Ask HN: Which industry will most likely produce the first trillionaire? - markovian
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muzani
I'd say it's something that has to grow exponentially for a very long time.

That rules something like finance out, which compounds very poorly, and hasn't
produced trillionaires despite being around for centuries.

I'd bet on education. Colleges and universities can be worth billions each.
While the billion dollar ones are pretty good, the sub billion ones aren't and
are getting competed with by several month courses.

It seems something mostly neglected. Universities hire the smartest people,
but teaching still uses the same old lecturing technique for decades, despite
all this interactive technology. We've learned a lot about psychology and
productivity. We have tried improving education technology, but it seems to
just be a side gimmick. This can also be combined with upcoming new tech like
AI to work better.

It seems like something that compounds very well. If you can hack your brain
to have, say, 90% comprehension, and comprehend harder things, you can also
discover better education techniques and train others.

Energy would be second. Oil has already produced trillionaire families, but
it's too big to concentrate on one person.

I'd imagine Bill Gates's shiny new nuclear plants could push him into
trillionaire territory. Combined with the new electrical vehicle trend, people
could be migrating from oil to electricity.

~~~
methusala8
Any particular thoughts on how to improve education with interactive
technology? I am a teacher and hence curious on how it can be improved.

~~~
muzani
Lol, we should be asking you that question.

Spaced repetition seems promising. Or letting students learn at their own
pace. Maybe going deeper down in details they're interested in. But we had
those for decades and they never took off.

Maybe we should be looking more into learning than teaching.

I learnt a lot from Europa Universalis. I think people should be able to
simply experiment more with things, see what happens when they tweak things,
actually _play_.

We teach derivatives and integrals all the time, and yet nobody has mainstream
software that illustrates how they work. The concept is easy visually,
difficult in writing. It's used a lot in algorithms, but that's more because
programmers make algorithms to illustrate to themselves the concept. We can do
a good deal with physics, chemistry, and so on.

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mdorazio
Honestly, probably something finance/investing-related. It's one of the only
industries where profits can be pretty much completely divorced from the value
actually created for customers, so there's basically unlimited upside.
Everything else ends up somewhat limited by GDPs, population, or anti-trust
regulations.

If someone figured out a way to accurately predict market trends in a
positive-ROI scenario, they could become a trillionaire without ever having to
do all the pesky parts of actually creating a sustainable business.

~~~
markovian
Seems relevant. Maybe some kind of global financial technology company such as
Ant Financial.

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aisafetyceo
Artificial General Intelligence is creating the first group of multi-
trillionaires

Elon Musk & Andrej Karpathy
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBklltKXtDE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBklltKXtDE)

Elon Musk & Max Hodak
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wqb7P3u5ujw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wqb7P3u5ujw)

Larry Page & Sergey brin

Bill Gates
[https://youtu.be/s7O3oCWZgjE?t=225](https://youtu.be/s7O3oCWZgjE?t=225)

Mark Zuckerberg & Abhinav Gupta
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-swj_rj3luE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-swj_rj3luE)
[https://research.fb.com/publications/canonical-surface-
mappi...](https://research.fb.com/publications/canonical-surface-mapping-via-
geometric-cycle-consistency/)

Jason Kelly
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaVsc65iu6E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaVsc65iu6E)

John & Patrick Collison
[https://youtu.be/_4t12rS6_jo?t=700](https://youtu.be/_4t12rS6_jo?t=700)
\------------------------ To make a trillion

\- sell ~33,333,333 cars at $30,000 \- sell ~2,000,000,000 devices at $500 \-
sell ~10,000,000 virtual developers at $100,000 / year

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WheelsAtLarge
An industry involved in space will produce the first trillionaire. Simply
because the money needed is so high that the return on investment will have to
be just as high.

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sarcasmatwork
Jeff Bezos was right around the corner in 2017 per this article:
[https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/27/richest-man-alive-jeff-
bezos...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/27/richest-man-alive-jeff-bezos-could-
become-the-first-trillionaire.html)

~~~
sp332
Yes but he was divorced this year. [https://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-ceo-jeff-
bezos-140b-divorce...](https://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-ceo-jeff-
bezos-140b-divorce-what-you-need-to-know/)

And cashing out a billion dollars a year (over one percent of his net worth at
the peak) to spend on rocket ships has got to put a dent in his earnings
growth.

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saluki
Asteroid Mining

~~~
kleer001
IMHO this is the only correct answer. Some of the smallest asteroids clock in
at Quintillions of dollars of value for their minerals. Even if only 1% of
their value makes it dirtside that's a big ol' chunk of dosh.

~~~
MS90
I hope I can live long enough to see the effects of asteroid mining on the
world and the economy.

Palladium today is $1704.73 per ounce, but the price of palladium comes from
the fact that it's extremely rare on Earth. But what if someone comes back
from an asteroid with an amount of palladium that suddenly triples the
worldwide supply? What will the effects be on the price point? I'm sure the
costs of getting it back planetside will be factored in and slow down any
inflation, but I am still curious.

And what kind of things could we create, given a vastly increased supply of
rare elements?

~~~
shostack
If you have a stranglehold on an exceptionally rare resource, I'm not sure it
would be a wise business move to suddenly triple the world's supply.

~~~
MS90
Yeah, probably would be best to take the De Beers approach and bury 99% of it
in storage.

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sidcool
May be I am pessimistic but I don't see a trillionaire this century. In next
century it will be a space mining company.

~~~
idoh
We are already at a couple people being 100 billionaires. Inflation alone is
enough to get us there by then.

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deepaksurti
The industry that solves climate change without space colonisation will
produce the first trillionaire.

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markovian
What about Healthcare ? Massive and still highly inefficient industry here.

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astrodev
Sex robots. Disrupting the power of women in the sexual marketplace is bound
to yield unprecedented profits.

~~~
dyingkneepad
Only when such robots pass the Turing test.

