Who is the Immigrant Self-made Billionaire?  Robert Herjavec? or Romesh Wadhwani?


Robert Herjavec is immigrant from Croatia to Canada and is a famous TV persoanlity with millions of fans.

Romesh Wadhwani is the founder of Symphony Software and 20 other companies.  99% of Americans don't know who he is.

The answer is:  Romesh Wadhwani is the correct answer.   He has a net worth of $2.8B  vs Robert Herjavec $100M. 

Congratulation to both.  You both are idols for us immigrants who started as dishwashers.

My eBook #11 "Zero to Billions:  Anyone Can: 57 Immigrant Self-made Billionaires" will appear in Amazon Kindle on 5/1/2016.  I am an immigrant to US and I have been very honor to write on this topic.

This is eBook #8 48 Hedge Fund Self-made Billionaires.  It has been the most popular so far

I am now writing eBook #11  "Immigrant Self-made Billionaire".   I am in the 50% and one big surprise.

Immigrants have 30% higher chance to becoming Self-made Billionaires than someone born in the United States.


So much for Mr. Donal Trump, who is into bashing immigrants, the Pope, women etc. 





To be fair to him, he is is good businessman. And I can learn 1001 things on self-promotion and business-promotion from him.

 But he is not self-made.   In my definition, he did not start from ZERO.  Instead he started life inherited a couple million dollars from his father. Mind you, that was 40 years ago. Factored into inflation, it means he probably inherited about $100M in today's term.

Just a brief look between Mr Elon Musk and Mr Donal Trump.  IMHO,  Musk works a lot harder, is a better businessperson and Mr Musk has better ideas to make our world a better place.   And Mr Musk was born in South Africa.

The only thing common between Donald Trump and Elon Musk.  They both went to U Penn Wharton School.

 
"When everyone is going right, look left.”
Sam Zell , Real Estate Self-made Billionaire

 Why I am not writing on self-made millionaires?   Question from a friend.

Because there are 10,000 people writing or podcasting or youtubing how to be millionaires

I don't want to be #10,001 -- it is a crowded field.  
It is difficult to come up with something original.  The study of self-made billionaires is like the swimming in the blue ocean.  There are infinite possibility.  I can write 20 books on self-made billionaires.  I have already written and ePublished 10 of them, all on Amazon Kindle.  

On second thought, this is a brilliant question.  For most people, becoming a millionaire is more relevant to most people.   And every self-made billionaire was once a self-made millionaire.  It is an inevitable step, an important step  and a great step for everyone.

So my eBook #12  will be "From Millionaires to Billionaires, from  top 3% to top 0.001%".  Scheduled to be completed by end of June, 2016.   I am writing eBook #11 "Immigrant Self-made Billionaires."   

Here are the most important stats: 
over 80% of millionaires are self-made (from book Millionaires Next Door by Stanley &Danko),
average age 56,  about 3% of US population are millionaires.
They are plentiful and not difficult to find one to talk to.   This self-made millionaire could be your neighbor or co-worker.  You probably talk to a couple of self-made millionaires a day if you live in San Francisco,  New York or Washington DC area.

About 67% of billionaires are self-made (Forbes)
average age is 66, about 0.001%,   1.2 per million population
these are very rare and very difficult to find

These are the black swans , one in a million.  I am infatuated by them.  They made great stories. They are the rebels, the disruptors, the creators, the builders ...  They are the 0.001%.  They think differently from 99% of the population.  

Do you think differently from 99% of the population?    

This is my #10 eBook on Self-made Billionaires. My biggest challenge is the sheer number of real estate Self-made Billionaires (SMB). There are well over 100 of them in the world. If I include all of them, the book will be too huge and too boring for most readers. So I resort to 4 cut-off criteria to trim the number of well over 100 to a manageable 65. The 4 cut-off criteria are (1) for Hong Kong the cut-off net worth is $4B , (2) for US, the cut-off net wrothis $3B, (3) for China, the cut-off net wroth is $2.8B and (4) I also exclude all those who made their fortune primarily as casinos operators. Now I have an eBook of global appeal, with all countries and continents in the world well represented. I do not want to write an eBook for just for Americans or Chinese.
My second challenge is the complexity of the biographies and data. I stared at the facts for over 1 months, unable to make sense of information in front of me. The youngest real estate SMB is Adam Neumann from Israel at age 36. The oldest is Stanley Perron from Australia at age 93. Neuman is a college dropout. Perron has zero high school education. While it took Stanley Perron 79 years to amass his fortune, Adam Neumann took only 7 years. 79 years vs 7 years to build an empire? This is a difference of more than half a century. Perron did it in the hot desert port of Perth, Neumann did it in cool downtown Manhattan. Perron is 57 years older than Neumann. Perron could easily have been Neumann’s great grandfather.
My third challenge to writing this eBook is my bias. To keep it minimum, I resort to an 80/20 approach: that is 80% facts and data, 20% analysis. This way, I respect my readers and they are free to form their own conclusions. 80% of this book are taken up by business biographies.
Here are my top 5 surprises in this pioneering study (1) 43% of the real estate self-made billionaires never went to college. 8 of them never went to high school. So if a high school education is all you got, you definitely have a chance. (2) More than 50% of them did not start with real estate. They started with car dealership, office furniture, rice trade, ceiling fan, as tourist guide, as lawyers, medical clinics, bee collectives and just about anything bizzare and irrelevant. In other words, most of them made their first fortune in another business, then plunged into real estate when they see an opportunity, or as a place to park their cash reserve. (3) They are concentrated in a few countries. US, China, HK, Israel, Brazil and Australia contribute more than 3 real estate SMBs, while there is only 1 from Japan; zero real estate SMB from Germany and France. If we rolled back the clock 30 years Japan would have the largest number of real estate tycoons (4) In terms of gender and ethnicity, I was very surprised to find good representation from 4 women and 4 Muslims. Good news, everyone has a chance. (5) There is a bifurcation going on in the real estate industry now. I call one group the sharing economy and the other one the traditional group. In terms of age, those from sharing economy have an average age of 30, while those from traditional real estate have an average age of 67. It took the sharing economy real estate SMB an average 7 years to achieve billionaire status. It took the traditional real estate an average of 30 years to reach billionaire status. Looking ahead,
For conclusion, I have 2 chapters (1) 16 lessons and (2) 9 future trends. As in all my other ebooks, I see a WORLD OF ACCELERATED CHANGE. The future of real estate in the world will be fast and violent. For aspiring real estate tycoons, the way to thrive is avoid the status quo like a plague. In other words, to create and not to copy.  The lifestyle and preference of the millennials will dictate the future real estate, just as the automobiles and the baby boomers have redefined real estate in the past 60 years. Are you part of this change?