How Getting Rich Has Evolved Across Time

If you were born 50, 500 or 5,000 years ago, your path to getting rich would've looked nothing like it does today. You might have had to conquer a kingdom, sail the high seas or build a factory from the ground up because the truth is, the rules of wealth are in constant evolution and the richest people have always been the ones to know how to spot the next big thing. So in this video we're gonna take you on a journey through time to explore how people got rich across thousands of years of history and of course, we'll also see what wealth will look like 5, 50 and even 500 years from now. So hop in the time machine my friend and let's go! Welcome to Alux, the place where future billionaires come to get inspired. Okay, so let's start off by going back around 14,000 years to the dawn of human civilization. Because around this time a bunch of humans got tired of chasing animals across the plains and said, we're gonna plant a bunch of seeds right here and this is where we're staying. This began the agricultural age, where suddenly whoever controlled the land, controlled everything. Picture a local chieftain who controls some land along a river in Mesopotamia. He commands a hundred farmers and stores so much food he can throw festivals while others starve. Back then, the richest people weren't traders or investors, no, they were tribal leaders, warlords and early kings just like this. Because if you had fertile soil, a source of water, livestock and enough people to work for you, everybody else's survival basically depended on you, so they followed your rules. You got rich by claiming territory, organizing labor and defending your land with brute force. So back then, wealth didn't get you coins or gold or a Lamborghini, it got you a surplus of grain, a couple of loyal servants in your mud brick home and yeah, more wives than you But here's the thing, power built on land and muscle doesn't last forever. If you were smart during this time, you built alliances and eventually, as these small civilizations turned into small cities, people started writing laws, they created currency and they realized that they weren't the only ones doing it. All around them were other burgeoning civilizations and they were rich. So just like that, getting rich meant getting your hands dirty. And now we're moving into the age of Empire and Conquest, starting around 5000 years ago. So by this point, people are getting more organized, cities are starting to form and wealth no longer belongs to the guy with the biggest farm, but the guy with the biggest army. This is where things get a little bit more aggressive. So at this point in history, you got rich by winning wars, collecting tribute and enslaving your enemies, so the wealthiest people at the time were often the ones standing at the top of a military machine. Think pharaohs in Egypt, emperors in China or generals in Rome. These weren't businessmen, they were fierce rulers who expanded their wealth by expanding their borders. Because simply put, the more land you took, the more people you controlled and the more taxes flowed back to your throne. And it also didn't hurt that when you invaded one of your enemies, you could just take everything they had. It's a brutal truth, but this is the way entire economies were built back in the day. You didn't negotiate, you conquered. And what did all of that power get you? Well, how about palaces carved from stone, rare silk from half way across the world, entertainers, soldiers, servants, your face stamped onto coins and your story immortalized in the history books. That is a Genghis Khan level lifestyle. However, even this kind of power had a ceiling, because as empires grew larger, armies got expensive and borders became harder to hold, a new kind of wealth started to emerge. And this time it didn't come from brute force, but from something far more efficient. But you know what my friend, no matter what era you lived in, whether it was 5000 years ago or today, the smartest thing you could do was to invest in improving yourself right? It always has been the foundation of wealth and that's exactly why we built the ALUX app. Inside the app you'll find expert-led lessons, daily insights and personal growth tools designed to help you become the most capable, most confident, most successful version of yourself in every area of your life. So whether you're focused on building wealth, starting a business, improving your habits or just getting your mindset right, the ALUX app gives you knowledge and structure to make real progress. Hundreds of thousands of professionals, entrepreneurs and ambitious people like you use the ALUX app daily, because they know that success starts from within. So if you're ready to take your growth seriously, scan the QR code on screen right now to download the app and you'll get 25% off your yearly plan. Go ahead and place a bet on yourself my friend, but let's get back to today's topic shall we? Alright, jumping ahead to the 1400s, we're in the start of the age of trade and exploration. So at this point, the Americas had just been discovered and ships were racing out of European ports to grow their empires all over the world. Colonies were popping up, resources were flowing and trade routes were exploding across the globe from Asia to Africa and the New World. A new kind of wealth machine had been born and it didn't run on land or loyalty, it ran on trade. Pepper from India, porcelain from China, sugar from the Caribbean, gold from West Africa, whoever controlled the trade routes, controlled the wealth. Enter the Dutch East India Company. At its peak, it was the most valuable company in history, which also happened to have its own army and its own navy. I mean, the company literally took over cities and overthrew local rulers, all in the name of commerce. They extracted unimaginable wealth from the world, but it didn't come exclusively from brute force. They understood how goods moved and how to move them better than anybody else. That is how you got rich at this point in history. You had to be bold enough to take risks, smart enough to manage capital and persuasive enough to negotiate with rulers. It was a brand new set of skills and sometimes, yeah, you also had to be a pretty decent sailor. If you couldn't handle uncertainty or a rogue wave, you were not built for this era. But if you could, you lived like royalty. Trade turned merchants into aristocrats and companies into global powers. The economy had gone international and for the first time, wealth could stretch across oceans. But even with that power, there were still a few problems. Ships took months, communication was unreliable and there was no way to scale without something faster. But that is when the world met the machine. When the industrial age began in the 1800s, everything changed. Wealth was no longer about merchants and spices. It was about industry. People like Cornelius Vanderbilt, who started from nothing, built a railroad system that stitched the entire American economy together. Andrew Carnegie built a steel dynasty from which the country was literally built. And John D. Rockefeller built the oil empire from which it was powered. This era rewarded the industrialists, because for the first time in history, the amount of stuff you could produce wasn't limited by how many people you could get to work for you. You got rich by owning the means of production. Steel mills, textile factories, oil refineries… these were the new gold mines. If you could build them fast enough and cheap enough, you could dominate an entire industry before your competitors even caught up. But that was easier said than done. This was the age of monopolies, vertical integration and aggressive expansion. If you wanted to play in the same league as the Rockefellers of the world, you had to be relentless and able to bend the rules of capitalism in your favor. It wasn't easy, but it was definitely worth it for them. Thanks to all the new inventions popping up around this time, the rich had early access to the first versions of actual modern luxury. We're talking massive estates with live-in staff, private railcars that felt like rolling hotels, actual cars for the first time, early electricity, gas, lighting, elevators, stuff that made you feel like you were living 50 years in the future. The future was very fast approaching though. Pretty quickly the same systems that built factories and railroads started building telegraphs, telephones, electricity, radio and transistors. By the time we hit the mid-20th century, we'd built the first computer and suddenly everything Welcome to the information age, my friend. You know this one, it's basically what's been happening ever since the US military found out that you could take 2 computers and make them talk to each other. Suddenly, the richest people on earth weren't factory owners or oil barons like Carnegie or Rockefeller, they were guys like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos. Guys who built systems, platforms and code that connected the world. In the information age, you got rich by building tools that replicated themselves. An operating system, a digital storefront, a network that pulled people in and kept them there. And here's the best part, a single software product could reach billions of people without additional cost and every new user made the system stronger. In the information age, you don't need ships or trains, you need servers, cloud infrastructure and an army of computer engineers. So naturally, it took a different kind of mind to win here. You had to understand timing, you had to think about product-market fit, attention and virality. You had to ship fast, fail faster and capture people's behavior before anybody else did. If you were built for that, this era came with a new kind of luxury. Smart homes, private jets, biohacking labs, the ability to work from anywhere, build from anywhere and shape the way billions of people live. Your wealth was borderless. But just like the industrial age laid the foundation for this one, this era is laying the foundation for what comes next. Because now we're going from managing information ourselves, to teaching machines to understand it and that is creating a whole new era and a whole new way of getting rich. Yeah, we're talking about the age of intelligence, my friend. It's what we're living right now. If you want to build wealth in the modern day like it's never been possible before in history, there's only one way to do it and that is with AI. We're seeing a shift where traditional products are being fundamentally changed by AI. It's not just a tool anymore and the biggest companies in the world know it. You might think it's overhyped, but there's a reason why Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and NVIDIA are all locked into trillion dollar arms races to become the leader in artificial intelligence. Because whoever builds the most powerful AI is basically going to own the future, which means a lot of dollar bills. Wealth in this era doesn't look like factories or fleets. The new rich are the ones who own data, who build the foundation models, who sell the tools that power everybody else's tools. The cool thing is that it's not about being a code wizard. The skills you need to get rich in this age are systems thinking, creativity and being able to take complex ideas, simplify them and share them with the world. It's about working alongside AI, not against it. But we're still in the transition from the information age to the intelligence age, so who knows what wealth will really look like, but if history has taught us anything, it's that over time wealth never looks the same. Luxury is gonna get wild in the future. If it's exclusivity you're looking for, you're gonna have to be taking trips to the moon or something. The rich are gonna be living fully automated lives, they'll have flying cars and smart homes that learn their preferences and robotic AI assistants. But honestly, the real luxury in this time is gonna be having time to think deeply, to create, to learn, to play the long game while machines handle all the short-term chaos. That's the kind of life AI makes possible if you know how to use it. Right now you're watching the groundwork being laid for something much bigger, which brings us to bigger questions. Like where do we go from here? What does getting rich look like in 50-500 years from now? Let's make some predictions on the future of wealth, shall we? So in the next 5 years, the winners will be the ones who truly master AI and integrate it into everything they do. People who know how to automate workflows, generate income from digital assets and scale their influence using machines will have an unfair advantage over everyone else. A few of them will seemingly get rich overnight, but most of them will get rich by building quiet systems that run in the background, earning money while they sleep. Now fast forward 50 years, by then AI is not gonna be new. There will be 2 or 3 whole generations who have been born with it. And honestly, who knows what the next wave will be. We might be living more in the digital world than the physical world at some point. Many experts say that the most valuable companies might be those that control And what about 500 years from now? Well, we're obviously guessing here. But if we follow the current trajectory, wealth may not even look like money at all. Imagine a world post-scarcity where anyone, anywhere has access to all of life's basic necessities. How do you even define wealth and exclusivity in that reality? Hell, if there's one thing that's never gonna change much, it's human nature. Exclusivity will always be measured in access and influence. But what the hell, let's think big. 500 years from now, the richest people might live in their own private simulations and travel the galaxy and live to 500. And if they don't happen to crack immortality, they'll probably be able to preserve their consciousness digitally somehow. It sounds wild, I know. But remember, 500 years ago, the idea of global digital currencies or personal AI assistants or even being able to watch a YouTube video would've sounded just as crazy. So where does that leave you, my friend? Well, we've seen how wealth has evolved through history, how it's evolving and changing today and how it will keep evolving. If you wanna stay in the game, you can't afford to cling to what worked yesterday, you have to embrace the future. So there you have it Aluxer, that is how people got rich throughout history. And if you want to build the mindset to build wealth today and in the future, come join us on the Alux app, because all throughout history, the best investment you could make was in yourself and that still holds true today. So go ahead and scan that QR code on screen and you'll get a special 25% discount on your yearly plan for the Alux app. Hundreds of thousands of people have already started changing their lives with it and we would love to have you on board as well. With that said Aluxer, we'll see you back here next time. Take care my friend.