By BEN R. WILLIAMS
These days, it seems as though everyone who’s anyone is a billionaire. But how do you become a billionaire yourself?
Studies have shown that there are just two key differences that separate a billionaire from a “normal” or “inferior” person. The first difference is having billions of dollars. The second difference is having followed the seven easy rules laid out in the guide below. With my help, you too can become the next Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Warren “Jimmy” Buffett!
Step one: Get plenty of sleep
“Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Benjamin Franklin said that, and he should know a thing or two about success; after all, he became one of our nation’s most beloved Founding Fathers despite being an unrepentant pervert.
But Benjamin Franklin’s words are as true today as they were when he first muttered them to an elderly woman he was drunkenly hitting on: if you want to become a billionaire, make sure you get a good night’s sleep and wake up early in the morning. As the saying goes, “the early bird gets the worm.” Just ask any worm farmer, most of whom are billionaires.
Step two: Maintain a healthy diet
Have you ever seen Jeff Bezos eating a huge pile of nachos? Just going to town on them, just wrecking those nachos, cheese and jalapeño slices flying from his mouth as he tears into the nachos with crazed abandon? While many of us have seen this as part of a recurring dream, we realize it’s not an accurate depiction of reality. Billionaires keep a healthy diet, drinking special probiotic shakes and eating secret vegetables that taste better than our poor people vegetables. Be sure to eat healthy if you want to join the ranks of the billionaires!
Step three: Be born to parents who co-owned an Apartheid-era emerald mine
While Elon Musk got to where he is through hard work and sheer grit, it certainly helped that his father Errol Musk owned half of a Zambian emerald mine and was unspeakably wealthy. If your parents don’t own an emerald mine, don’t fret; a diamond mine is perfectly acceptable. Of course, if you don’t have preposterously wealthy parents but only ridiculously wealthy parents, you can simply go the Jeff Bezos route. He started Amazon with nothing more than gumption, a strong work ethic, and a quarter million dollar loan from his father.
Step four: Understand that other people aren’t real in the same way you are
“Solipsism” is the philosophical idea that a person cannot be certain that anything outside of their own mind exists. From there, it’s just a hop, a skip, and a jump to understanding that you’re the only real person and everyone else is, at best, a series of tools to be used to improve your own position. That may sound sociopathic, but it helps to remember that the people who might consider you a sociopath don’t have rich inner lives in the same way you do.
Step five: Crush all who oppose you
Once you start leveraging your parents’ millions into billions, you may find that pesky folks like “progressives” and “union leaders” and “OSHA inspectors” are always trying to rain on your parade. Don’t worry; simply use your vast wealth to either pay them off or grind them into the dirt like the wretched worms they are. You are a giant treading the Earth, a capricious demigod with one hand open in offering and the other curled into a fist, fully prepared to mete out justice depending upon your whims. You will see those who stand against you cower in fear, and you will delight at the lamentation of their women.
Step six: Go to outer space
Anyone can be a billionaire, but only TRUE billionaires go to outer space. This is because their inexhaustible wealth has so distanced them from their fellow man that they can only find comfort in the howling, empty vacuum of the cosmos, a cold and bleak expanse that mirrors the billionaire’s own heart. It is only in space that the billionaire can find peace; he must aim his jaded, yellow eyes on the swirling galaxies and see them for himself, for whatever in creation exists without his knowledge exists without his consent.
Step seven: Drink plenty of water
Hydration is important!
