in every capital, donations to every party that has a chance, studies from institutes one finances oneself. Whoever wants to keep the tax rules of step 5 and the subsidies of step 6 has to make sure that nobody changes them. That costs a tiny fraction of what it brings in.

The bill: The voters, whose voice counts during the election campaign and afterwards less than a conversation over dinner.

Step 8: Make the puppets dance

Now the purpose shifts. Money is no longer the goal but the tool. The goal is that others do what one wants without one having to order it. Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013 for 250 million dollars. Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 for 44 billion dollars and has since decided himself which voices become loud there. Peter Thiel secretly financed the wrestler Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the online outlet Gawker, which had previously reported on him. Gawker was ordered to pay 140 million dollars and went bankrupt in 2016. Only afterwards did the public learn who had paid for the lawsuit.

That is the puppeteer’s joy: not to own, but to move. A platform whose algorithm one determines moves hundreds of millions of people, and none of them sees the strings.

The bill: The public itself. What is said, heard and believed is no longer decided by the conversation of citizens, but by the owner of the space in which it takes place.

Step 9: Endow last

Whoever has taken enough should give something back, and in such a way that everyone sees it. In 2010 Bill Gates and Warren Buffett launched the “Giving Pledge”, a promise by billionaires to give away the greater part of their wealth. That is honourable. But a foundation decides itself what the money is spent on, and saves taxes in doing so. What an elected parliament would decide after public debate is then decided by a donor according to his taste. In the end his name stands on the lecture hall, the hospital wing, the museum.

The bill: The state that forgoes the tax, and democracy, which forgoes the decision.

Step 10: Ye shall be as gods

The last step is the oldest. “Ye shall be as gods,” the serpent promises in paradise. Whoever has everything wants, in the end, what no money can buy: dominion over the world as it ought to be, and over the time that remains to him.

Peter Thiel wrote in 2009: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” From here the path leads to plans to replace the state with private cities and network states, to the rule of the knowing without a mandate, to the colonisation of Mars as an escape route, and to research programmes against ageing that are meant to abolish death itself. We traced the genealogy of these ideas from the technocracy movement of the 1930s to the Dark Enlightenment in “The Engineers of Absolutism”, and their present in “The New Right”, in “The Katechon” and in “The Stone That Looks Back”.

The bill: The state one wants to abolish paid for the schools in which one learned to read, the roads on which the goods travelled, the internet, which was a project of the US Department of Defense, and the courts that protect property. A billion that wants to free itself from the state terminates the contract from which it arose.

The balance sheet

None of the ten steps requires malice, and almost all are legal. That is what is uncanny about these instructions. They describe not criminals, but a set of rules that makes large fortunes almost inevitably larger and makes it hard for small ones to grow. Whoever looks for culprits finds people who did what the rules allowed. Whoever looks for causes finds the rules.

And it is striking how similar the ending is to that of the cult. There, the founder finally disposes of his followers’ existence. Here, the billionaire finally disposes of the public space in which everyone moves, and in the end wants to dispose of the rules themselves. In both cases money is only the means. The goal is power over others, and behind it the old wish to be no longer mortal like them.

The vaccination

With every large fortune a single question is worth asking: how much of it is payment for one’s own work, and how much is yield from rules that others pay for? With most billions the first part is small and the second large.

Whoever sees this admires no less what people build. He simply no longer admires the rules that turn it into dominion. And he knows where one would have to start: not with envy of wealth, but at the ten points where others pay for it.

Further reading: Addendum: Putting It to the Test · Building Instructions for a Cult · We Will Keep Inheriting · Legal Expropriation · Expropriation or the Next Raid? · The Guaranteed Winners · Plunder, Lease and Inheritance · The Engineers of Absolutism · The Helmsman Nobody Elects · Technocracy and Its Vassalage · The Built Sandbox · Two Concepts of Wealth