Can I Become A Billionaire?

Jordan's with us in Little Rock, Arkansas. Hi Jordan, how are you? Hi, Dave. I'm doing great. How are you? Better than I deserve. What's up? So, I just went through your financial peace university and legacy journey, and it was awesome. Great. And my question for you is kind of following in your footsteps, how do you become a billionaire? A billionaire? Yes, sir. I've heard you say that's one of your goals, and I know you said like mutual funds won't get you there, and it's kind of capped at like 5 million or something like that. No, it's not capped at that. But what I said was that we've just done this book, Baby Steps Millionaires, and the difference in a million and a billion is a billion is a thousand million. So, you know, you can become a millionaire, everybody can, without a doubt, using your 401k and funding it generously, like following the baby steps and then getting your house paid off. And that's the typical way people become millionaires. The first one to five million is what I was saying on that. It doesn't cap at that, but there's only so much, though, that you can put into a 401k, so there's only so much you're going to have in a 401k, so you're not going to get to $100 million in your 401k, it's not mathematically possible, and that would only be a tenth of a billion. So, typically, now, I'm not an expert on billionaires, I am on millionaires. I have studied them, and I've looked at the numbers a lot. But I'll tell you what I generally see. All the Forbes 400 is now billionaires, there's no one in the Forbes 400 that's not at least worth a billion, at least one billion. And Bezos is hundreds of billions, I mean, it's crazy. But the vast majority, 70% of the Forbes 400, the wealthiest people in America, are first generation, meaning they earned it from nothing, and so they didn't inherit it. That's good news. So that means you got a shot at it. The billionaires that I have personally met, and I've probably met now in person 25 or 30, and I've studied and read about a lot of the others, the vast majority of them made their money in a business. They created a thing. So you look at Michael Dell. You look at Truett Cathy, or Bill Gates. You look at Bill Gates. You look at Oprah Winfrey. These are business people that created a business that became very, very large. And so the vast majority of my wealth, beyond the first 10 million net worth that I made, has been from the business, Ramsey Solutions. Gotcha. So is that something where it's like you need to take a company public kind of thing? Could or don't have to. Chick-fil-A's not public. Ramsey Solutions is not public. Hobby Lobby is not public, and David Green would be on that list. Do you kind of still hold the same principles with financing businesses like that? I don't finance anything. We're starting something like that? There's no indication debt caused them to become a billionaire. But they were adding value to the marketplace. They were adding value to the community, and people paid them for it. So Bill Gates, the most famous example, comes up with a personal computer, right? Apple is not attributed to a singular person. But where you're adding value, a good or a service that you are bringing is extremely valuable. Elon Musk is adding value with the Tesla and SpaceX and so on. So these people, and a lot of them are people you might not be household names like we're mentioning, those are all multi-billionaires. But the first 1 to 10 billion even, an unusual number of them did it with a business. I don't have actual facts on it in terms of, I can show you percentages or I've broken it down or I've done detailed research, but that's just anecdotally looking at it and saying, okay, who's on that list, where'd their money come from? And you just kind of do it that way, and it's kind of a common sense approach to the first round of what could become detailed research. But I doubt I'll do detailed research on a billionaire. Where did the narrative come that if you were wealthy, it's because you did nothing and someone gave it to you? Because the data in your book says that's false. It's just simply inaccurate. And then I had never even thought about the billionaires. I'm sure there's Saudi princes and whatever, but these folks, like, man, talk about right place, right time. The world shuts down and I got this little company called Amazon that delivers stuff to your door. You know what I mean? Like they created something of value. And that's where the money comes from. Someone got helped. Someone got served. Someone got entertained. Yeah. And that's where the money comes from. But this narrative is that. Well, the narrative is Marxism. I mean, you cannot support communism as an economic methodology unless you first have to lay the groundwork and say that all of the wealth, that the aristocracy that has the wealth are evil. And so it must be taken away from them. You have to vilify. You got to make somebody bad. And the problem is, is in America that the people that they're vilifying are successful people and the problem is they're successful helping other people. And so the narrative won't hold water in America because people are walking around going, no, I know that guy. I know that gal. They're not. I don't hate Oprah. Right. You know, I'm sorry. You know, you can't. It's not legal to hate Oprah. You know, it's not. Exactly. I mean, you can't. You can't. You know, I'm not. You can't go, okay, kill all the rich people. You know, like, you know, the Russian Revolution, right? And which was brought on by Marxism and brought on by communism. So whether it's that level of violence or not, you can't, in order to say that life is unfair and so we have to have anarchy, we have to change the whole system of economics to one where everyone is equal, okay? The only way that that works is you have to first vilify the ones that have the money. Those who are above the bell curve are evil. Yeah. That's how they got there. And you know, if they were Russian aristocrats in 1901, you could go back and probably prove that they were inbred evil and had no reason for having the money. The money was handed to them and they provided no value to the community. So it was a lot easier to get mad at them, kill them all, and Karl Marx, you know, steps up, right? And so that's... But love him or hate him, Jeff Bezos drops boxes off at my house. Well, he doesn't. I know he doesn't. He has somebody do it for him. He does. But he provides me with a service. Whether you like him or not, you know, a lot of people use what he has. Yeah. And whether you like Bill Gates or not, or whether you like, you know, the whole Microsoft movement versus the Apple movement or whatever, all that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. The bottom line is, is the personal computer has changed the world. You and I have things sitting on my desk here that filled a room just a generation ago. The brainpower. And so, and those men, the Michael Dells and the women are involved in these things in Silicon Valley and they brought value. Are there robber barons out there? Yeah, of course. It's everywhere though. But by and large, they're not the norm. The norm. And so you have to say, you have to vilify success. And it's just as it's, they're having trouble doing that in America because the data is against them. That's, yeah, the data is so clear. It's very clear. And so you go, okay, you know, how can you make it without some Jesus chicken? I mean, you got to have a Chick-fil-A, right? So it's like, it's, you know, if you don't have some ever so often, you're just not okay. So it's, they serve a lot of people with the fastest service at a drive-thru anywhere and high quality, hot food and wonderful teenagers working there that no manners and wear a belt. And it's pretty amazing. And you know, so it's, you know, how are you going to vilify that? Right. Well, you have to, if you want to tear it down. First have to make it bad. And if you want to tear it down and that, and the problem is it's a lie. It's not true. And so it won't hold water. It's not, it doesn't work here. So you wealth inequality people, sorry, you're going to take your communism to a different continent. It's not going to work here.