Because you don’t have the drive, creativity, imagination, determination, and fortitude required and you are likely risk adverse. Or you do have those qualities and are too lazy to use them.
Almost every major self-made billionaire today has experienced significant failures, setbacks, near-bankruptcies, product flops, and financial losses. Failure is a common thread in their stories, and many credit it as essential to their eventual success.
Even Colonel Sanders (founder of KFC) experienced repeated failures throughout much of his life before achieving massive success in his 60s.
Top US Billionaires (as of mid-May 2026):
1. Elon Musk Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company; earlier: Zip2 and co-founded Pay Pal
2. Larry Page, Google
3. Sergey Brin, Google
4. Jeff Bezos, Amazon
5. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook
6. Larry Ellison, Oracle
7. Jensen Huang, Nvidia
8. Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway
9. Michael Dell, Dell Computer
10. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft
11. Bill Gates, Microsoft
12. Waltons, Walmart, from Sam Walton
The greatest portion of the wealth of most of these billionaires is in the stock of the company they founded which has then been used to make other investments.
So stop complaining about billionaires, stop envying them, stop saying they don’t pay their fair share. The wealth they created also created wealth for millions of other people while improving the lives of Americans and people around the world.
If you are reading this, you likely have benefited from one or more of the things created by the people listed here.
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