To be a billionaire, you obviously have to have at least a billion dollars. Some would say it’s better to have a billion dollars in assets. It avoids having too much cash, something the taxman could tax more easily than, say, any of the following attributes, which will make you not only a billionaire person, but a billionaire person more representative of the world. year 2022.
A virtual monopoly. Amazon crushes the competition in the world of online shopping. Its share of the North American market was 50% in 2021. Amazon is perceived by its critics as a monopoly in that the company owns a must-have platform for online retailers and its main competitor is… Amazon, which also sells its own products online. For its part, Facebook has made its founder Mark Zuckerberg a young billionaire who is these days the target of American and European authorities because of his business practices deemed anti-competitive. And of course, Elon Musk leads Tesla. The electric car maker accounted for 14% of global electric vehicle sales last year, but 70% of North American sales. This is called a dominant position.
A social network (or at least a digital medium). It’s unclear where Elon Musk will fit as Twitter’s big boss on a spectrum where the extremes could be Jeff Bezos, who in 2013 acquired the washington post then who seems to have left his journalists alone, and Donald Trump, who gave his name to the social platform Truth, apparently reserved for followers of the political theories of a certain American right. What we do know, however, is that Musk has just joined the select club of billionaires who own their own digital megaphones, along with the Australian-American media baron Rupert Murdoch, who is trying a return to UK media with specialist channel TalkTV.
A cohort of fans. Apple’s surge to the top of the stock market pyramid peaked in January 2022 when the Cupertino company reached a value of
3 trillion (3000 billion) US dollars. But this boom has picked up speed as self-driving mobile apps have won over a younger generation of investors who love the California brand. The same goes for Tesla which, thanks to a cohort of staunch early investors, retains an outsized stock market value given the company’s current financial performance. But don’t tell that to fans of either of these two brands. They will crucify you in the public square — digital, of course.
A space conquest. The privatization of space is handled by government agencies like NASA, which are eager to offload to private corporations the enormous costs of developing and maintaining the hardware needed to conquer the Moon, Mars, and whatnot. The adage that the future belongs to those who get up early couldn’t be truer than in this sector, where the first to arrive will undoubtedly be the biggest winners in the long term. This explains the rapid arrival of players like Blue Origin, from Bezos, and SpaceX, from Musk, in the United States. It also justifies the eagerness of countries like China and even India to attempt their own space conquest. The objective: to ensure that at least part of the wealth promised by this new, more than global industry is harvested, which the specialized analysis firm SpaceTech Analytics already estimated in 2021 at 4 trillion (4000 billion) US dollars.
An anti-nuclear bunker. Survivalist billionaires do not run to hide in the forest. Instead, they buy a collection of state-of-the-art nuclear shelters that usually include a swimming pool, home theater, and garage for their vintage cars. The market for luxury nuclear shelters has exploded over the past five years. The Texas-based Rising S Company is regularly cited as a reference in the American media, and Gary Lynch, its CEO, says he saw his turnover jump by 1000% between 2018 and the end of 2021. He receives up to to 3,000 calls a month these days, whereas he used to receive around 100. Like any real estate asset, the nuclear shelter is expensive these days, and you usually have to pay close to a million dollars to get one.
A plan to save humanity. Thanks to billions of dollars from Silicon Valley, transhumanism is moving from science fiction to reality. The Neuralink company, also led by Elon Musk, raised 200 million US dollars in 2021 to develop a computer that would be grafted directly to the human brain. Its goal is to surpass the limits of the human condition through technology. Peter Thiel — who became a billionaire thanks to his stake in PayPal and then Facebook — is another major financier of transhumanism. The libertarian businessman once claimed that humans and artificial intelligence will merge somewhere around 2030 to create a new species of living beings. He has calmed down lately, saying at a conference in late 2021 that the transhumanism movement is idling these days. He also expressed concern about how artificial intelligence was being misused by some authoritarian states.