On becoming a trillionaire in 2022

Here is a guaranteed way to instantly accumulate a net worth of one trillion dollars:

• Own a thing.
• Write down somewhere that you are structuring your ownership of that thing into one-trillion-and-one equivalent shares.
• Sell one share for a dollar.¹

Mazal tov! You are now a trillionaire. Think kindly of me when you are issuing invites to your blowout parties on Ko Samui (presumably you have purchased the whole island outright).

Haha just kidding obviously you will have some trouble doing something with this newfound fortune. The point of accumulating wealth, in the main, is not to achieve some perfectly abstract high score; the point is to use that wealth to exert economic and social power in ways that arrange the world more to your liking.²

However, in order to do that, you will need to convince other people that you actually have a trillion dollars, in the sense that you control assets which, if they accept in exchange for providing you goods and services, other people will also similary accept in turn. Much like becoming King of France per David Graeber, wealth is in the last analysis a social fact, not a material one; you become a trillionaire when you have convinced others you are a trillionaire.

Of course social facts are like Che Guevara with bling on, and so this process is not binary. If you convince a bartender you are a trillionaire you might get to open a tab. If you convince a small town of provincial folk you are a trillionaire you might convince them to invest in your monorail. If you convince the right people at JP Morgan Chase and Deutsche Bank that you are a trillionaire then maybe you can buy Ko Samui.

There are obviously also many ways to accomplish this convincing, all of which are more, and more resiliently, persuasive to different folks. You may be able to convince the townsfolk you are a trillionaire by coming to town in a limo and conspicuously flashing ostentatious signs of wealth, but that is less likely to convince the bankers. On the other hand if you become dictator of a country that has trillions in proven oil reserves you are in better shape on Wall Street. The material facts do matter.

What if you convince an army of retail-trading apes to rapidly pump the stock of your electric car company to the moon?

This is an interesting case! On the one hand, the car company is quite real and doing OK, the stock is listed on all the exchanges, hedge fund people wearing the right kinds of suits to the right kinds of restaurants have been enbarreled by attempting to short the stock down. On the other hand, the stock price implies that your car company will, sometime within the next generation, become one of those cartoonish Omnicorp-type companies from replacement-level sci-fi movies that somehow come to conglomerate like 80% of industry and consumption. Even a heroically bullish valuation of the car company implies a figure at least an order of magnitude lower than where the stock is trading.

If this happened and you were a Normal Business NPC you might simply say ‘I have won, at business’ and steadily liquidate your stock options and diversify into like VTSAX and a nice Manhattan apartment. But you are not a Normal Business NPC, and, critically, the reason the apes have 🚀 your stonk is because they believe that you are, in fact, some kind of cross between mad scientist, Randian superhero, and meme magic warlock whose goal is to revolutionize the world through imposing glibertarian-colored futurism via your will and genius.

So here you are; you have an unprecedented paper fortune; mazal tov. But any attempt to render that fortune liquid, or resilient via diversification, or even slightly-less-correlated with the quite-possibly-very-mercurial hype vortex around your persona, undercuts that persona in such a way that quite possibly rapidly deflates the bubble in the stonk and renders you once again merely quite rich, not ‘the richest man on earth.’

So. You need a way to turn even a very large chunk of your very large pile of temporarily-ultra-valuable stonk into something else uncorrelated to the price of the stonk without so violently puncturing that bubble, via shaking ape confidence, that the stonk plummets too far too fast for you to actually execute this exit.

Put another way: you need a way to convert the stonk into one or more other assets that are, fundamentally, uncorrelated, while still convincing the ape army that you are doing this all in character. The persona has to have a good reason to buy this asset, good enough to keep the stonk afloat to arrange for a very large purchase funded in large part by high-priced bank loans predicated in large part on the assumption that this new asset is indeed more-or-less uncorrelated from the stonk.³

In fact, you might be willing to drastically overpay for such an asset. It could be an unprofitable asset. The loans to buy the asset could be quite expensive to service. It doesn’t really matter, though; the key is that, if you can string the whole situation along just enough to swap out a big chunk of stonk for this thing, you are now hedged. Maybe your net wealth isn’t quite really definitely two-hundred-and-whatever billion dollars; but it might be a lot closer to really definitely being something more like fifty billion, which is easily double what it was a couple years ago, before the mania. And you might still have something close to that much wealth five years from now, even if the mania ends like so many do.

¹Because it is, tragically, 2022, people tend to immediately think ‘crypto’ when they hear this idea, but while that’s a fast way to do it it’s not strictly necessary. You could register your lemonade stand or deli with the SEC, do everything just right and proper, and then sell one of those 1,000,000,000,001 shares on a nice legitimate exchange for $1 and boom, high score achieved.

² This doesn’t have to be grandiose (parting with forty of my hard-earned trillion to acquire a family meal at Bonchon Chicken arranges the world more to my liking) but a trillion dollars does start to stir the imagination. Maybe if Ko Samui isn’t for sale you get yourself a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier and annex it.

³In the worst case scenario where you can’t pay the bank back, they get the asset. Those worst case scenarios are all some variation on ‘stonk goes down a lot’ so there’s no point in using the asset as security unless it wouldn’t necessarily go down a lot just because the stonk did.