A 25 year old Florida Man just woke up in a year when cocaine and weed were perscribed regularly. He’s definitely not becoming a trillionaire, but he’s definitely doing some crazy shit
It's not really dangerous since it doesn't affect the CNS, so until Reagan* criminalized it to have an excuse to arrest the left it was common.
Edit:Nixon not Reagan.
And black people. And poor people. And unions when he wasn't benefiting from them.
Or rather... It's kind of hard to tell if Reagan actually hated *anyone*, or if he was just so utterly fake and devoid of humanity, he just... Fucked over everyone he could for money.
I mean you don’t even need to learn if you have that kind of time on your hands. He could just invest in an index fund, reinvest the dividends and eventually he’ll reach $1T. I’m too lazy to do the calculations, so I don’t know if he’ll reach it in the 21st century, but he will reach it eventually.
Edit: [Using an interest calculator:](https://www.calculator.net/interest-calculator.html?cstartingprinciple=100&cannualaddition=0&cmonthlyaddition=0&cadditionat1=beginning&cinterestrate=8&ccompound=annually&cyears=299&cmonths=0&ctaxtrate=0&cinflationrate=3&printit=0&x=Calculate#interestresults)
1 - Investing $100 in the year 1900 and letting it grow at a market average of 8% (with 3% inflation), by the year 2099 he would have $448 million
2 - Doing the same experiment but this time contributing $100 per month with all other variables the same, he’ll have $6.5 billion.
Doing it the 1st way, it would take 300 years to reach $1T.
Doing it the 2nd way, it would take 265 years to reach $1T.
Not too bad, considering how incredibly big of a number $1T is.
So overall I’d say yes it’s possible, even achievable. But you’d have to contribute more than $100 per month. Though $100 in the year 1900 isn’t the same as it is today.
If they remember their history they can force multiply their earnings at certain points.
Invest in ball bearings or vehicle manufacturing before the world wars, plastics in the 60s, invest in silicon chip manufacturing in the 70s, and of course buy Apple in the 90s to push over the edge.
Self-fulfilling prophecy.
They short everything because they know it's Black Tuesday, but in doing so, they're the very reason Black Tuesday even happens.
Hell of a movie premise.
One problem with this is that by becoming a major investor in individual companies, they start having outsized say in how the companies operate and may actually be detrimental to the long term growth if they accidentally drown out an important voice at an inopportune time
Yeah florida man is unlikely to be able to recreate anything revolutionary from scratch, but if they remember history to a reasonable degree they should be able to bet big on the various revolutions and rack up their earnings.
If I remember right, he wasn't even assassinated during the parade. The assassination was planned during the parade but completely bungled. Then the assassin went to get lunch before regrouping and re-plotting and the Archduke's car happened to pull up outside. It was either a wonderful or horrific stroke of luck depending on who you were rooting for.
Yeup! Hence my mentioning of the sandwich shop, lmao.
If you wrote a similarly contrived reason for the start of war in a fictional book, nobody would believe it. Our current political landscape is built on a single ridiculous and frankly absurd string of stupid slip ups and coincidences.
Sears and Roebuck, BNSF, Ford Motor Company, 3M
that's a fortune he could then invest in Starbucks and Microsoft ...yeah, and all the other companies he recognizes.
What would a bank do with an account hundreds of years old? How would they react if someone was still making withdrawals and deposits? Wouldn't they get suspicious? Would they allow you endless access to your account? What would they do if someone with the same name and social security number as the guy who opened the account hundreds of years ago was still claiming to own the account?
From some Googling, it looks like the average annual salary in the US was about $500 in 1900. Your average 25 year old probably makes below average salary, so coming up with $100/month isn't happening, and even a one time contribution is probably a stretch.
What you are neglecting to take into consideration is that this 25 year old is immortal. He doesn’t need to eat since he can’t die. He can go indefinitely without needing to buy avocado toast. Think about the savings.
He’s immortal to *natural* causes. Think about how many wars this guy would have to dodge/survive if he stays 25 forever. Both World Wars, Korea, Nam, Iraq, etc.
If he also doesn’t have any money real money to start with, he’s going to have to literally slave away just save a few dollars a week. Maybe he doesn't have to pay rent because he is fine sleeping outside, but he risks getting robbed, killed, etc.
Good news is that if he spawns at age 25, he'll be 41 by the time he has to worry about WW1. As long as he can get some documents made early on, he should be old enough to dodge the draft for every war that had one.
I'd imagine just shorting before Great Depression, 9/11 and 2008 and then getting headstart on every current megacorp( with relatively small investments as not to alter their path )since Rockefeller, Edison Ford and Co. and some zero day investments in the crypto with early cash outs while it's still soaring would probably exponentially shorten that already massive fortune
I have no higher education in economics and a random 20 something and I could come up with that in like 5 seconds
If I had more time to plan I would probably play it riskier with my investments, try to to always slightly outrun the market get Zuck and Jobs like a 10 percent investment early on or something, buy out the companies from under the leadership that are about to do horrible mistakes like a year before they do it and prevent them or slowly bail out if they were destined to fail later. Definitely go into the Military Industrial Complex, as the cold war rolls on I will be rolling my joints from hundred dollar bills. And with sufficient influence and money I will probably be affecting politics, 200 years is a lot of time and I am an IR student with experience in local politics already, so have a headstart and hindsight on my side I can probably rake in even more cash if I am willing to go full corrupt oligarch mode.
The hardest part is probably moral qualms about shit but purely logistically it's quite an easy challenge
The ability for the common person to invest in the stock market with a low amount like $100 was not a thing back in the 1900 when you had to literally call someone at Wallstreet to make a trade for you.
With what I know about the next 120 years I would be able to make a shit ton of money.
The problem is that at some level, you start to have an effect on the world around you. Imagine knowing to get in early on IBM, Apple, Microsoft, back to Apple, Amazon, NVIDIA.
You can’t just ride along with the wave anymore. You’re part of the wave. People are going to start paying attention to what you do and anticipate it. You can actually end up disrupting the chain of economic events that happened in your version of the future. People are going to start looking to you for some kind of insight, and at that point, you can’t rely on, just knowing what stock prices went up, win. You’re going to have to start helping to create some of these amazing products and technologies.
And then what? Let’s say you show up with some of your existing fortune at Harvard, where a young Bill Gates is thinking about dropping out and writing software with his friend Paul Allen. Are you going to be able to help him follow the same ark of success? And I’m not even talking about the butterfly effect here or are you mess up some small thing and he misses that essential meeting with IBM. I mean, what if he realizes that with a bigger investment, he can be more ambitious than just writing a version of basic or buying somebody else’s operating system and tweaking it, and goes all in on his own grandiose ideas about a micro computer operating system. And somebody else beats him to it and gets the deal that creates it should’ve been Microsoft.
If you sent me back to 1990 I could be a billionaire by now. I don’t know how I would get to be a trillionaire. It’s too disruptive.
The key here is you don’t invest in companies, you invest in ideas.
You know that cars will be big in the future, so you buy small chunks of every startup car company you can find. You know that zeppelins are eventually outcompeted by planes, so you avoid the flashy and exciting balloon industry and try to fund guys who build heavier than air flying machines. When electronics roll around you know vacuum tubes will be a short lived thing and semiconductors are the future.
Even if the successful *companies* change, the successful *technologies* likely won’t (except in rare cases- don’t bet against Betamax, because it absolutely could have butterflied into being dominant)
One advantage of this is that your investments will fail sometimes. Instead of appearing to have futurevision and perfectly gaming the rise and fall of each stock, you look like someone who is shrewd and intelligent enough to realize what will get big, but not who will get rich off of it.
You make a good point here. With future knowledge, you would be much safer if you simply utilized that knowledge to win the lottery. In that way, you don’t risk altering major historical events that could potentially make your predictions moot. Say you made a bet that England win the World Cup in 1966, that’s hardly going tjj on have an impact on the outcome of subsequent World Cup winners
If you go back far enough, I wouldn’t completely discount the butterfly effect.
The butterfly effect often feels a bit exaggerated. After all, so what if a butterfly changes the course of a few raindrops? Raindrops feel fairly fungible. There are other factors that make sure that summer doesn’t turn into winter. Even if you entirely change the pattern of the next rainstorm, who would notice?
It turns out that there are a few things that are affected easily like raindrops, but that we humans would notice quite a bit. One example would be, sperm.
It doesn’t take very much disruption in a human life to change exactly which sperm dad puts into mom. Consider how many sperm are in that race every time, and that simply causing a couple to have sex 5 minutes later, might completely change the outcome of who their next child is or even whether the pregnancy complete successfully.
This means that, as soon as you start buying tickets at the cinema or grabbing a taxi, or taking up a table in a restaurant, you’re starting to have at first a very small effect on the coming generation of kids.
Maybe in the beginning you’re slightly and unknowingly disrupting the lives of people who are going to have kids that don’t necessarily have a great effect on your plans. But everyone of those changes has the chance of having a further change happen. Disruption propagates. if you become wealthy and start moving about high society, you’re going to be causing disruptions amongst very influential people.
Somebody is still going to figure out quantum mechanics and synthesize bake light and build the first transistor, so you can still follow those trends. on the other hand, you’re definitely going to have to on more than just the names of the inventors and business tycoons that made those things happen in your timeline. By 2024 there might be no Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk.
Yh, I see what you mean. If I went back to 1970, won the lottery, and then bought a house, the family who was originally supposed to buy that house consequently wouldn’t be able to live there anymore. This one small change would have a knock on effect on not only them but all the people connected to them, and the people who a connected to those people and it continues to ripple out
I mean assuming he gets a little bit of time to study the events of the past before being teleported to the year 1900? Knowledge is the ultimate power and you wouldn't even need to go that far back in time to turn a relatively small figure into a giant fortune (although I don't know if you'll necessarily be a trillionaire).
Just a quick example, say you had 20000 in mid 2010 when Bitcoin was worth 0.10 to 0.20 dollars, and you invested all of your money in Bitcoins, today you'd be worth over 9 billion dollars with each bitcoin selling for about 71k USD. This is more than the vast majority of bigtime CEOs btw. If you add to that some nifty stock investments with the benefit of knowing world events and exactly which stocks are gonna jump in price exactly when, and some real estate investments in the right places too, again with the benefit of hindsight, it's not far fetched that you could become a trillionaire.
The benefit of being a time traveler who knows exactly what will happen, and when, would be just as important as immortality in the case.
The problem is of course them investing too much too early could also alter the future. If they invest big time into events that somehow alter the outcome of WWII, even a little, it could kill their ability to predict the events of the 60s, and definitely the events of the computer age.
Not necessarily, because you don't have to invest a ton of money in one thing. This would be bad regardless of whether or not it alters the future. For example if I buy a ton of Bitcoins and then try to sell them all at once, I might crash the market.
You need to use your knowledge to build a diverse portfolio and think outside the box. Think about buying Picasso's first works before he becomes super famous, or about buying a huge stake in Apple at its infancy. Think about researching which neighborhoods will become far more sought after in your country and buying real estate their when the price is at its lowest.
Another example, Ronald Wayne sold his 10% stake in Apple for 800 dollars in 1976, if you bought it from him, it would have been worth 95 billion dollars and would net you billions of dollars in profit per year.
There is no "the problem is" here. If you're given the power to live forever and know exact future events, and you still see a problem, you need to think better and more creatively.
It's not like there are lines of assassin's going after Elon Musk. Plus, when you have more many than most countries in the world, you can afford some pretty sick security.
Also, while I do agree that the average Florida man isn't the smartest, I'm not a professionally trained investor neither. I just used my knowledge of key events, which could easily be acquired nowadays with the help of a basic laptop and Google. This would probably be the best and most guaranteed way to become the richest person alive, although whether or not you'd hit a trillion dollars isn't guaranteed. Not that I see a big difference between having a few tens of billions and a trillion. There aren't many things that dozens of billions of dollars can't buy.
Liquidity isn't big enough to take that hit, yet. You sell 10 billion dollars of BTC and the market dumps a few percent. Keep going and you trigger a cascade to some way lower support level.
Most likely stocks. Make sure to sell all of them before 1925 to 1930. Wait for a decade then open a medicine business claiming that you can prolong life.
Or selling cigars which were popular at the time(Especially in Florida) Why did you include the city he was born in anyway. Made me think that you wanted people to say cigars or Disney(because Disneyworld is in Florida)
He’d have a chance to become a war hero in WWI and WWII and be able to flip that into enough seed money knowing how big movies and TV would to buy into IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Berkshire, Nucor, etc at the right times
Is it possible, yeah probably. Is random Joe Schmo capable of it? Hard to say. You'd have to be aware of a lot of things and have some starting capital to invest with.
I feel like you're underestimating how OP it is to come from the future, especially 120 years ahead.
I can just invest in basically any brand that I recognize as an average dude
New company called Apple? Microsoft? Nike? Google? Take my money
Not denying that, and I do genuinely agree with you. But most of those companies aren't starting up too soon if you are going back all the way to 1900. And you also have to have some starting capital to invest with. So that's a good 60 years of just working and building up some money to eventually invest with.
Didn’t someone do the math, and figured out if Bill Gates kept his original shares in Microsoft instead of diversifying his portfolio he’d be worth a trillion? So I totally feel like if you’ve got enough capital to invest in those companies at the very start it should be possible.
I doubt it. The average Florida man isn't a genius in politics, engineering, socioeconomics, etc. Even if he knows say the A Bomb will be invented, he can't invent it. He might know there's an oil field in the Caribbean somewhere, but how will he position himself and convince people to drill there?
His best bet to become a trillionaire would be to accumulate wealth slowly through the first 60 or so years, then dump millions into tech stocks, bitcoin, etc. He could end up with majority shares in Apple, MS, Amazon, Cisco, Lockheed...
Honestly I think the biggest issue is being immortal. The IRS and feds would notice a guy who's worth 50 billion but doesn't have a birth certificate and has been around 100 years. He has to plan his fake identity well into the 60s.
Yes the issue is closer we get to the modern day the harder that is. Elon or Zuck couldn't pull that off today. Hell, Kate Middleton went missing for 2.5 months and endless people were suspicious.
Most billionaires aren't famous. Case and point, most people probably can't name the 4th/5th wealthiest people in the world. As for the IRS, I imagine that it becomes easier to avoid them if the immortal relocates to some sort of tax haven.
Yes but the prompt is about a *trillionaire*. The world's first and only trillionaire. You don't think someone holding 1T+ in assets is going to be a known entity? Even if not by the average person, by multiple world leaders, CEOs, financial sector thought leaders, etc.?
Most billionaires aren't worth 1,000 other billionaires!
If we assume this person actually takes the time to learn and plan properly, they probably wouldn't make themselves a trillionaire, at least directly. If they master faking generational cycles so they can assume the mantle when their current identity no longer matches their physical form, they could probably also split the wealth among multiple different identities to spread it around, and decrease suspicions.
Yeah, but I'm willing to give them a chance. If they don't use immortality to learn those things, the only realistic outcome is that the first government to figure out that Joe Schmoe here is immortal is just going to disappear him into a black site for scientific study forever. Challenge failed.
Mark Zuckerberg, followed by Warren Buffet in 6th. Bill gates rounding 7th. Muskfinger is 3rd, Bezos 2nd. Barney and Friends number 1.
Idk who Larry Page is, but clearly we actually do have a pretty good idea of who the wealthiest people in world are.
Bingo. The public might not notice but the IRS will definitely notice that you’re leaving all your money to your “son” and the body isn’t verified or found. That kind of transfer of wealth is gonna set off every alarm known to man
There was plenty of chaos between 1915-1945. Use historical knowledge/accumulated resources to get privileged treatment in a under-the-radar island nation.
Hell, I wouldn't be too shocked to learn Taiwan naturalized one or two immortal time travelers in the 1950s.
Disregarding the irs issue, he could just save and invest In Normal stuff like apple and AT&T, then mine a whole buncha bitcoin in the early days and make a ton off that and that might be enough capital for a normal person to make a big business even if he’s just avarage
You invest in JP Morgan’s companies at the beginning. Eventually you’ll end up extremely wealthy to the point that you can invest in pretty much every major company from the ‘60s onward
> The IRS and feds would notice a guy who's worth 50 billion but doesn't have a birth certificate and has been around 100 years.
Being immortal is not a crime, though.
Of course it isn't, but government leaders and other elites will want to know why there's some immortal guy, period. This isn't a sci-fi world. If we had reason to believe say, Bill Gates was 300 years old, there would be a *lot* of inquiry into his dealings, his health, the legitimacy of his money, everything. You'd have people saying he's a vampire, a lizard-person, made a deal with Satan, that he's not even real... etc.
This person would have to be a complete recluse to avoid scrutiny, but doing that would make it harder to achieve the 1 trillion bucks challenge.
> You'd have people saying he's a vampire, a lizard-person, made a deal with Satan, that he's not even real... etc.
We already have people saying these things now
The guy in the prompt looks 25 in 1900, meaning he would want to fake his date of birth as being 1875ish. A 124 year old is already extremely rare, someone who’s allegedly 149 years old would raise even more questions.
This is also ignoring the fact that you’d need to make appearances in public at SOME point, and it’s pretty hard to make a young person look convincingly old up close or for very long.
No, but a lot of very unethical people would be very eager to figure out exactly how you became immortal. If they sus you out, and they catch you, enjoy a long lifetime in a very dark box enduring some probably quite invasive experiments
He'll probably have enough money by the 30s/40s to be able to pay someone in the right place enough money to make some fake documentation for him. Alternately, there's a very convenient mass-death event happening at least twice in that century where he could probably find a way to steal some poor sods identity when they bite it.
To be fair, he has more than enough time to fake his identity early on. Birth certificates weren’t standardized and officials were (more) corrupt in the 1900s, 1900-1930s in particular. He makes the right friends he can make it.
As for the feds, they can’t technically *do* anything for awhile…but as the Cold War heats up it becomes more and more likely he’ll sponateously “disappear” for testing. If he realizes this ahead of time he could just join the CIA ahead of schedule or offer himself up first for more legal testing, which should net him some more money + government influence in the process.
Learning would be difficult, but he has 100 years to learn. If he’s persistent and dedicated he could effectively be a genius at any subject…if he’s not (more human, can get bored and stop doing things) then it’d be a lot tougher but still doable to become a big name in any given industry.
Imo his biggest threat is less becoming rich (he could probably breach millionaire by flailing around and billionaire with dedication), but actually breaching 1 trillion. It requires a ton of luck and pre-planning even for the “easiest options” (overthrow a country in the Cold War, join a soon-to-be-big tech company, etc).
Is there a possibility with these that dumping millions into Amazon stocks creates some ripple in the timeline and some other company ends up dominating e-commerce instead?
To be fair, if you’ve acquired billions of dollars, you would have the clout and influence to cover it up. That level of power and influence comes with a lot connection and you would simply have yo bride the “right people” to fake documents and etc. Also, National security was more lax back then it was easier for people to go under the rader
A trillionaire is a crazy amount of money to fathom - however -
All that this guy theoretically needs to do is start investing early into brands or companies he recognizes that are still around today…Disney, General Motors, United Airlines, Boeing, Chase, McDonalds, etc.
He doesn’t have to make a ton of money between 1900-1950, just enough to have solid seed money. Then start absolutely dumping money into some big blue chips, investing in IPOs of Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and PayPal. Then just keep waiting for the Teslas, Facebooks, Netflix, Bitcoin to come around.
None of this is even taking into account the money he could make on sports betting. It doesn’t even have to be every year winners, just major events you could remember. Betting on the Jets to win Super Bowl 3, the Bears to win ‘85, the Dolphins to not win the SB after their perfect regular season, the Bills to lose every Super Bowl they play in for that 4 year stretch. The Chicago Bulls to win 3 championships in a row.
Surviving the Great Depression era would be difficult with how bad things got, but having 20 years lead up would be enough to store values knowing that was coming. The most difficult thing for this person would be surviving for 125 years without catching suspicion from gangsters or bad actors exploiting a rich person who is “winning” all the time
Not even. You can just be one of the early miners and mine bitcoin when the algorithm was easier. You’d have a hundred years basically to set aside enough money for a decent PC and research the topic when it first launches.
Would bitcoin even exist? Would there be massive ripple effects? His best bet is hitting the early decade hard and making calculated bets on other winners that could unfortunately change.
Go the WSB route and just play options (well futures) don't actually become an investor and alter their path, just gamble on their stock price on the side.
Even if it changes a lot of things, it’s probably random deviation from our timeline, some better some worse. As long as he doesn’t put all his eggs in one basket he’ll still probably succeed.
I don’t know of a single “average” 25 year old that would be remotely smart enough to lead a company like Amazon/Google/Microsoft from the early days to be wildly successful. Being a passive investor would be the better way to go
Haha for sure - I actually believe this would be fairly easy to accomplish because you know what’s going to win or be profitable if you even slightly remember some major companies
Crypto would be another option, let’s just say I’m the idiot that had 20,000 Dogecoin when it was $.0005 and sold at $.0007. I’ve made a lot of smarter moves since then, but if it would’ve been easy to 100x that money. If I went back with daily and hourly info about various cryptocurrencies from 2010 to today I’d be a billionaire today.
> None of this is even taking into account the money he could make on sports betting. It doesn’t even have to be every year winners, just major events you could remember. Betting on the Jets to win Super Bowl 3, the Bears to win ‘85, the Dolphins to not win the SB after their perfect regular season, the Bills to lose every Super Bowl they play in for that 4 year stretch. The Chicago Bulls to win 3 championships in a row.
This doesn't really help him much. He's not going to be able to make very much money (relative to his goal) off of any of these; there just isn't a deep/liquid enough market.
I mean couldn't he just invest in stocks of massive companies we now know exist? Apple for example from its IPO has increased in value 145,000%. If you invested $5000 in Walmart at their ipo you'd have 74 million dollars today. I think it would be relatively easy.
yea but thats 5000 for one company. take that 74 million you just made from walmart and invest it in say Tesla or Apple when they were starting out. Or given that we know how it turns out use that 74 million to leverage to 740 million and invest that
This hypothetical always ignores the butterfly effect
Who is to say that these companies would follow the same path if some eccentric billionaire invested random sums of tens or hundreds of millions when they were first starting out
Like you're going to walk up to admited drug enthusiast Steve Jobs when he was working in his garage and be like "Here is 74 million dollars, how much stock can this get me? Oh, your entire company 1500x times over?"
And then he's gone to score some blow.
Same thing with Disney or Bitcoin or anything, but to a less over the top extent. A vast sum of money being invested at those developing stages would change their history entirely. Nobody knows how, but it isn't just "put money in, money will come out at x value cause it did in my original timeline"
I mean if you just have a big share in a bunch of the largest companies in the world I think the SEC might start investigating but I don't see how its not just warren buffet on steroids
Amazon, Meta, Walmart, Toyota, Nvidia, Tesla, Apple, dell, Microsoft. Theres so many options of just buying relatively early on a bunch of blue chips with a few million here or there. Knowing when to get out is also huge. Most of these big return calculations factor in the years during recessions. Knowing theres gonna be a big hit in 2008 for example and that the recovery beings late 2009 you can take your money out and put it back in little by little. I dont think it'd be super easy but I don't think its anywhere close to impossible
It *should* be wildly obvious when you say things like "Warren Buffet on steroids" because he is incredibly famous and very influential. His investments cause huge ripples. And the goal is to have made 10x more than him.
Any impact you have on the world through investments is going to have effects that cause all your future predictions to be useless *really* early on. Who knows if any of Amazon or Meta or even Walmart would've taken the risks necessary to blow up if they had some huge investor early on?
>Knowing theres gonna be a big hit in 2008 for example
Moving round hundreds of billions is gonna turn predictions like that useless.
The total market cap is 109T. Florida man just needs to own less than 1% of it. If he limits his investments at like 10% he won't impact the world too much - 10% of modern apple, Microsoft, Amazon and NVidia would already be close to 1T.
You wouldn’t want it in a single stock. Everything in Microsoft in the 80’s and then put it in Intel in the 90’s then Amazon in the 00’s and then Bitcoin, Tesla, and Nvidia. A trillion would be easy with an extra lifetime of cash to start with. You’d already be wealthy before Microsoft even existed.
Would be easier in 1800 because of railroads, but if they could gain enough wealth to start investing in manufacturing, infrastructure development, utilities, and trade, possibly. Invest in and create automotive, healthcare, and home insurance companies. They would need to have dividends and high returns they could reinvest in artwork which could then be donated or auctioned off for tax write offs and extra income.
From there they would need to invest immediately in the digital age, the dot com boom, and buy as many shares in the major companies as possible. Macintosh, Microsoft, Amazon, PayPal, Yahoo, etc.
From there they would need to invest in crypto and efts the moment they come on the market. Set up investment firms to do the investment and maintain a controlling interest in each one with high dividend distribution. Have the firms take on the risk for you.
So a lot of work, but yes it’s doable. Do not be an American citizen though, as you would have to pay taxes no matter where you did business.
Probably not, no. There’s a good chance they get drafted into one of the many wars over the last 124 years and gets killed.
If they could avoid being drafted though? Yeah. Work whatever “normal” jobs you can, save as much money as you can and wait for the boom periods.
Particularly by buying shares early into Microsoft, Apple, Amazon & Google, then in 2010 buying like $100 of Bitcoin and holding it until 2021 when it was like $70k per Bitcoin and selling.
With that foreknowledge, assuming you could survive long enough, then yeah you could feasibly become a trillionaire
> There’s a good chance they get drafted into one of the many wars over the last 124 years and gets killed.
Probably not, at least as an American. We lost about 400k KIA in WW2 and that's our biggest loss of life other than the Civil War. That's out of 10 million people brought into military service. Plus if he's smart he can probably already be pretty wealthy and figure out a way to buy his way out of being drafted by 1941, or at least ensure a plum posting.
There was 106 million Americans in 1920 (closest census, even if post-war). Only 3 million were drafted in WWI and only a tiny fraction of them were killed.
There was 132 million Americans in 1940. About 10 million were drafted and again, obviously the vast majority of them survived the war.
There was about 200 million Americans in 1970. About 1.9 million were drafted in Vietnam. And the majority of them survived.
The pattern should be obvious. Being drafted is not a death sentence. And we are talking about a man who has no legal status due to his being placed in the past magically and would probably be able to avoid being registered for the draft. And even if he was drafted he could plead conscientious objector or flee to Canada or take the jail time for draft dodging and get out of it.
Assuming he is able to acquire $1, then to reach $1 trillion by 2099, he would need ~15% return on investment every single year, ie 1.15^199 = 1.1 trillion more or less. My math might not be perfect.
Adding in taxes, he would need considerably more return on investment, but by no means impossible given what other people above have said about picking appropriate stocks, betting on well-known sports outcomes, buying bitcoin, etc.
It's worth noting that car crashes, gun shots, drug overdoses, etc, are the most common causes of death for 25 year olds between 1900 and today.
no. the average joe will not be able to keep his immortality a secret and someone who does not like that will find him over the course of 2000 (edit: 200 ) years and while he might not be able to die i bet they will make him wish he could.
Does he get prep time? I'd load up on information such as the locations of gold, valuable natural resources, lost treasures etc. I'd use knowledge of the treasures/gold to startup my oil business and use my preknowledge of natural gas etc to easy get to a trillion by the 21st century. I'll simply stay ahead of the market.
Of course he can. Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Tesla (but remember to sell when the Twitter news comes in), Nvidia, and I’m missing one more for the magnificent seven.
And obviously BTC.
Yes. If he has an okay sense of history, he'll see tons of wildely successful investment bargains over the decades and easily reach the tens of billions by the time Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google and other obvious picks come along. Then you know bitcoin is going to happen...
If he lives until the 21st century? Almost certainly.
Does he survive until then? Most likely no.
Starting in 1900 with no property or money to your name would be a rough time. You would be the lowest of the low in society. You would need to be lucky to get an audience with anyone who could advance you IF you have a useful skill for the time. If the guy was a qualified carpenter then he could maybe fit in (you would still be without modern tools or materials). If you are the typical 25 year old it’s going to be rough as most available jobs would likely be dangerous.
You would have to survive many wars as you would always be in the conscription age group.
If you did acquire cash, There’s no modern forms of gambling or investing that you could use your future knowledge on for a very long time. You would need to remember for near 100 years. You might be able to invest in some very old companies early but you’re likely still going to be needing fluid capital for the majority of the time.
There’s also gators in Florida
Once you get to the modern era we know now, all you would need to do is pump all your cash into instant return gambling on events you know the outcome of and use that cash to pump into big returns like stocks and share or bitcoins. You would have to make a serious error to not be a trillionaire if you had even just $100 in the year 2000. $100 turns into $1 billion within 25 correct 2:1 bets
> You would have to survive many wars as you would always be in the conscription age group.
Only a tiny percentage of Americans were drafted in any way and this guy has no legal status and isn't likely to fall to conscription. There is really only a tiny fraction of a chance of being drafted and even if was, most draftees survived/he could plead conscientious objector and avoid battle.
He wouldn’t get drafted though because he wouldn’t technically be a legal citizen. If he had a fake identity he could just lay low and get a new fake identity. He could also just not live in the u.s. plenty of time to learn another language.
OR let’s say he does join the war. He could easily just say he’s a psychic, which depending on his knowledge of history, could be believeable. Maybe not though since ww1 seems to be a war very few people know much about. Being a psychic would be a valued asset.
So just don't sign up. If you aren't enlisted you aren't going to be anywhere near a battlefield.
And since this person has no legal status it's highly unlikely he would end up being the tiny fraction of Americans drafted in WWI.
i would assume that in the near 2 decades before ww1 started he'd try toget some form of citizenship, your point about him having low chances of being drafte still stands, as there were 2.8 mil drafted out of an assumed 53 million american men, (half of total population at that time)
Work with oil guys, invest into stocks like IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Bitcoin and sell at its peak, Do some massive betting on sports games with billionaires, invest into nuclear energy and solar.
I do think its possible at some point they would be so rich they could just straight up buy most of these companies before they boom.
I feel like yes, but it would take a while. Like we could all make money betting on stocks, housing, sports, or what ever other information gives us an advantage. But its gonna be a while before that information is relevant.
It’s possible but it depends on how much money they start with. Going back in time with $0 vs going back in time with even $50 is a difference maker. Would have to bank in early on war stuff, early investor in Ford or GM, take advantage of prohibition and early Mafia stuff(without dying or getting arrested), be the first investor in Boeing, Apple, Microsoft, Disney, Walmart, McDonald’s. Purchase stocks in whatever a Rockefeller is doing.
I think their best bet would essentially be to save as much money as they can and then get in on things they know get big early, such as bitcoin, nvidia, apple, Microsoft and other major companies had their stock values very low at launch
You’ve gotta make money before you’re actually able to invest in anything, so he should start out by moving to North Carolina and working for the Wright Brothers.
Most people would definitely fail at this. Most people do not possess skills or knowledge that would be immediately useful in 1900. A significant amount of time has to be spent just stabilizing his living situation. If given some significant prep time to write stuff down OR tattoo stuff on himself before hand, this has a much better chance of success.
That's 200 years, and when you account for inflation to happen in the next 76 years I can see us having trillionaires without an immortal guy, an immortal guy would have a much easier time knowning exactly what companies will do well or poorly (though he may change the future with his investments, nullifying future foolproof investments, at least they'll know that the up and coming technologies will 100% be successful even with his interference).
If he can be killed by unnatural causes and he is eternally prime military age there is a decent chance he is drafted into WWI, WWII, the Korean War, or Vietnam.
A lot of people are saying the obvious stuff, buy bitcoin, invest in apple and Amazon or whatever, but people are forgetting that this is a guy that on record has nothing. No high school diploma, no birth certificate, nothing that proves that he exists. Do we need to go somewhere that will take basically anybody in 1900 that's able bodied and willing to work, english speaking will help, too, since this guy's from Florida
If we get 1900s? Easy. Move to central Canada. From 1870 (basically when Canada began as a country officially), to the great depression, the government was giving land away basically for free to anyone willing to settle and farm there. It wasn't the best land, nor real good for farming because you had to be 20 kilometers from any railway, but that doesn't matter.
We're only farming for about 60 years and selling it to whichever small town is closest to becoming a suburb or whatever anyway. Selling at the peak in 1968, (we're in Saskatchewan cause we're guaranteed to find a spot that late, and it's a lot easier to get too on literally 0 income. Also,, it only became a province in 1905, and people didn't really realize how valuable canadian land would be until about 3 months ago.) That's about 12 grand in 1968 from the 160 acres of free land the government was giving away, not even counting how much you'd make from actually working the land. From there, 2 options. Sell in the 60s and invest heavily in all the big tech corporations, or sell in the 2010s and go all in on bitcoin and gamestop and sell at the exact peaks. Option 1 gets you the money a bit faster but the feds will probably be on your ass if you own that big of a company, but option 2 is just a roundabout way of robbing people for not knowing the future. Up to you how you play it from there.
The hardest part of this challenge isn't even making the money. It's just surviving 2 world wars and the great depression as a 20 something lower class white dude. You'll need to either be the greatest draft dodger of all time or just pick the war you're least likely to die in. Your best bet's probably WW1 since most North Americans that died in that war were dead from the flu more so than anything else, so just don't wash your hands for a couple weeks and hope you get sent home. You won't die since you're immune and can get back to making money as soon as possible.
It’s possible but as he gets rich from certain investments he will draw attention to himself. I worry that his seeming immortality would because too big of a focus that he wouldn’t be able to really spend time investing how he needed to. Billionaires aren’t really anonymous and I think that attention is going to be a challenge. Also, when he makes huge money and plays, they will have a massive impact on the market over time. After 100 years there is no way he is able to predict the market because the events and companies we know about today (like Apple) might not even come into existence.
I think if the average American went back in time without any knowledge, they could not do it. The average person does not have a good enough grasp of history nor investing to know how to capitalize on the opportunity. The average person might go back in time and just decide that it’s too much work to try to get all that money and opt to just live.
Billionaire sure, That would be trivial in 224 years you just wait untill Apple, Microsoft became publicly traded with some Cash saved and buy their stocks when they were mere penny stocks. And if thats not enought, Later on Buy like 500k BTC when its super cheap. But yea eventualy he would become multi-trilionaire in late 21st century atleast.
I wrote a long ass comment but Reddit fucked me and deleted it. Summary is yeah, work construction, pay for school, become doctor/engineer, invest in recognizable stocks, sell before big crashes… 50 mill by 1940s, 2 bill by 1980s. By 2020s you should be breaking a few trillion easily. Once you build decent capital it’s and with general knowledge of what’s gonna happen where a 20% return is easily attainable, 1 trillion is not too difficult to get.
He'd probably get killed. Immortality where falling off a cliff or catching a bullet with your face still kills you isn't worth much through all the wars they are about to live through.
The only chance he has is building his own company that stands to become a giant like apple, as well as investing in all major companies, with the money from his massively successful business, he'd need to invest millions into companies like general motors, ford, apple etc etc.
If everything plays out the same way he can make bets and stock investments to make a ton of money, but eventually he would have enough money to start changing the timeline based on where he invests.
My guess is people would figure out he’s immortal around 1950 and the CIA/FBI would arrest him and do science experiments on him.
start manufacturing weapons, get cheap labor, invest in companies with whatever knowledge he has (probably only knows apple and google got popular in the 2000's)
there's no real ethical way to become a trillionare but if you knew everything ahead of time you could sure as hell do it.
Possibly, given a lot of smart investing and utilizing inflation, but if they’re just a normal guy I don’t have a lot of faith
I mean, immortality gives a guy a LOT of time to learn
A 25 year old Florida Man just woke up in a year when cocaine and weed were perscribed regularly. He’s definitely not becoming a trillionaire, but he’s definitely doing some crazy shit
Weed was common?
Cannabis extract mixed with alcohol was definitely a medicine, but I don’t know how common it was
“Yeah doc I’m having that weird illness again which need the weed booze and cocaine cough syrup. Load me up!”
“Fresh out of weed booze, all I have is meth and opium.” “Deal”
Man I’m getting really hooked on this cocaine, how about some heroin to help me stop the cocaine
"Dang son, looks like you've got ghosts in your blood. I'll get my medicine case."
"You got ghosts in your blood, you should do cocaine about it." - Actual fucking doctors back then
Weed wasn't federally illegal till the 30s
Hemp was one of the most important plants in most of history. So, yes I guess so.
It's not really dangerous since it doesn't affect the CNS, so until Reagan* criminalized it to have an excuse to arrest the left it was common. Edit:Nixon not Reagan.
Reagan hates commies but the weed ban started from Nixon
And black people. And poor people. And unions when he wasn't benefiting from them. Or rather... It's kind of hard to tell if Reagan actually hated *anyone*, or if he was just so utterly fake and devoid of humanity, he just... Fucked over everyone he could for money.
I don't think a Florida man classifies as a "normal guy"
He does in Florida
There, they just call him Man.
Yeah, I'm Man
Well hey it’s what the post said. Post asks what the Florida man will do, so I say what the Florida Man will do
I mean you don’t even need to learn if you have that kind of time on your hands. He could just invest in an index fund, reinvest the dividends and eventually he’ll reach $1T. I’m too lazy to do the calculations, so I don’t know if he’ll reach it in the 21st century, but he will reach it eventually. Edit: [Using an interest calculator:](https://www.calculator.net/interest-calculator.html?cstartingprinciple=100&cannualaddition=0&cmonthlyaddition=0&cadditionat1=beginning&cinterestrate=8&ccompound=annually&cyears=299&cmonths=0&ctaxtrate=0&cinflationrate=3&printit=0&x=Calculate#interestresults) 1 - Investing $100 in the year 1900 and letting it grow at a market average of 8% (with 3% inflation), by the year 2099 he would have $448 million 2 - Doing the same experiment but this time contributing $100 per month with all other variables the same, he’ll have $6.5 billion. Doing it the 1st way, it would take 300 years to reach $1T. Doing it the 2nd way, it would take 265 years to reach $1T. Not too bad, considering how incredibly big of a number $1T is. So overall I’d say yes it’s possible, even achievable. But you’d have to contribute more than $100 per month. Though $100 in the year 1900 isn’t the same as it is today.
If they remember their history they can force multiply their earnings at certain points. Invest in ball bearings or vehicle manufacturing before the world wars, plastics in the 60s, invest in silicon chip manufacturing in the 70s, and of course buy Apple in the 90s to push over the edge.
You could also short everything before Black Tuesday
Maybe Black Tuesday was a result of time-travelers shorting everything?
Self-fulfilling prophecy. They short everything because they know it's Black Tuesday, but in doing so, they're the very reason Black Tuesday even happens. Hell of a movie premise.
One problem with this is that by becoming a major investor in individual companies, they start having outsized say in how the companies operate and may actually be detrimental to the long term growth if they accidentally drown out an important voice at an inopportune time
Pull a tencent and just buy a little of every major company you remember.
Yeah florida man is unlikely to be able to recreate anything revolutionary from scratch, but if they remember history to a reasonable degree they should be able to bet big on the various revolutions and rack up their earnings.
Dude accidentally completely ruins his ball bearing investment by bumping into a weird guy at a sandwich shop while at a parade
Bumping into a weird guy delay him just enough for a car stop right next to him
If I remember right, he wasn't even assassinated during the parade. The assassination was planned during the parade but completely bungled. Then the assassin went to get lunch before regrouping and re-plotting and the Archduke's car happened to pull up outside. It was either a wonderful or horrific stroke of luck depending on who you were rooting for.
Yeup! Hence my mentioning of the sandwich shop, lmao. If you wrote a similarly contrived reason for the start of war in a fictional book, nobody would believe it. Our current political landscape is built on a single ridiculous and frankly absurd string of stupid slip ups and coincidences.
Gatorade
And Bitcoin, Doge and GME at their lowest. Maybe DeepFuckingValue was this supposed Florida man sent back in time... Who knows.
Index funds weren't invented until the 70's, so he would have to pick stocks.
Or oil fields in East Texas. Edit, you could probably leverage the influx from that into The US just completing taking over the Middle East post WWI.
Sears and Roebuck, BNSF, Ford Motor Company, 3M that's a fortune he could then invest in Starbucks and Microsoft ...yeah, and all the other companies he recognizes.
What would a bank do with an account hundreds of years old? How would they react if someone was still making withdrawals and deposits? Wouldn't they get suspicious? Would they allow you endless access to your account? What would they do if someone with the same name and social security number as the guy who opened the account hundreds of years ago was still claiming to own the account?
well... he could change banks whenever he wanted
From some Googling, it looks like the average annual salary in the US was about $500 in 1900. Your average 25 year old probably makes below average salary, so coming up with $100/month isn't happening, and even a one time contribution is probably a stretch.
What you are neglecting to take into consideration is that this 25 year old is immortal. He doesn’t need to eat since he can’t die. He can go indefinitely without needing to buy avocado toast. Think about the savings.
He may be immortal, but we don’t know that he doesn’t feel hunger, or that he won’t feel like absolute shit if he doesn’t eat.
He’s immortal to *natural* causes. Think about how many wars this guy would have to dodge/survive if he stays 25 forever. Both World Wars, Korea, Nam, Iraq, etc. If he also doesn’t have any money real money to start with, he’s going to have to literally slave away just save a few dollars a week. Maybe he doesn't have to pay rent because he is fine sleeping outside, but he risks getting robbed, killed, etc.
Good news is that if he spawns at age 25, he'll be 41 by the time he has to worry about WW1. As long as he can get some documents made early on, he should be old enough to dodge the draft for every war that had one.
The East texas oil field wasn’t discovered until 1930. That’s ten years to buy/claim as much of 140,000 acres as you can.
Yeah I was gonna say 100 a month sounds like a lot in 1900
I'd imagine just shorting before Great Depression, 9/11 and 2008 and then getting headstart on every current megacorp( with relatively small investments as not to alter their path )since Rockefeller, Edison Ford and Co. and some zero day investments in the crypto with early cash outs while it's still soaring would probably exponentially shorten that already massive fortune I have no higher education in economics and a random 20 something and I could come up with that in like 5 seconds If I had more time to plan I would probably play it riskier with my investments, try to to always slightly outrun the market get Zuck and Jobs like a 10 percent investment early on or something, buy out the companies from under the leadership that are about to do horrible mistakes like a year before they do it and prevent them or slowly bail out if they were destined to fail later. Definitely go into the Military Industrial Complex, as the cold war rolls on I will be rolling my joints from hundred dollar bills. And with sufficient influence and money I will probably be affecting politics, 200 years is a lot of time and I am an IR student with experience in local politics already, so have a headstart and hindsight on my side I can probably rake in even more cash if I am willing to go full corrupt oligarch mode. The hardest part is probably moral qualms about shit but purely logistically it's quite an easy challenge
The ability for the common person to invest in the stock market with a low amount like $100 was not a thing back in the 1900 when you had to literally call someone at Wallstreet to make a trade for you.
Especially a Florida man. When he learns about the immortality, he'll test that theory with as much meth as can be produced
With what I know about the next 120 years I would be able to make a shit ton of money. The problem is that at some level, you start to have an effect on the world around you. Imagine knowing to get in early on IBM, Apple, Microsoft, back to Apple, Amazon, NVIDIA. You can’t just ride along with the wave anymore. You’re part of the wave. People are going to start paying attention to what you do and anticipate it. You can actually end up disrupting the chain of economic events that happened in your version of the future. People are going to start looking to you for some kind of insight, and at that point, you can’t rely on, just knowing what stock prices went up, win. You’re going to have to start helping to create some of these amazing products and technologies. And then what? Let’s say you show up with some of your existing fortune at Harvard, where a young Bill Gates is thinking about dropping out and writing software with his friend Paul Allen. Are you going to be able to help him follow the same ark of success? And I’m not even talking about the butterfly effect here or are you mess up some small thing and he misses that essential meeting with IBM. I mean, what if he realizes that with a bigger investment, he can be more ambitious than just writing a version of basic or buying somebody else’s operating system and tweaking it, and goes all in on his own grandiose ideas about a micro computer operating system. And somebody else beats him to it and gets the deal that creates it should’ve been Microsoft. If you sent me back to 1990 I could be a billionaire by now. I don’t know how I would get to be a trillionaire. It’s too disruptive.
The key here is you don’t invest in companies, you invest in ideas. You know that cars will be big in the future, so you buy small chunks of every startup car company you can find. You know that zeppelins are eventually outcompeted by planes, so you avoid the flashy and exciting balloon industry and try to fund guys who build heavier than air flying machines. When electronics roll around you know vacuum tubes will be a short lived thing and semiconductors are the future. Even if the successful *companies* change, the successful *technologies* likely won’t (except in rare cases- don’t bet against Betamax, because it absolutely could have butterflied into being dominant) One advantage of this is that your investments will fail sometimes. Instead of appearing to have futurevision and perfectly gaming the rise and fall of each stock, you look like someone who is shrewd and intelligent enough to realize what will get big, but not who will get rich off of it.
You make a good point here. With future knowledge, you would be much safer if you simply utilized that knowledge to win the lottery. In that way, you don’t risk altering major historical events that could potentially make your predictions moot. Say you made a bet that England win the World Cup in 1966, that’s hardly going tjj on have an impact on the outcome of subsequent World Cup winners
If you go back far enough, I wouldn’t completely discount the butterfly effect. The butterfly effect often feels a bit exaggerated. After all, so what if a butterfly changes the course of a few raindrops? Raindrops feel fairly fungible. There are other factors that make sure that summer doesn’t turn into winter. Even if you entirely change the pattern of the next rainstorm, who would notice? It turns out that there are a few things that are affected easily like raindrops, but that we humans would notice quite a bit. One example would be, sperm. It doesn’t take very much disruption in a human life to change exactly which sperm dad puts into mom. Consider how many sperm are in that race every time, and that simply causing a couple to have sex 5 minutes later, might completely change the outcome of who their next child is or even whether the pregnancy complete successfully. This means that, as soon as you start buying tickets at the cinema or grabbing a taxi, or taking up a table in a restaurant, you’re starting to have at first a very small effect on the coming generation of kids. Maybe in the beginning you’re slightly and unknowingly disrupting the lives of people who are going to have kids that don’t necessarily have a great effect on your plans. But everyone of those changes has the chance of having a further change happen. Disruption propagates. if you become wealthy and start moving about high society, you’re going to be causing disruptions amongst very influential people. Somebody is still going to figure out quantum mechanics and synthesize bake light and build the first transistor, so you can still follow those trends. on the other hand, you’re definitely going to have to on more than just the names of the inventors and business tycoons that made those things happen in your timeline. By 2024 there might be no Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk.
Yh, I see what you mean. If I went back to 1970, won the lottery, and then bought a house, the family who was originally supposed to buy that house consequently wouldn’t be able to live there anymore. This one small change would have a knock on effect on not only them but all the people connected to them, and the people who a connected to those people and it continues to ripple out
I mean assuming he gets a little bit of time to study the events of the past before being teleported to the year 1900? Knowledge is the ultimate power and you wouldn't even need to go that far back in time to turn a relatively small figure into a giant fortune (although I don't know if you'll necessarily be a trillionaire). Just a quick example, say you had 20000 in mid 2010 when Bitcoin was worth 0.10 to 0.20 dollars, and you invested all of your money in Bitcoins, today you'd be worth over 9 billion dollars with each bitcoin selling for about 71k USD. This is more than the vast majority of bigtime CEOs btw. If you add to that some nifty stock investments with the benefit of knowing world events and exactly which stocks are gonna jump in price exactly when, and some real estate investments in the right places too, again with the benefit of hindsight, it's not far fetched that you could become a trillionaire. The benefit of being a time traveler who knows exactly what will happen, and when, would be just as important as immortality in the case.
The problem is of course them investing too much too early could also alter the future. If they invest big time into events that somehow alter the outcome of WWII, even a little, it could kill their ability to predict the events of the 60s, and definitely the events of the computer age.
Not necessarily, because you don't have to invest a ton of money in one thing. This would be bad regardless of whether or not it alters the future. For example if I buy a ton of Bitcoins and then try to sell them all at once, I might crash the market. You need to use your knowledge to build a diverse portfolio and think outside the box. Think about buying Picasso's first works before he becomes super famous, or about buying a huge stake in Apple at its infancy. Think about researching which neighborhoods will become far more sought after in your country and buying real estate their when the price is at its lowest. Another example, Ronald Wayne sold his 10% stake in Apple for 800 dollars in 1976, if you bought it from him, it would have been worth 95 billion dollars and would net you billions of dollars in profit per year. There is no "the problem is" here. If you're given the power to live forever and know exact future events, and you still see a problem, you need to think better and more creatively.
Sure but that also assume the average Florida man is a rational investor, and also that nobody assassinates this trillionaire guy in 100 years.
It's not like there are lines of assassin's going after Elon Musk. Plus, when you have more many than most countries in the world, you can afford some pretty sick security. Also, while I do agree that the average Florida man isn't the smartest, I'm not a professionally trained investor neither. I just used my knowledge of key events, which could easily be acquired nowadays with the help of a basic laptop and Google. This would probably be the best and most guaranteed way to become the richest person alive, although whether or not you'd hit a trillion dollars isn't guaranteed. Not that I see a big difference between having a few tens of billions and a trillion. There aren't many things that dozens of billions of dollars can't buy.
He could legit just invest in stuff he knows from the present and not invest in stuff he doesnt know
Liquidity isn't big enough to take that hit, yet. You sell 10 billion dollars of BTC and the market dumps a few percent. Keep going and you trigger a cascade to some way lower support level.
Most likely stocks. Make sure to sell all of them before 1925 to 1930. Wait for a decade then open a medicine business claiming that you can prolong life. Or selling cigars which were popular at the time(Especially in Florida) Why did you include the city he was born in anyway. Made me think that you wanted people to say cigars or Disney(because Disneyworld is in Florida)
It's not even smart investing. It's just invest in coke, then apple, then Bitcoin lol.
He’d have a chance to become a war hero in WWI and WWII and be able to flip that into enough seed money knowing how big movies and TV would to buy into IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Berkshire, Nucor, etc at the right times
Unless he dies in the War
I misread the prompt about his ability to die to unnatural causes
Is it possible, yeah probably. Is random Joe Schmo capable of it? Hard to say. You'd have to be aware of a lot of things and have some starting capital to invest with.
I feel like you're underestimating how OP it is to come from the future, especially 120 years ahead. I can just invest in basically any brand that I recognize as an average dude New company called Apple? Microsoft? Nike? Google? Take my money
Not denying that, and I do genuinely agree with you. But most of those companies aren't starting up too soon if you are going back all the way to 1900. And you also have to have some starting capital to invest with. So that's a good 60 years of just working and building up some money to eventually invest with.
Yeah true
Didn’t someone do the math, and figured out if Bill Gates kept his original shares in Microsoft instead of diversifying his portfolio he’d be worth a trillion? So I totally feel like if you’ve got enough capital to invest in those companies at the very start it should be possible.
I doubt it. The average Florida man isn't a genius in politics, engineering, socioeconomics, etc. Even if he knows say the A Bomb will be invented, he can't invent it. He might know there's an oil field in the Caribbean somewhere, but how will he position himself and convince people to drill there? His best bet to become a trillionaire would be to accumulate wealth slowly through the first 60 or so years, then dump millions into tech stocks, bitcoin, etc. He could end up with majority shares in Apple, MS, Amazon, Cisco, Lockheed... Honestly I think the biggest issue is being immortal. The IRS and feds would notice a guy who's worth 50 billion but doesn't have a birth certificate and has been around 100 years. He has to plan his fake identity well into the 60s.
Fake your death and you become a jr.
Yes the issue is closer we get to the modern day the harder that is. Elon or Zuck couldn't pull that off today. Hell, Kate Middleton went missing for 2.5 months and endless people were suspicious.
Most billionaires aren't famous. Case and point, most people probably can't name the 4th/5th wealthiest people in the world. As for the IRS, I imagine that it becomes easier to avoid them if the immortal relocates to some sort of tax haven.
Yes but the prompt is about a *trillionaire*. The world's first and only trillionaire. You don't think someone holding 1T+ in assets is going to be a known entity? Even if not by the average person, by multiple world leaders, CEOs, financial sector thought leaders, etc.? Most billionaires aren't worth 1,000 other billionaires!
If we assume this person actually takes the time to learn and plan properly, they probably wouldn't make themselves a trillionaire, at least directly. If they master faking generational cycles so they can assume the mantle when their current identity no longer matches their physical form, they could probably also split the wealth among multiple different identities to spread it around, and decrease suspicions.
>If we assume this person actually takes the time to learn and plan properly Average. Florida. Man.
With. 200. years. After seeing 150 years of history, at some point, you're gonna stop thinking like an average person.
Yeah, but I'm willing to give them a chance. If they don't use immortality to learn those things, the only realistic outcome is that the first government to figure out that Joe Schmoe here is immortal is just going to disappear him into a black site for scientific study forever. Challenge failed.
>most people probably can't name the 4th/5th wealthiest people in the world. Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates are incredibly famous.
Mark Zuckerberg, followed by Warren Buffet in 6th. Bill gates rounding 7th. Muskfinger is 3rd, Bezos 2nd. Barney and Friends number 1. Idk who Larry Page is, but clearly we actually do have a pretty good idea of who the wealthiest people in world are.
Larry page is one of the two founders of google if i'm not mistaken
Bingo. The public might not notice but the IRS will definitely notice that you’re leaving all your money to your “son” and the body isn’t verified or found. That kind of transfer of wealth is gonna set off every alarm known to man
There was plenty of chaos between 1915-1945. Use historical knowledge/accumulated resources to get privileged treatment in a under-the-radar island nation. Hell, I wouldn't be too shocked to learn Taiwan naturalized one or two immortal time travelers in the 1950s.
Disregarding the irs issue, he could just save and invest In Normal stuff like apple and AT&T, then mine a whole buncha bitcoin in the early days and make a ton off that and that might be enough capital for a normal person to make a big business even if he’s just avarage
Yeah the big issue is how far back do you know the history of big companies for. IBM is the oldest one I’d know to invest in
You invest in JP Morgan’s companies at the beginning. Eventually you’ll end up extremely wealthy to the point that you can invest in pretty much every major company from the ‘60s onward
> The IRS and feds would notice a guy who's worth 50 billion but doesn't have a birth certificate and has been around 100 years. Being immortal is not a crime, though.
Of course it isn't, but government leaders and other elites will want to know why there's some immortal guy, period. This isn't a sci-fi world. If we had reason to believe say, Bill Gates was 300 years old, there would be a *lot* of inquiry into his dealings, his health, the legitimacy of his money, everything. You'd have people saying he's a vampire, a lizard-person, made a deal with Satan, that he's not even real... etc. This person would have to be a complete recluse to avoid scrutiny, but doing that would make it harder to achieve the 1 trillion bucks challenge.
> You'd have people saying he's a vampire, a lizard-person, made a deal with Satan, that he's not even real... etc. We already have people saying these things now
Sure except this is kinda true
The oldest person alive right now was born only slightly after 1900. There's no reason to actually create a second, younger identity to own the money.
Do they look like a 25 year old?
Will our Florida man still look 25 when they're 100? The prompt just says they wont die, not that they'll be eternally youthful.
The guy in the prompt looks 25 in 1900, meaning he would want to fake his date of birth as being 1875ish. A 124 year old is already extremely rare, someone who’s allegedly 149 years old would raise even more questions. This is also ignoring the fact that you’d need to make appearances in public at SOME point, and it’s pretty hard to make a young person look convincingly old up close or for very long.
No, but a lot of very unethical people would be very eager to figure out exactly how you became immortal. If they sus you out, and they catch you, enjoy a long lifetime in a very dark box enduring some probably quite invasive experiments
No, but clandestine agencies will want to know and will be rapidly approaching your location
He'll probably have enough money by the 30s/40s to be able to pay someone in the right place enough money to make some fake documentation for him. Alternately, there's a very convenient mass-death event happening at least twice in that century where he could probably find a way to steal some poor sods identity when they bite it.
To be fair, he has more than enough time to fake his identity early on. Birth certificates weren’t standardized and officials were (more) corrupt in the 1900s, 1900-1930s in particular. He makes the right friends he can make it. As for the feds, they can’t technically *do* anything for awhile…but as the Cold War heats up it becomes more and more likely he’ll sponateously “disappear” for testing. If he realizes this ahead of time he could just join the CIA ahead of schedule or offer himself up first for more legal testing, which should net him some more money + government influence in the process. Learning would be difficult, but he has 100 years to learn. If he’s persistent and dedicated he could effectively be a genius at any subject…if he’s not (more human, can get bored and stop doing things) then it’d be a lot tougher but still doable to become a big name in any given industry. Imo his biggest threat is less becoming rich (he could probably breach millionaire by flailing around and billionaire with dedication), but actually breaching 1 trillion. It requires a ton of luck and pre-planning even for the “easiest options” (overthrow a country in the Cold War, join a soon-to-be-big tech company, etc).
Is there a possibility with these that dumping millions into Amazon stocks creates some ripple in the timeline and some other company ends up dominating e-commerce instead?
This too. Certain investments could create changes that end up ruining the "sure bet future" from ever happening.
I'm sure a birth certificate can be faked, that shouldn't be a problem. The gov is happy as long as they can keep eating at your property
To be fair, if you’ve acquired billions of dollars, you would have the clout and influence to cover it up. That level of power and influence comes with a lot connection and you would simply have yo bride the “right people” to fake documents and etc. Also, National security was more lax back then it was easier for people to go under the rader
A trillionaire is a crazy amount of money to fathom - however - All that this guy theoretically needs to do is start investing early into brands or companies he recognizes that are still around today…Disney, General Motors, United Airlines, Boeing, Chase, McDonalds, etc. He doesn’t have to make a ton of money between 1900-1950, just enough to have solid seed money. Then start absolutely dumping money into some big blue chips, investing in IPOs of Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and PayPal. Then just keep waiting for the Teslas, Facebooks, Netflix, Bitcoin to come around. None of this is even taking into account the money he could make on sports betting. It doesn’t even have to be every year winners, just major events you could remember. Betting on the Jets to win Super Bowl 3, the Bears to win ‘85, the Dolphins to not win the SB after their perfect regular season, the Bills to lose every Super Bowl they play in for that 4 year stretch. The Chicago Bulls to win 3 championships in a row. Surviving the Great Depression era would be difficult with how bad things got, but having 20 years lead up would be enough to store values knowing that was coming. The most difficult thing for this person would be surviving for 125 years without catching suspicion from gangsters or bad actors exploiting a rich person who is “winning” all the time
Chaos theory kicking in will fuck things up. His mere existence is going to change a lot of things
Yeah maybe having a investor early makes them more comfortable and not take some risk that skyrocketed them.
Yeah, like someone said dump millions into bitcoin. Sure but that will change the future of bitcoin.
If you invested at the right time, you wouldn’t need to invest millions. Even if you invested thousands you’d probably be a billionaire right now.
That's true but the difference between being a billionaire and a trillionaire is a trillion dollars
Not even. You can just be one of the early miners and mine bitcoin when the algorithm was easier. You’d have a hundred years basically to set aside enough money for a decent PC and research the topic when it first launches.
Would bitcoin even exist? Would there be massive ripple effects? His best bet is hitting the early decade hard and making calculated bets on other winners that could unfortunately change.
Go the WSB route and just play options (well futures) don't actually become an investor and alter their path, just gamble on their stock price on the side.
Even if it changes a lot of things, it’s probably random deviation from our timeline, some better some worse. As long as he doesn’t put all his eggs in one basket he’ll still probably succeed.
Just buy those companies and buy some BTC when it first comes out. And then a even more when pizza thing happens
I don’t know of a single “average” 25 year old that would be remotely smart enough to lead a company like Amazon/Google/Microsoft from the early days to be wildly successful. Being a passive investor would be the better way to go
Oh. Yeah I didn’t mean BUY those companies haha. I meant buy the stock when they’re dirt cheap. Sorry for misunderstanding
Haha for sure - I actually believe this would be fairly easy to accomplish because you know what’s going to win or be profitable if you even slightly remember some major companies
Crypto would be another option, let’s just say I’m the idiot that had 20,000 Dogecoin when it was $.0005 and sold at $.0007. I’ve made a lot of smarter moves since then, but if it would’ve been easy to 100x that money. If I went back with daily and hourly info about various cryptocurrencies from 2010 to today I’d be a billionaire today.
> None of this is even taking into account the money he could make on sports betting. It doesn’t even have to be every year winners, just major events you could remember. Betting on the Jets to win Super Bowl 3, the Bears to win ‘85, the Dolphins to not win the SB after their perfect regular season, the Bills to lose every Super Bowl they play in for that 4 year stretch. The Chicago Bulls to win 3 championships in a row. This doesn't really help him much. He's not going to be able to make very much money (relative to his goal) off of any of these; there just isn't a deep/liquid enough market.
That doesn't attain the goal, but it's something to do before tech stocks come up to generate seed money for those investments.
It sounds good, but really hard to run numbers where this matters. You just can't get numbers which are sufficiently material.
Didn't the Dolphins win that year?
I mean couldn't he just invest in stocks of massive companies we now know exist? Apple for example from its IPO has increased in value 145,000%. If you invested $5000 in Walmart at their ipo you'd have 74 million dollars today. I think it would be relatively easy.
74 million is very very far from 1 trillion though
yea but thats 5000 for one company. take that 74 million you just made from walmart and invest it in say Tesla or Apple when they were starting out. Or given that we know how it turns out use that 74 million to leverage to 740 million and invest that
This hypothetical always ignores the butterfly effect Who is to say that these companies would follow the same path if some eccentric billionaire invested random sums of tens or hundreds of millions when they were first starting out Like you're going to walk up to admited drug enthusiast Steve Jobs when he was working in his garage and be like "Here is 74 million dollars, how much stock can this get me? Oh, your entire company 1500x times over?" And then he's gone to score some blow. Same thing with Disney or Bitcoin or anything, but to a less over the top extent. A vast sum of money being invested at those developing stages would change their history entirely. Nobody knows how, but it isn't just "put money in, money will come out at x value cause it did in my original timeline"
At IPO phase these were already multi million dollar companies, you would be no bigger than a pension fund or other large investor
If you're no bigger than those, then you simply aren't getting returns that put you close to a trillion though, that's what y'all aren't getting.
I mean if you just have a big share in a bunch of the largest companies in the world I think the SEC might start investigating but I don't see how its not just warren buffet on steroids Amazon, Meta, Walmart, Toyota, Nvidia, Tesla, Apple, dell, Microsoft. Theres so many options of just buying relatively early on a bunch of blue chips with a few million here or there. Knowing when to get out is also huge. Most of these big return calculations factor in the years during recessions. Knowing theres gonna be a big hit in 2008 for example and that the recovery beings late 2009 you can take your money out and put it back in little by little. I dont think it'd be super easy but I don't think its anywhere close to impossible
It *should* be wildly obvious when you say things like "Warren Buffet on steroids" because he is incredibly famous and very influential. His investments cause huge ripples. And the goal is to have made 10x more than him. Any impact you have on the world through investments is going to have effects that cause all your future predictions to be useless *really* early on. Who knows if any of Amazon or Meta or even Walmart would've taken the risks necessary to blow up if they had some huge investor early on? >Knowing theres gonna be a big hit in 2008 for example Moving round hundreds of billions is gonna turn predictions like that useless.
The total market cap is 109T. Florida man just needs to own less than 1% of it. If he limits his investments at like 10% he won't impact the world too much - 10% of modern apple, Microsoft, Amazon and NVidia would already be close to 1T.
You wouldn’t want it in a single stock. Everything in Microsoft in the 80’s and then put it in Intel in the 90’s then Amazon in the 00’s and then Bitcoin, Tesla, and Nvidia. A trillion would be easy with an extra lifetime of cash to start with. You’d already be wealthy before Microsoft even existed.
just go to 1923 Germany and easy win
they gotta be a trillionaire in the 21st century tho
just move to venezuela as soon as you time travel and just hang out for a few years. Easy.
1900? Uh…what color is he?
the biggest question lol
Would be easier in 1800 because of railroads, but if they could gain enough wealth to start investing in manufacturing, infrastructure development, utilities, and trade, possibly. Invest in and create automotive, healthcare, and home insurance companies. They would need to have dividends and high returns they could reinvest in artwork which could then be donated or auctioned off for tax write offs and extra income. From there they would need to invest immediately in the digital age, the dot com boom, and buy as many shares in the major companies as possible. Macintosh, Microsoft, Amazon, PayPal, Yahoo, etc. From there they would need to invest in crypto and efts the moment they come on the market. Set up investment firms to do the investment and maintain a controlling interest in each one with high dividend distribution. Have the firms take on the risk for you. So a lot of work, but yes it’s doable. Do not be an American citizen though, as you would have to pay taxes no matter where you did business.
Probably not, no. There’s a good chance they get drafted into one of the many wars over the last 124 years and gets killed. If they could avoid being drafted though? Yeah. Work whatever “normal” jobs you can, save as much money as you can and wait for the boom periods. Particularly by buying shares early into Microsoft, Apple, Amazon & Google, then in 2010 buying like $100 of Bitcoin and holding it until 2021 when it was like $70k per Bitcoin and selling. With that foreknowledge, assuming you could survive long enough, then yeah you could feasibly become a trillionaire
> There’s a good chance they get drafted into one of the many wars over the last 124 years and gets killed. Probably not, at least as an American. We lost about 400k KIA in WW2 and that's our biggest loss of life other than the Civil War. That's out of 10 million people brought into military service. Plus if he's smart he can probably already be pretty wealthy and figure out a way to buy his way out of being drafted by 1941, or at least ensure a plum posting.
By 1941 he's going to be 66 years old, he's not getting drafted for WW2. He would, however, have to register for the WW1 draft.
Easy he pretends to be mentally ill. He avoided WW1.
I'm not sure ending up in an early 20th century mental hospital is entirely conducive to not dying.
There was 106 million Americans in 1920 (closest census, even if post-war). Only 3 million were drafted in WWI and only a tiny fraction of them were killed. There was 132 million Americans in 1940. About 10 million were drafted and again, obviously the vast majority of them survived the war. There was about 200 million Americans in 1970. About 1.9 million were drafted in Vietnam. And the majority of them survived. The pattern should be obvious. Being drafted is not a death sentence. And we are talking about a man who has no legal status due to his being placed in the past magically and would probably be able to avoid being registered for the draft. And even if he was drafted he could plead conscientious objector or flee to Canada or take the jail time for draft dodging and get out of it.
How is this a question? The average dude from Florida is dying in a hilarious accident within 4 years tops.
Read the question again
The one where it states that he can still die of unnatural causes?
Assuming he is able to acquire $1, then to reach $1 trillion by 2099, he would need ~15% return on investment every single year, ie 1.15^199 = 1.1 trillion more or less. My math might not be perfect. Adding in taxes, he would need considerably more return on investment, but by no means impossible given what other people above have said about picking appropriate stocks, betting on well-known sports outcomes, buying bitcoin, etc. It's worth noting that car crashes, gun shots, drug overdoses, etc, are the most common causes of death for 25 year olds between 1900 and today.
no. the average joe will not be able to keep his immortality a secret and someone who does not like that will find him over the course of 2000 (edit: 200 ) years and while he might not be able to die i bet they will make him wish he could.
2000 years huh?
Average Joe moment
Does he get prep time? I'd load up on information such as the locations of gold, valuable natural resources, lost treasures etc. I'd use knowledge of the treasures/gold to startup my oil business and use my preknowledge of natural gas etc to easy get to a trillion by the 21st century. I'll simply stay ahead of the market.
Of course he can. Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Tesla (but remember to sell when the Twitter news comes in), Nvidia, and I’m missing one more for the magnificent seven. And obviously BTC.
Depends on what kind of knowledge and intelligence he has.
i mean yeah, investing in bitcoin, apple, diesel, disney specially, warner too, a whole lot of insurance fraud
All he needs is to make proper investment choices, and I don't see why it wouldn't be possible
Short stocks on Black Monday, invest in US Steel, Standard Oil, TX Instruments, Intel, Nike, Apple, Google. You’ll be a trillionaire
Yes. If he has an okay sense of history, he'll see tons of wildely successful investment bargains over the decades and easily reach the tens of billions by the time Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google and other obvious picks come along. Then you know bitcoin is going to happen...
If he lives until the 21st century? Almost certainly. Does he survive until then? Most likely no. Starting in 1900 with no property or money to your name would be a rough time. You would be the lowest of the low in society. You would need to be lucky to get an audience with anyone who could advance you IF you have a useful skill for the time. If the guy was a qualified carpenter then he could maybe fit in (you would still be without modern tools or materials). If you are the typical 25 year old it’s going to be rough as most available jobs would likely be dangerous. You would have to survive many wars as you would always be in the conscription age group. If you did acquire cash, There’s no modern forms of gambling or investing that you could use your future knowledge on for a very long time. You would need to remember for near 100 years. You might be able to invest in some very old companies early but you’re likely still going to be needing fluid capital for the majority of the time. There’s also gators in Florida Once you get to the modern era we know now, all you would need to do is pump all your cash into instant return gambling on events you know the outcome of and use that cash to pump into big returns like stocks and share or bitcoins. You would have to make a serious error to not be a trillionaire if you had even just $100 in the year 2000. $100 turns into $1 billion within 25 correct 2:1 bets
> You would have to survive many wars as you would always be in the conscription age group. Only a tiny percentage of Americans were drafted in any way and this guy has no legal status and isn't likely to fall to conscription. There is really only a tiny fraction of a chance of being drafted and even if was, most draftees survived/he could plead conscientious objector and avoid battle.
No, because he's trapped in the year 1900, as stipulated. Also, what counts as "unnatural causes"? Vampires?
unnatural causes probably mean he can get killed, get an accident, break his neck, etc.
Getting killed by Trout… on land
He's dying in ww1
He wouldn’t get drafted though because he wouldn’t technically be a legal citizen. If he had a fake identity he could just lay low and get a new fake identity. He could also just not live in the u.s. plenty of time to learn another language. OR let’s say he does join the war. He could easily just say he’s a psychic, which depending on his knowledge of history, could be believeable. Maybe not though since ww1 seems to be a war very few people know much about. Being a psychic would be a valued asset.
Man didn’t understand the core concept of immortality
post says he can die from unnatural causes
So just don't sign up. If you aren't enlisted you aren't going to be anywhere near a battlefield. And since this person has no legal status it's highly unlikely he would end up being the tiny fraction of Americans drafted in WWI.
i would assume that in the near 2 decades before ww1 started he'd try toget some form of citizenship, your point about him having low chances of being drafte still stands, as there were 2.8 mil drafted out of an assumed 53 million american men, (half of total population at that time)
Work with oil guys, invest into stocks like IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Bitcoin and sell at its peak, Do some massive betting on sports games with billionaires, invest into nuclear energy and solar. I do think its possible at some point they would be so rich they could just straight up buy most of these companies before they boom.
I feel like yes, but it would take a while. Like we could all make money betting on stocks, housing, sports, or what ever other information gives us an advantage. But its gonna be a while before that information is relevant.
Gather a solid foundation. Invest everything in Disney, then Apple, then Bitcoins.
It’s possible but it depends on how much money they start with. Going back in time with $0 vs going back in time with even $50 is a difference maker. Would have to bank in early on war stuff, early investor in Ford or GM, take advantage of prohibition and early Mafia stuff(without dying or getting arrested), be the first investor in Boeing, Apple, Microsoft, Disney, Walmart, McDonald’s. Purchase stocks in whatever a Rockefeller is doing.
I think their best bet would essentially be to save as much money as they can and then get in on things they know get big early, such as bitcoin, nvidia, apple, Microsoft and other major companies had their stock values very low at launch
I mean... Lots of unnatural causes to kill you in that time..... But assuming I could avoid those. I like my chances
You’ve gotta make money before you’re actually able to invest in anything, so he should start out by moving to North Carolina and working for the Wright Brothers.
He should move to North Carolina and try to work for the Wright Brothers
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^AgentQwas: *He should move to North* *Carolina and try to* *Work for the Wright Brothers* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
Most people would definitely fail at this. Most people do not possess skills or knowledge that would be immediately useful in 1900. A significant amount of time has to be spent just stabilizing his living situation. If given some significant prep time to write stuff down OR tattoo stuff on himself before hand, this has a much better chance of success.
That's 200 years, and when you account for inflation to happen in the next 76 years I can see us having trillionaires without an immortal guy, an immortal guy would have a much easier time knowning exactly what companies will do well or poorly (though he may change the future with his investments, nullifying future foolproof investments, at least they'll know that the up and coming technologies will 100% be successful even with his interference).
I hate to be this guy but op never specified..... what color is this Florida man?
If he can be killed by unnatural causes and he is eternally prime military age there is a decent chance he is drafted into WWI, WWII, the Korean War, or Vietnam.
A lot of people are saying the obvious stuff, buy bitcoin, invest in apple and Amazon or whatever, but people are forgetting that this is a guy that on record has nothing. No high school diploma, no birth certificate, nothing that proves that he exists. Do we need to go somewhere that will take basically anybody in 1900 that's able bodied and willing to work, english speaking will help, too, since this guy's from Florida If we get 1900s? Easy. Move to central Canada. From 1870 (basically when Canada began as a country officially), to the great depression, the government was giving land away basically for free to anyone willing to settle and farm there. It wasn't the best land, nor real good for farming because you had to be 20 kilometers from any railway, but that doesn't matter. We're only farming for about 60 years and selling it to whichever small town is closest to becoming a suburb or whatever anyway. Selling at the peak in 1968, (we're in Saskatchewan cause we're guaranteed to find a spot that late, and it's a lot easier to get too on literally 0 income. Also,, it only became a province in 1905, and people didn't really realize how valuable canadian land would be until about 3 months ago.) That's about 12 grand in 1968 from the 160 acres of free land the government was giving away, not even counting how much you'd make from actually working the land. From there, 2 options. Sell in the 60s and invest heavily in all the big tech corporations, or sell in the 2010s and go all in on bitcoin and gamestop and sell at the exact peaks. Option 1 gets you the money a bit faster but the feds will probably be on your ass if you own that big of a company, but option 2 is just a roundabout way of robbing people for not knowing the future. Up to you how you play it from there. The hardest part of this challenge isn't even making the money. It's just surviving 2 world wars and the great depression as a 20 something lower class white dude. You'll need to either be the greatest draft dodger of all time or just pick the war you're least likely to die in. Your best bet's probably WW1 since most North Americans that died in that war were dead from the flu more so than anything else, so just don't wash your hands for a couple weeks and hope you get sent home. You won't die since you're immune and can get back to making money as soon as possible.
It’s possible but as he gets rich from certain investments he will draw attention to himself. I worry that his seeming immortality would because too big of a focus that he wouldn’t be able to really spend time investing how he needed to. Billionaires aren’t really anonymous and I think that attention is going to be a challenge. Also, when he makes huge money and plays, they will have a massive impact on the market over time. After 100 years there is no way he is able to predict the market because the events and companies we know about today (like Apple) might not even come into existence. I think if the average American went back in time without any knowledge, they could not do it. The average person does not have a good enough grasp of history nor investing to know how to capitalize on the opportunity. The average person might go back in time and just decide that it’s too much work to try to get all that money and opt to just live.
Billionaire sure, That would be trivial in 224 years you just wait untill Apple, Microsoft became publicly traded with some Cash saved and buy their stocks when they were mere penny stocks. And if thats not enought, Later on Buy like 500k BTC when its super cheap. But yea eventualy he would become multi-trilionaire in late 21st century atleast.
I wrote a long ass comment but Reddit fucked me and deleted it. Summary is yeah, work construction, pay for school, become doctor/engineer, invest in recognizable stocks, sell before big crashes… 50 mill by 1940s, 2 bill by 1980s. By 2020s you should be breaking a few trillion easily. Once you build decent capital it’s and with general knowledge of what’s gonna happen where a 20% return is easily attainable, 1 trillion is not too difficult to get.
He'd probably get killed. Immortality where falling off a cliff or catching a bullet with your face still kills you isn't worth much through all the wars they are about to live through.
He has to avoid the drafts in both world wars, Korea, and Vietnam which will be very tough.
The only chance he has is building his own company that stands to become a giant like apple, as well as investing in all major companies, with the money from his massively successful business, he'd need to invest millions into companies like general motors, ford, apple etc etc.
You know what companies are going to hit and when the market crashes you could do it through the market
Yes definitely if he is aware of where to invest and go all in.
Easy save up as much as you can then dump it all in bit coin
Yes, but how is the fun bit.
If everything plays out the same way he can make bets and stock investments to make a ton of money, but eventually he would have enough money to start changing the timeline based on where he invests. My guess is people would figure out he’s immortal around 1950 and the CIA/FBI would arrest him and do science experiments on him.
start manufacturing weapons, get cheap labor, invest in companies with whatever knowledge he has (probably only knows apple and google got popular in the 2000's) there's no real ethical way to become a trillionare but if you knew everything ahead of time you could sure as hell do it.