Chances are, just about anyone you talk with will have an idea for a business that they think can make millions. Although business pitches may be easy to come by, turning those ideas into wins is a whole new ballgame.

Names like Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, and Mark Zuckerberg usually come to mind when people think about those lucky few who have cashed in on their ideas, but you don’t have to live in Silicon Valley or Seattle to turn your idea into millions. So what does it take to make $100 million.

Click ahead to see 10 people and the ideas that made $100 million or more. By Michelle FoxUpdated 15 June 2012.

In 1994, the brothers borrowed on a credit card belonging to Robin’s in-laws and opened their first shop, decorated with fire equipment and a hand-painted mural that depicted the local fire department. They even gave their subs firefighter-inspired names like “Hook & Ladder” and “Engine Company.” Robin worked at the store while Chris continued to work part-time at the fire department.

Firehouse Subs is now a booming franchise business, with 514 corporate and franchise locations around the United States — and the numbers keep growing. The company plans to continue its expansion in the Northeast, Central and Southwest in 2012.

Mary Ellen Sheets never imagined that hauling trash would turn into a multi-million dollar company. In the early 1980s, Sheets’s sons, Jon and Brig Sorber, started doing odd jobs for locals, using their pickup truck to haul trash and brush from people’s yards and moving furniture.Once the boys went off to college, the phone kept ringing.

At first it was a hobby, but by the late-1980’s, she quit her job to focus on the business full-time. She also made another life-changing decision: she decided to franchise.

Brig Sorber has replaced his mom as CEO, but Mary Ellen Sheets still serves on the board of directors and Jon Sorber is an executive with the company. In 2011, Two Men and a Truck conducted 353,761 moves and had a total of $220 million in sales.

Bert and John Jacobs designed their first t-shirts in 1989 and hawked them on the streets of Boston and at colleges along the East Coast. But for five years, success eluded them.

You can find him and other characters smiling on products from towels and totes to coffee mugs and dog leashes. And life sure is good now for Bert and John Jacobs.

One night, Sara Blakely cut off the bottom of her pantyhose and the idea of Spanx was born. Armed with $5,000 in savings, Blakely researched and wrote her patent for footless pantyhose and drove around North Carolina begging mill owners to make her product.

In the first three months, she sold over 50,000 pairs from the back of her apartment. Now her “crazy idea” has grown to include a full range of products that are sold around the world, and Blakely is soaring high.

Siblings Dave and Catherine Cook had just moved to a new high school in when they came up with the idea of an online yearbook to meet new friends. To get started, they turned to their brother, Geoff Cook, who had already started and sold a business while in college.

Within the first nine months, the site had 1 million users. As the company grew, it left the high school realm and started connecting people in general.

All three siblings still work at the company, with Geoff Cook as the COO.The next big milestone for MeetMe is its merger with Quepasa, which will bring the number of users from 40 million to 80 million, according to Geoff Cook.

She set about creating stuffed animals that unfolded into plush pillows.She and her husband decided to wholesale the products themselves in 2003 through their company, CJ Products, and began by hawking them at a mall kiosk during the holiday season. By the end of the year, after Jennifer introduced Pillow Pets at a home show, they were nearly sold out.

Tom and Kate Chappell moved to Maine in 1968 hoping to simplify their lives. When they found it difficult to find natural, unprocessed foods and products, they decided to create and sell what they were looking for themselves.

Their breakthrough came five years later when they launched their leading product — Tom’s of Maine toothpaste. By 1999, sales surpassed $40 million, and in 2006 Colgate Palmolive bought 84 percent of Tom’s of Maine for $100 million.

You could say beer is in Jim Koch’s blood. His father was a fifth-generation brewer but Jim left the family business as a few big brewers took over the market.

He dug out his great-great grandfather’s recipe and started brewing in his kitchen. Once his sample brew was perfected, he left his job as a management consultant, and went door to door to Boston bars trying to sell Samuel Adams Boston Beer Lager.

It still uses all-natural ingredients, which Koch travels around the world to hand-select, and employs traditional brewing methods.The hard work has paid off. The company says it has won more awards in international beer-tasting competitions than any other brewery in the world.

It happened at a wedding — Joel Glickman, then 50 years old and working in his family’s plastics business, was sitting at a table and starting cutting and connecting a bunch of straws together. His creation gave him an idea for a plastic construction toy.

After rejections from Hasbro and Mattel, Glickman decided to take a huge risk and shut down part of the family’s injection molded plastic business to make his toy himself. In 1993, not long after K’NEX hit the market, Toys R Us’ founder said it was the best thing he’d seen in years.

Glickman retired, but when the business suffered, he went back to work, and business is once again booming. The company anticipates it will have sales of approximately $100 million for 2012.

Jim McCann was a bartender and a social worker looking for a way to supplement his income when he bought a flower shop for $10,000 in 1976. That led to 13 more stores in the New York metropolitan area, but it wasn’t until he acquired the 1-800-FLOWERS phone number in 1986 that business really bloomed.

In 1999, 1-800-FLOWERS went public and add the.COM to its name. The company, which has also expanded by acquiring companies like The Popcorn Factory and Fannie May, reported $689.8 millionin total revenue in fiscal year 2011.

Find out how everyday people have taken ordinary ideas and turned them into extraordinary businesses.

In $100M Offers, Alex Hormozi teaches readers the entrepreneurial skills of “how to make offers so good people will feel stupid saying no.” Specifically, Alex breaks down the steps to come up with a highly valuable and unique offer, offers examples, and teaches you how to enhance it using psychology.

About the Author:Alex Hormozi is an American entrepreneur who started in the health and fitness industry, helping gym owners scale their businesses. He then sold and took capital and lessons learned with him to launch his own incubator to help scale other e-learning businesses.Alex is also very active in many different social media platforms, providing helpful and free advice to a growing audience of business enthusiasts.

there is a difference between gambling in business and gambling in a casino. In a casino, the odds are stacked against you.

In contrast, in business, you can improve your skills to shift the odds in your favor. Simply stated, with enough skill, you can become the house.

Alex says that the market is the most important element of success -more important than your offer or your sales and marketing skills (which both require most time and effort to learn).Put in equation format: Starving Crowd (market) > Offer Strength > Persuasion Skills.

The goal is to find a smaller subgroup within one of those larger buckets that is growing, has the buying power, and is easy to target (the other three variables). This insight was truly fantastic.

Instead of seeking the moonshots in uncertain markets, in his podcast Alex recommends that you start as an entrepreneur in a market of proven interest and demand because it’s more reliable, has better risk/reward, and gives you more realistic feedback.

Alex’s goal is to make you money first, and if you want to make money choose a proven market. For 99.6 percent of readers below $10M per year, niching down will make you more money.

Image from $100M Offers: How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No. Says Alex:

The definition of a grand slam offer is: It’s an offer you present to the marketplace that cannot be compared to any other product or service available, combining an attractive promotion, an unmatchable value proposition, a premium price, and an unbeatable guarantee with a money model (payment terms) that allows you to get paid to get new customers.

forever removing the cash constraint on business growth. The key is to position your product as in a category of its own.That way you compete on value, rather than on price.

Competing on value is the only way to make lots of money because price competitions are races to the bottom that eat all your margin away and leave you barely surviving. To compete on value make your offer so different that you never have to explain why your product is different.

Pay one time. (No recurring fee.

I’ll generate leads and work your leads for you. And only pay me if people show up.

I’ll also provide all the best practices from the other businesses like yours. With that type of offer you save on advertising because more people take you up on it, you close more leads, and you can charge more.

In his podcast, Alex says that most people focus on #1, getting more customers, while often reducing churn rate to increase lifetime value, or making a great product that increases word of mouth is by far the most effective.

Image from $100M Offers: How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No. To make your offer as compelling as possible, you want to:

But remember that as Machiavelli said, it’s about perceptions, not always reality. People all generally want the same things such as to be:

For example, men don’t really want money as in “pieces of paper”, they want money for the status it gives them, says Alex (or for the freedom, sense power, purchase power of their dream toys, or better dating, I’d add). So what they value most is not so much the conduit, but the deeper goal -ie.: their status-.

If the final goal is status, you can go one level beyond simply selling status. You can instead show the status they most deeply want already from the point of view of someone else.

If you buy these shoes, your speed will increase by 4km/h. Your running buddies’ jaws will drop when they see you leaving them behind.

they’ll ask you what’s changed.

only you will know. Now let’s finally get down to how to prepare your grand slam offer people feel stupid saying no to:

In his words, he was selling the vacation, not the plane ride to get there. So for Alex it was:

Says Alex: Think about it in insane detail.

In Alex’s weight loss case, the problems are: You listed out each core thing that someone has to do.

So, each of the above problems has four negative elements that align with the four value drivers.Such as: There are two parts in crafting solutions:

This is what you’re going to deliver. It’s the product, the meat of your offer, and you must make it good.

In Alex’s original example of weight loss, some solutions to buying healthy food if he wanted to deliver the service 1:1 would be: You then need to start fleshing out your solutions to later see what makes the most sense and what’s the easiest and most profitable to deliver.Alex proposes these questions.

Now you want to: If you aren’t sure what’s high value, then think of each solution through the lenses of the value equation and ask yourself what your prospect financially values, causes him to believe he will be likely to succeed, make him feel like he can do it with much less effort and sacrifice, and help him accomplish his goal and see the result he wants with far less time investment.

Let’s review the offer for the example of “losing weight”, presented with this format: Problem → Solution Wording→ Sexier Name for Bundle → delivery vehicle (what we’re actually gonna do for them/provide). 1-on-1 Nutrition Orientation where I explain how to use….

1-on-1 Nutrition Orientation where I explain how to use…. And then for the other problems:

adjusted to your needs so you never go too fast, plateau, or risk injury ($699 value). Traveling→ The Ultimate Tone Up While You Travel Eating & Workout Blueprint.

for getting amazing workouts in with no equipment so you don’t feel guilty enjoying yourself ($199 value). How to actually stick with it→ The “Never Fall Off” Accountability System.

the unbeatable system that works without your permission (it’s even gotten people who hate coming to the gym to look forward to showing up) ($1000 value). How To Be Social→ The ‘Live It Up While Slimming Down” Eating Out System that will give you the freedom to eat out and live life without feeling like the “odd man out” ($349 value).

) All for only $599. Compare this offer now to a mediocre “gym membership”.This bundle does 3 things:

Are you tired of the rat race. Maybe you just want to know what to do with 1 million dollars.

Don’t assume you have to find untapped business ideas. Sometimes an untapped idea means that you should keep looking.

We’ll discuss how to start a million-dollar business by discussing the following topics. Click on the one that interests you to jump straight to that section.

A $100-million-dollar business is normally going to be a publicly held company. According to KPI Crunch, somewhere between 1 and 3 percent of companies in business databases are $100 million business ideas.

Due to this value and growth, real estate investing is a consistently reliable business model to start a million-dollar company, or even a billion-dollar company for a savvy business owner. The real estate market is shifting in 2023, but there’s still plenty of opportunity in this space to start a successful business.

Buying and converting this type of property can be a very profitable business idea, especially in growing markets like Nashville, Dallas, or Atlanta. Of course, to purchase real estate, you’ll need to have some resources to invest.

Thach Nguyen started his own business from scratch using his income and knowledge as a real estate agent. That proved to be a multi-million dollar business idea and today he makes revenue of around $800,000 a month.

There are 5 million more pets in the United States in 2023 than there were in 2019, driving a projected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8% through 2030. What’s more, people don’t tend to cut back on pet supplies even in a tough economy.

Pet health services is the fastest-growing segment in this sector. Spending is expected to reach $118 billion by 2030, an increase of 143%.

Hear CEO Matt Hulett’s insights in this interview:.

Vlad Kuksenko started a 7-figure Etsy shop making personalized collars and tags. Learn how he built it in this interview:

Offering consulting services can certainly be a million-dollar business idea for someone with management or industry expertise who has a solid business plan.

It can also help to grow your personal brand through social media channels, your own blog, or other online platforms. Once you’re established, you can attract customers like large corporate clients that can grow your consulting firm into a multi-million dollar company.

Offering consulting services is a large part of how Bedros Keuilian makes more than $200 million a year, just to cite one example. You can hear how he built his multi-million-dollar business in this interview:

The need for on-demand plane and helicopter service is rising, especially in the niche of air ambulance services and emergency medical transportation.

Hear how he built his company in this interview:.

Consider a dropshipping business with a subscription business model selling vitamins or other wellness-themed products. Unique Vintage started off reselling vintage clothes on an e-commerce website.

Hear how they did it in this podcast interview:.

Portland Gear founder Marcus Harvey focused on his local market, capitalizing on their social media popularity to grow to 7-figure yearly revenue. You can hear his advice in this YouTube interview:

That’s also driven growth in the fitness industry. In 2023, 39% of Americans have gym memberships and that number is expected to rise.

Franchising is an excellent business model for a fitness studio, expanding your potential customer base and paving the way to grow it into a million-dollar business idea. That’s how Stretch Zone grew to more than $47 million in annual revenue, as you’ll hear in this podcast interview with CEO Tony Zaccario:

Cleaning businesses are like gold mines—easy to start and they have high success rates. In fact, our friend Chris Mondragon, owner of Queen Bee Cleaning, started out making $6K a month and has scaled tremendously.

Today, the business makes $125K monthly. That’s the beauty of the cleaning business: It’s one of those rare industries where you can start small and scale with no limits.

In Chris’s free masterclass, he shares a formula that reveals your city’s cleaning business earning potential. It may be a good idea to check whether your city passes the test before deciding a cleaning service is the million-dollar business idea for you.

Add revenue streams by making and selling products, like specialty cleaners or eco-friendly cleaning solutions, online. Spruse Clean increased their revenue to $112,000 a month when they added an eCommerce website to their cleaning services.

The digital advertising agency market size grew at a rate of 28.2% per year from 2017-2022, and is projected to continue that growth at a CAGR of 19.4% through 2030. This makes it one of the fastest-growing industries with a low cost to start.

Knowledge is the key to thriving in this space. If you’re skilled in areas like search engine optimization, content marketing, and social media management, you can offer these services online to other businesses to help them grow their brand and customer base.

Listen to it to hear his million-dollar ideas to start and grow a marketing agency:.

That audience is key to turning a podcast into a million-dollar business idea. Adding additional revenue streams is another great way to scale.

Hear their advice in this interview:.

The house painting services market is trending upwards, driven largely by an increase in spending on residential construction and renovation. The industry is forecasted to grow at a CAGR of 5.2% over the next decade.

He shares his strategies to grow to one million dollars and beyond in this podcast interview:.

That’s why epoxy flooring is a million-dollar business idea for entrepreneurs who have (or are willing to learn) those niche skills. Brandon Vaughn had no experience with epoxy coatings before starting his business.

He used that to grow Wise Coatings into a franchise, and the company now generates upwards of $5 million a year in revenue. Learn how he made millions of dollars installing epoxy floors in this interview:

An increasing percentage of those sales are expected to come through online channels, with the majority of sales forecasted to be online by 2024. This puts it among the best millionaire business ideas for sports lovers looking to start an e-commerce business.

You can hear how he achieved 600% growth in this interview:.

Nate is a serial entrepreneur, part-time investor, and founder of WallStreetZen. He holds a Juris Doctor (JD) degree from UAlberta Law – but don’t hold that against him.

He occasionally writes about himself in the 3rd person.

Your investment objectives should be two-fold: So the question is: How do you invest a million dollars to maximize returns while ensuring the money will be there when you need it.

According to most financial experts, the best way to invest a million dollars is in diversified low-cost index funds with a mix of stock and bond ETFs. However, the actual mix of stocks vs bonds you should hold depends on your risk tolerance and financial goals.

A classic stock/bond portfolio has stocks to drive returns over the long term while the bonds provide stability and cash flow over the short term. This chart shows the average returns after 20 years, based on asset allocation:

However, it was also the most volatile. Over the past 94 years, a 100% stock portfolio has seen losses in 26 of them, compared to just 14 years for a 100% bond portfolio.

Additionally, the worst year for stocks saw a loss of 43.13% compared to the worst year for bonds of 8.13%. Therefore, your risk tolerance and financial goals should drive your approach to asset allocation.

If you’re in your late thirties or early forties, you can weather a few bad years and wait for your 100% stock portfolio to recover over the decades.

You definitely don’t want to have your portfolio drop 43% in a single year.

You can use a free retirement calculator to project your portfolio value, based on your age, your risk tolerance, and how much you’re currently saving: I personally really like Empower’s free retirement planner – its free to use and is helpful for understanding how your investment choices now can impact your investment in 10, 20, 30 or more years.

Similar to your risk tolerance, your financial goals play a role in determining the best way to invest a million dollars. If maximum return is what you want, you’ll need a more aggressive portfolio.

Below, we’ll break down the best options for both types of investors. According to experts, high-end art may be one of the best investments in 2024.

Inflationary pressures. Cryptocurrency turbulence.

And now, finding promising investments is harder than ever. Recently, Bloomberg asked investment experts where they’d personally invest $1,000,000 right now.

After all, the ultra-wealthy have placed their bets on art for centuries. From the Rockefellers to Bezos and Gates — all actively collect art.

Thanks to the first and only art investing platform, Masterworks, you can invest in art without needing millions.

Skip the waitlist with our link below: If you’re American, one of the best things you can do is max out your 401(k).

Most countries have similar programs (e.g. RRSPs in Canada, or SSIP in the UK).

This lets you take what you would have paid in taxes, and invest it for your retirement instead.

A typical check would see $750 going to you and $250 to the government.

So investing $200 would only cost you $150 in take-home pay. This chart below shows how different levels of 401k contributions impact the amount of your paycheck you keep (in take home and invested amounts) vs.

When you retire, you can withdraw money from the account. You pay taxes on withdrawals, but typically at a lower rate due to your lower income in retirement.

Imagine you have $1,000 to invest each month. You pay 25% in income taxes, so you can invest $1,000 through a 401(k) but only $750 if you decide to invest post-tax.

If you invested without the tax benefit, you’d only have $1,796,716.01. Keep in mind that the funds you invest in through your 401(k) charge management fees.

For a simple example, imagine you earn a 10% return on $1 million for 20 years. You’ll have $6,727,499.95 at the end of 20 years.

A 1% fee cost you more than $1 million over 20 years. So what’s the solution.

You can use Empower’s free 401k fee analyzer to understand how fees are impacting your portfolio. If the app can find a fund with similar investments but lower fees, they’ll let you know so you can swap and save money.

Index funds aim to let investors track a market index, like the S&P 500, rather than using active management to try to beat the market. This passive management allows index funds to keep fees very low, while retaining strong returns.

For example, the SPDR S&P 500 index fund has returned 9.53% annually (since its inception in 1993). When investing in index funds, it’s all about matching your asset allocation to your risk tolerance.

Bonds are lower risk but have lower returns.

A 90/10 stock-to-bond split is aggressive and risky while a 60/40 split is better for someone who is more risk-averse. A common rule of thumb is to have a bond allocation equal to your age minus 10.

For example, someone who wants to know how to invest $50,000 at a 70/30 split would put $35,000 in stocks and $15,000 into bonds while someone with $1 million would split their cash $700,000 to $300,000. For example, that means that a 30-year-old would have 20% of their money in bonds and 80% in stocks.

Empower offers a tool to analyze your risk tolerance and help you choose the right portfolio. Keep in mind that you can invest in index funds through a 401(k).

Max out your retirement account before investing outside of a tax-advantaged account to ensure you make the most of your limited tax benefits. And don’t forget to analyze your 401k for hidden fees.

you don’t have a million dollars yet), index funds are a great way to invest in the stock market with a little money. starting out with index fund investing could put you on the path toward being a millionaire.

But that safety means lower returns. The reason savings accounts are so safe is that they come with FDIC insurance.

However, this coverage has a limit of $250,000 per account type, per depositor, per covered bank. Given current rates and inflation, money in a savings account will lose purchasing power.

That’s because while your balance would grow from $1 million to $1,030,000 at 3% interest, inflation being 5% would cause things that cost $1 million to rise in price to $1,050,000. If you do choose to put cash in a savings account, choose the one with the highest yield.

Many people choose big banks with lower rates, which means they’re missing out on huge amounts of interest. The Wall Street Journal found that this amounts to billions of dollars in lost interest each year.

That is something that you typically can’t do with stocks. For example, if you decide you want to make a 20% down payments on any property you buy, having $1 million available to invest means you could buy real estate worth as much as $5 million.

A real estate portfolio worth $5 million could produce much greater returns than $1 million stock or bond portfolios. If you want a hands-off way to invest in real estate, without the opti.

These crazy big homes are packed with amenities from a bowling alley to underground tunnels and even at $2 million TV that rises up from the pool. Take a look inside.

Bruce Makowsky is the real estate developer who built this luxury lair and filled it with a $30 million car collection, including a $15 million vintage Mercedes. And you’ll never get bored here: The home’s entertainment level has a four-lane bowling alley, a giant candy wall and four glass foosball tables.

..is a massive James Bond-themed movie theater that seats 40. The home originally hit the market in 2017 but after more than two years without any takers and after two price reductions, it’s now listed for $150 million.

“Not only is there nothing like this in Los Angeles, I don’t think there’s anything like this in the country,” Hilton & Hyland broker Gary Gold tells CNBC. The 25,000-square-foot mega-home, which belonged to late media mogul Jerry Perenchio, has some cool secrets.

Hidden underneath the residence are two tunnels original to the home’s 1935 construction. The first leads to a pool and pool house.

The 10-acre estate also has a massive garage. “Mr.

And above it, he built a beautiful rose garden,” says Gold. And there’s plenty of space to park vino too: The estate has a wine cellar with space for 12,000 bottles.

Fun fact: It was featured in the 1972 film “The Godfather” starring Marlon Brando, and in the 1992 blockbuster “The Bodyguard” with Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner. “This is the Beverly House, which was the estate of William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies,” owner Leonard Ross tells CNBC.

Kennedy honeymooned here.”. Inside the 50,000-square-foot home are eye-catching architectural details like the arched ceilings in the living room and the hand-carved woodwork in the two-story library.

With two dining rooms and hallways that are more than 100 feet long, the owner says the Beverly House can easily entertain 1,000 people. Downstairs, guests can literally party like the ultimate playboy.

The most iconic part of the estate is the backyard, where you’ll spot the gardens, fountains and the tiered pools that were featured in both “The Godfather” and “The Bodyguard.”. This gold-covered palace in Hillsboro Beach, Florida, originally hit the market for $159 million.

He spent $4 million on an enormous 150,000-gallon, resort-style swimming pool and another $2 million on one of the first IMAX home movie theaters. He also spent huge amounts of cash on the interiors.

“This is the same type of gold and same technique applied in 18th century France,” says Nicholas Gardnier, who was in charge of the crew painting on the precious metal. Everything got the Midas touch, including the $500,000 front doors, the railings on the $2 million staircase and the moldings on the walls and ceilings.

When it sat empty for several years, it eventually sold at auction. Public records show it sold for just $42.5 million to an LLC with ties to Andy Mack, the co-founder of tea business Teavana, which sold to Starbucks for more than $600 million in 2012.

Don’t Miss: These 4 mansions have incredible secrets buried underneath them — take a look inside.

It’s no secret that Elon Musk has been deeply frustrated with OpenAI since stepping down from its board in February 2018, culminating in an open letter calling for the organization to pause work on more powerful systems. “It does seem weird that something can be a nonprofit, open source and somehow transform itself into a for-profit, closed source,” Musk said in a CNBC interview Wednesday, following a Tesla shareholder’s meeting.

The power of his criticism hinges on the fact that Musk helped launch the AI research organization. But exactly how much support he gave, even Musk seems unsure about.

If this is legal, why doesn’t everyone do it. ” he tweeted in mid-March.

The $100 million figure has been widely reported as fact. But in the same CNBC interview yesterday, Musk abruptly shrank his claim.

So what changed in the last eight weeks.

Our analysis of documents filed with the IRS and a state regulator show that Musk could not have given the nonprofit the $100 million he originally claimed. In fact, while the source of much of OpenAI’s funding remains unclear, filings contain only around $15 million of donations that can be traced definitively back to Musk.

The tax filings also reveal previously unreported details about one of the most valuable and well-known technology ventures operating today, including the level of investment by Reid Hoffman, free Teslas for early OpenAI engineers and the skyrocketing computing bill that may have prompted it to take a $1 billion investment from Microsoft.

They wrote that OpenAI’s goal was to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.” The nonprofit would be co-chaired by Musk and Sam Altman.

The next year, Wired duly reported OpenAI as a “billion dollar effort,” and that figure was subsequently widely shared. But “committed” is not the same as “actually donated.” According to federal tax filings, at least one of the named donors, YC Research, never gave a single dollar, and the total amount donated to OpenAI’s nonprofit from its inception through 2021 was only $133.2 million.

It received just $3,066 of donations in 2021. So how much of OpenAI’s $133 million did Musk donate.

In 2016, the Musk Foundation made a $10 million donation to yet another nonprofit associated with Altman, called YC.org. YC.org, in turn, made a $10 million donation to OpenAI.

That $10 million donation remains the only publicly disclosed cash contribution from Musk to OpenAI. However, an audited financial statement filed by YC.org with California charity regulators in 2020 reveals that $15 million of the organization’s 2016 revenue came from a single contributor.

YC subsequently gave OpenAI another $16 million in 2017, of which at least $5 million was likely Musk’s. The only other donation that can be tied to Musk is a previously unreported gift to OpenAI in 2017 of $248,295 worth of Tesla vehicles, and a subsequent donation in 2018 for $14,105 in vehicle upgrades.

However, there are also ways to give money to a nonprofit anonymously. Rich individuals can cloak their gifts by funneling money through so-called donor advised funds (DAFs).

That fund then donated $7.8 million to OpenAI between 2018 and 2020. There is no way to tell whether any of that money was Musk’s — the Fund has many donors and tens of billions of dollars in assets — but it is impossible to rule out.

Musk likely did this with the additional $5 million gift to YC.org in 2016. Perhaps he simply topped up his OpenAI donations to $50 or $100 million the same way.

Several weeks ago, Musk’s representative was presented with TechCrunch’s reporting but did not reply to requests for comment. The only way to put a limit on Musk’s contributions was to count up the gifts to OpenAI from other donors and see how much was left over.

Sam Altman, now OpenAI’s CEO, made a contribution, the organization’s 2016 IRS filing shows. He loaned the young organization $3.75 million to get it started — and then forgave the full amount, with interest, for a total gift of $3,784,637.

Aphorism then followed up with a $5 million donation direct to OpenAI in 2017 and 2018. Amazon and Microsoft donated at least $800,000 in cloud computing services, and Infosys confirmed to TechCrunch that it had made a donation.

There were other corporate gifts in-kind, including a $129,000 high-performance computer from Nvidia, as well as software and services from over a dozen other companies. OpenAI would not share details of contributions made by Brockman or Livingston.

However, there was a modest $100,000 donation in 2018 from Donor’s Trust, a DAF favored by conservatives and libertarians, among whom Thiel has been counted. In 2017, Open Philanthropy announced a $30 million donation to OpenAI, which was delivered in three $10 million gifts in 2017, 2018 and 2019, through a nonprofit controlled by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.

“We see some risks, both from unintended consequences of AI use, and from deliberate misuse, and believe that we — as a philanthropic organization, separate from academia, industry, and government — may be well-placed to support work to reduce those risks,” the organization wrote at the time. As OpenAI scaled, its costs began rising fast.

According to its tax filings, OpenAI spent $2.3 million on cloud computing in 2016, $7.9 million in 2017 and $30.6 million in 2018. In February 2018, OpenAI switched cloud providers from Amazon to Google, signing an agreement to spend at least $63 million with the tech giant over the next two years.

The events may be unconnected, although Semafor reported recently that Musk thought OpenAI was slipping behind Google, and walked away after the other founders rejected his offer to run the nonprofit. According to insiders at OpenAI contacted by Semafor, Musk stopped making donations at that point, precipitating the spin-out of a for-profit OpenAI LP that would welcome outside investors.

In July, Microsoft invested around $1 billion in the new for-profit entity — with about half the funds in the form of credits for its own Azure cloud computing service. Musk has publicly decried OpenAI’s transition to a for-profit business.

In a conversation on a philanthropy forum in March, he posted: “My hope is we actually slowed acceleration by participating but I’m quite skeptical of the view that we added to it.”. Not every founding donor felt the same.

Aphorism justified the charitable investment by writing that the new business aimed to provide AI “technology to the public through open source licensing where appropriate to benefit the public.”. None of the recent versions of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot have been open source.

To build a successful and enduring company, you need more than just hype, publicity, or impressive fundraising skills. Ultimately it all boils down to one simple principle: you must have a product that solves a pressing problem, and then the right amount of paying customers to make the math work.

Today’s infographic comes to us from Point Nine Capital, and it highlights five basic revenue models that startups can use to achieve $100 million in annual revenue.

Are you hunting flies, or are you trying to hunt elephants.

To build a $100 million revenue per year company, you’ll need to have a clear vision of your product-market fit and the customers you’re going after.

This has implications.

If you’re going after Fortune 500 companies, you’ll need far fewer customers, but also a sophisticated and detailed sales strategy. Flies – $10 per user x 10 million customers = $100 million in annual revenue.

To build a big business with flies, you’ll need a product with a high viral coefficient (Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.) that spreads your brand quickly and inexpensively. Alternatively, you can build a platform that allows for the creation of massive amounts of user generated content (UGC) such as Yelp or Reddit.

Mice are still pretty small, but the expectations are higher than for flies. To get $100 per user, these customers will have to be directly paying for something, like a $10 monthly subscription.

Rabbits – $1k per user x 100k customers = $100 million in annual revenue. Once you hit rabbit territory, we are basically out of reach of B2C customers.

To do this, you’ll need a fantastic product, excellent inbound marketing, and an extremely high NPS (Net Promoter Score). The latter metric is used to measure the likelihood a customer would recommend you to their peers.

Deer – $10k per user x 10k customers = $100 million in annual revenue. We’re now getting up there in size – which makes it likely that deer have to be medium-sized businesses.

While revenue per user is much higher than preceding levels, it is still not likely enough to warrant traditional enterprise field sales.

Going after elephants is a totally different world, and requires a skilled sales force, patience, and an enterprise-focused approach. You’ll need to educate Fortune 500 companies on why they should spend $100,000 with you each year – and you’ll need to be able to back that all up with a killer product.

Software as a Service (SaaS) companies like Workday or Salesforce often use this kind of strategy, and it allows them to key in on the features that their most important clients want to see. As we noted in a previous infographic, investors love the predictable revenue stemming from a well-positioned SaaS company.

For the record, I believe having at least 10 million dollars is the ideal amount of money to retire early today. Given interest rates have come down over the past 40+ years, the value of cash flow has gone up.

Retirees and investors need a lot more capital to generate the same amount of risk-adjusted returns.

With $350,000+ in income, you should be able to live a wonderful life, especially if you don’t have debt. Today, in a big city you need about $300,000 to live a middle-class lifestyle with a mortgage and two kids.The question becomes, if you had 10 million dollars, what would you do with it.

In “The Samurai Method To Maximizing Investment Returns,” I mentioned a long-term goal of accumulating 10 million dollars in stocks and bonds in order to generate at least $200,000 a year in dividend income. $10 million sounds like a lot, but dreaming is free, and I dream all the time because I’m frugal.

Everything is neatly partitioned so I can have a clearer focus on how to maximize effort and income. But what if 10 million dollars after-taxes just fell into your lap.

I’m not so sure anything would change at all.

I’d like you to go through the same exercise. 1) Do nothing.

Money is most easily blown when it first comes in. This is when we get in the most trouble, especially if we didn’t spend years earning our money.

Spend: $0. What’s left: $10 million.

I’d do a net worth analysis to see where I’m light on assets. Given I bought another property last year, I’m a little too heavy in real estate than I would like (~40% of net worth vs.

Hence, I’d allocate money towards public equities, risk free assets, and private equity investments. By keeping 40% of the $10 million windfall, I know I’ll be safe no matter what I do with the other 60%.

What’s left: $6 million. 3) Pay down some debt.

Both are cash flow positive, but I like the idea of having a 1:1 debt to cash ratio for financial security. Spend: $1 million.

4) Help family and friends. I’d ask my parents, sister, in-laws, close friends, and other loved ones if they are in need of any financial assistance.

It’s important to have the optionality to help others without others always expecting you to help them. Spend $1.5 million.

5) Create a perpetual giving machine. I’d set up a $3 million trust to perpetually donate to a particular charity based off the returns generated from the principal.

I have a new book with Penguin Random House entitled, Buy This, Not That: How To Spend Your Way To Wealth And Freedom. I will be donating 100% of the royalties to The Pomeroy Center, a place that helps disabled adults and children.

What’s left: $500,000. 6) Live a little.

7) Build more passive income with real estate. Real estate is my favorite asset class to generate passive income and wealth.

Personally, I like investing with Fundrise and CrowdStreet, the two premier real estate investing platforms today.

But then I thought about the maintenance costs and $65,000 a year in property taxes each year. That is just an outrageous amount of waste.

I’ve been to several $5 million dollar houses before, and they aren’t nice enough for me to move from my cozy <2,000 sqft house overlooking the ocean. I'd feel a little silly living in a house so big (3,000 – 4,000 sqft) with just the two of us.

But then I realized how stupid it would be to drive 40 mph at the most in the hilly, pot-holed roads of San Francisco.

Then it will be time to get a new family car with newer safety features.

But given I know my parents are already financially secure due to a lack of debt and a healthy pension, I’m not worried. My in-laws don’t need that much to live a happy life either.

Going through this fun exercise makes me re-appreciate the value of freedom. If you have all the money in the world, but don’t have the freedom to do what you want, is it really worth being so rich.

Do your best to optimize your life for freedom while discovering what is the minimum amount of money you need to be happy. Because I already have the freedom to choose how to spend all my time, $10 million doesn’t do much to change my life.

It’s kind of sad that 10 million dollars only earns you around $150,000 – $300,000 risk free every year in interest. But $200,000 – $250,000 a year so happens to be the ideal income for maximum happiness, so why not shoot for such a financial nut.

How would you spend $10 million. What is really the point of accumulating so much wealth beyond what you are comfortable spending.

Do you think your life will change much with such a large windfall.

If you’re able to accumulate such levels of wealth, you might as well figure out how to spend or give away every dollar above those thresholds. I first wrote this post in 2015 when my net worth was below $10 million.

They also generate north of $370,000 a year in passive income.

Therefore, although it’s great to have more money, our costs have risen as well.

You still worry about a bear market losing you millions out of the blue. But that’s what a diversified net worth is for.

The wealthier you get, the less risk you want to take. Therefore, I’ve got 40% of our net worth in real estate for diversification and income.

Real estate is my favorite asset class to build wealth. As you get wealthier, the more you will appreciate the value of real estate.

In 2016, I started diversifying into heartland real estate to take advantage of lower valuations and higher cap rates. I did so by investing $810,000 with real estate crowdfunding platforms.

With interest rates down, the value of cash flow is up. Further, the pandemic has made working from home more common.

Take a look at my two favorite real estate crowdfunding platforms. Both are free to sign up and explore.

Fundrise: A way for accredited and non-accredited investors to diversify into real estate through private eFunds. Fundrise has been around since 2012 and has consistently generated steady returns, no matter what the stock market is doing.

CrowdStreet: A way for accredited investors to invest in individual real estate opportunities mostly in 18-hour cities. 18-hour cities are secondary cities with lower valuations, higher rental yields, and potentially higher growth due to job growth and demographic trends.

Sign up for Personal Capital, the web’s #1 free wealth management tool to get a better handle on your finances. If you are lucky enough to acc.

You’ve spent weeks trying to think of a smart way to make money online. The harsh reality: not every online business idea has the potential to surpass the million-dollar mark.

This guide walks through what makes a $1 million business idea, with examples of entrepreneurs who’ve surpassed the million dollar mark. 12 million-dollar business ideas.

Examples include: In the case of PerfectDD, Alice Kim says, “Learning that the average bra size in the US is a 34DD and millions of women struggle with the same problem, I was inspired to create a solution and to be the voice for these underserved women.

In the past year, nearly half of customers chose to buy from brands with a clear commitment to sustainability. Build a million-dollar business by finding a traditionally unsustainable business and making it better.

Entrepreneur Nick Spina created Ethey as a solution. It has the same delivery functionality as mega brands like Hello Fresh and Gousto.

All food scraps from the facility are sent to a worm farm, rather than landfill. Nick says, “For the first five and a half years, we had successfully bootstrapped completely—no investors or outside capital.

Now, Ethey has the capacity to generate more than $65 million in revenue. That’s set to reach $110 million with the introduction of its warehouse automation technology.

Capitalize on consumer spend by opening an ecommerce website that sells wedding products. Capturing just a small fraction of the market can help you build a million-dollar business.

Dropshipping is a business model you can use to turn a tiny investment into a million-dollar business. Instead of paying for inventory upfront, your supplier charges you for the product once it sells.

Find trending products through tools like: Once you’ve found a supplier for your dropshipping business, create an online store and promote your products on TikTok.

Tyler, an avid TikTok user himself, says, “I natively know what the trends are, what kind of videos are working well, or what kind of videos are going viral on TikTok. For me, it was fairly easy to say, like, “Oh, I was scrolling through TikTok last night and I saw all this concept and we can apply it to SendAFriend.”.

Homeowners and renters splash thousands each year on home services. If you have handy skills, become a contractor and offer the following services to the local community:

The more hands you have on deck, the more projects (and money) you’ll get. If you’re a crafty and creative person, build an online store to sell your products.

Popular handmade items to sell online include: Turn this into a million-dollar business by using finer quality materials.

Leslie Herrmann is the manager of My Way Stone, a jewelry brand that turns stones into custom jewelry. She says, “The idea came about during my wedding in 2017, when I went to the wedding location with my family and we picked up several stones that my mom made into custom jewelry for the bridal party.

We had to do a fair amount of development to create a website that allowed our customers to really design their own jewelry. We have more products in the pipeline and are excited to continue to grow from necklaces to earrings, cufflinks, rings, bracelets, more shapes, etc.”.

It’s a million-dollar business idea because there’s no need to invest time and money into product development. Lean on an existing product to build your own company.

Promix is an example of how to stand out in the crowded supplements market. Founder ​​Albert Matheny used his food science background to build a personal brand around the supplements business.

I’ve trained people for 10 plus years,” Albert says. “I studied all this stuff for many years, and I’m an athlete as well.

“For me, that’s a point of differentiation for Promix. I can bring that to the table while interacting with customers.

I still help people with their nutrition. I know that other brands out there are not getting that level of customer service or personal attention.”.

It has the potential to become a million-dollar business that allows you to work from anywhere. “You don’t need a million-dollar brilliant idea that reinvents the wheel,” says Alex Micol, founder of Scalers, who reportedly made $30 million last year.

Alex puts this into practice with affiliate marketing—a business model in which you get paid commission for products you sell on behalf of another retailer. Alex says, “Choose a vertical that is a good fit for you, whether it’s because of your professional background or a personal passion, and dive into becoming an expert on that vertical while only pursuing opportunities within it.”.

Offer consulting services or virtual tutoring sessions. People often pay higher rates for personalized, one-to-one sessions.

Build a team and create a mini agency. These employees allow you to take on more clients, and ultimately, make more money online.

Spend time turning your knowledge into online educational resources and sell them for years to come. Take Jack Butcher, the owner of Tiny, a small portfolio of companies that collectively generate $100 million in revenue each year.

The course alone is a powerhouse of a brand, raking in more than a million dollars each year. Viewers watch 694,000 hours of YouTube content each minute.

Ways to monetize your YouTube channel include: Take Ryan Trahan, a track and cross country athlete who started a YouTube channel.

His philosophy is: “I think all of us, as creators, have something unique about ourselves. You’re the only person that’s you.

And it actually matters. I think that matters a lot.”.

Ryan now has more than 11 million subscribers and brand deals (including Shopify) that help him build a lucrative business on YouTube. Large corporate clients often spend thousands each year on gifts to clients or employees.

Package a selection of items into a gift box and run marketing campaigns that convince large businesses to ship your gift boxes to their clients. Go the extra mile with gift wrapping and customer service to make this an extremely profitable business idea.

The subscription ecommerce market is tipped to hit $473 billion by 2025. It’s a great opportunity to build a million-dollar business, since there’s less pressure to find new customers.

Package popular products, such as food, cosmetics, or pet toys into a subscription box. Use a Shopify subscription app like SubBox, Recharge, or BOLD to automatically bill customers each month in exchange for their box.

She founded Indigenous Box, a quarterly subscription box that sources products made by Indigenous entrepreneurs. “I meet with every single entrepreneur we buy from,” Mallory says.

You may think that most millionaires are celebrities or technology magnates, but many of the wealthiest people — roughly 20 million in the U.S. alone — are regular people.

Here are nine steps to help you become a millionaire in five years or less. Having a wealth-building plan is vital to ensuring financial freedom.

However, a plan should take more than just your budget into consideration. It should also factor in your:

The sooner you start building a plan, the quicker you’ll start building wealth.

However, becoming rich takes immediate action. Start saving, investing and challenging yourself today.

Many of the country’s largest companies match 50 cents for every $1 contributed by an employee into a retirement account. While these contributions are typically capped at 6% of your salary, these benefits can add up to $200 a month to your retirement accounts.

For instance, perhaps you make $50,000 a year and contribute $450 to your retirement accounts each month. Without employer contributions, you’ll have $1 million in around 40 years.

That extra cash will allow you to become a millionaire in 34 years instead of 40. One of the best ways to amass a net worth of over $1 million is to increase the amount of money you’re earning.

You should do your research before approaching your boss. You need to understand how much other people in your industry make so you can make an educated argument when it’s time for your annual employee review.

Trim down your budget and live well below your means. Don’t take on extra debt, and don’t worry about the luxury items other people are buying.

Build a strict savings plan so you avoid wasting money on unnecessary items. Many people start by saving 10% of their income and then increase it to 20%.

For example, assume you and your partner make a combined income of $100,000 per year, leaving you with about $80,000 after paying taxes. You’ll put $25,000 into savings each year if you save 25% of your income.

states if you reduce your housing expenses and eliminate debt. Supplementing your full-time pay by developing multiple income streams is another way to become a millionaire in five years or less.

Keep in mind that this income isn’t fun money. To grow it, you need to invest it.

Debt is one of the biggest deterrents to becoming a millionaire because it reduces the amount of money you can save from your paycheck. The biggest obstacle to building wealth for most young people is student loan debt.

Focus on paying down your student loans and eliminating other consumer debt such as credit cards, personal loans and auto loans. You may need to prioritize eliminating debt over other financial strategies if you have more than $10,000 in credit card debt.

You may think that most individuals become millionaires by making technical, complicated investments. However, a simple investment strategy is often the most effective.

Every investment portfolio should contain stocks. Investing in simple, affordable index funds is the best strategy for most people.

These investments are heavily influenced by market factors and can result in drastic losses.

These funds invest in commercial real estate properties and large residential apartment buildings. Historically, REIT funds provide high returns for investors.

Until you begin to see significant returns from your investments, your income is your most significant source of wealth. No matter your industry or chosen career, take the time to perfect your skills.

Investing in your career can take many forms. Perhaps you need an advanced degree to receive a promotion.

Research affordable programs and map out a payment strategy. Do not take out loans to finance your education.

Perhaps earning a designation or taking a tailored course can help you land a promotion or a higher-paying job. If you work in finance, consider becoming a certified public accountant to increase your earning potential.

Besides making a realistic budget, you need to find ways to control impulse spending. Avoid visiting your favorite online shopping sites and stick to a list when going to the grocery store.

If you have a broken computer, see if you can have it repaired before buying a new one. Maybe a family or friend has a used computer you can buy.

If you want to become a millionaire in five years or less, you’ll need to adopt an aggressive investment and savings strategy. Many young adults can benefit from adopting a more realistic timeline.

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The money went toward creating the Foundation for Newark’s Future, a group that set out to improve the city’s public schools. At the time, Newark’s high-school graduation rate hovered at around 60%, 19 points below the national average.

Fewer than 40% of students were reading at grade level. The results of the $200 million experiment were disappointing, according to now-Mayor Ras Baraka and other critics.

Zuckerberg wasn’t personally involved with the foundation’s efforts, and according to Baraka, the group did not spend the Facebook founder’s donation wisely. He wishes the foundation would have engaged more with local community members to find solutions specific to Newark.

It went to a foundation that made decisions about what the money should be spent on,” he said at a Wall Street Journal conference on Wednesday. “You can’t just cobble up a bunch of money and drop it in the middle of the street and say, ‘This is going to fix everything.’ You have to engage with communities that already exist..

In a follow-up interview with Business Insider, Baraka explained that he wished the foundation had worked with local groups like the SPAN Parent Advocacy Network, the Newark Teachers Union, and the Newark chapter of the NAACP — which have all focused on local education issues for many years. The foundation may have acted without fully understanding local issues, so it was hard for them to devise good solutions, he said.

to talk about the concrete issues and narrow them down to specific things they could’ve impacted over a long period of time,” Baraka said. He gave the example of chronic absenteeism, an issue research suggests can lead to poor socio-emotional outcomes.

Much of the $200 million went toward buying out contracts of underperforming teachers, which also served as a cost-saving move, The New Yorker reported in 2014. Sixty million dollars was funneled into charters — schools that are privately run but publicly funded — and millions more went to $1,000-a-day consultants.

“But that’s just your opinion of what you think is successful — as opposed to a real discussion about what concrete things make schools work.. and building structures around students so they perform better.

The initiative was part of Zuckerberg’s larger mission at the time to repair floundering schools in cities across the US. Dale Russakoff, a former Washington Post reporter, followed the Newark foundation’s work in his 2015 book “The Prize.” She wrote that Booker and Zuckerberg’s “stated goal was not to repair education in Newark but to develop a model for saving it in all of urban America.”.

(It was designed to be just a five-year initiative.). A 2016 study from Harvard University looked at school data from 2009 through 2016, and compared the achievement growth of Newark’s students to that of similar schools elsewhere in New Jersey.

Another analysis by NYU professor Jesse Margolis found that high-school graduation rates and overall student enrollment rates in Newark have also risen. Both reports tied the gains to Newark’s education reform, which started with the $200 million donation.

In a 2010 TechCrunch interview before the donation, Zuckerberg suggested that Newark should close underperforming schools, increase the number of charter schools, and implement a student performance-based pay system for teachers. Baraka said the Foundation for Newark’s Future had a similar thinking to Zuckerberg.

According to McLain, the foundation devoted over $2 million for citywide literacy initiatives, put $1.5 million toward an effort to increase Newark’s college graduation rate, and provided summer employment to over 2,000 students.

That same year, he founded Start-Up: Education Foundation, which has since merged with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, an organization started by Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan. As part of that initiative, the couple has pledged up to $1 billion in Facebook shares every year from 2016 to the end of 2018.

This education strategy, which has recently grown in popularity, emphasizes customizing curriculums and classrooms to individual students’ needs. “We engage directly in the communities we serve because no one understands our society’s challenges like those who live them every day,” the Chan Zuckerberg site reads.

Zuckerberg’s 2010 donation hinted at Silicon Valley’s larger push into education in recent years. Several tech startups have embarked on missions to “disrupt” the way American schools run their classrooms, arguing that they don’t fully prepare kids for the future.

On Tuesday, the organization announced it’s teaming up with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on a national education initiative. The organizations plan to explore several potential pilot projects that focus on improving students’ writing, math, and IQ.

In a joint statement, representatives of the organizations said they hope to tap into the nation’s “unrealized potential to accelerate student learning.”. “The purpose of the initiative is not to mandate anything,” they wrote.

Dear Reader,. What does $1 trillion look like.

Which is why I had to find a picture:.

It’s important to point out that the bills used in the example above are all $100 bills – not tens or twenties. $100 million fits on a single pallet.

And $1 trillion.

The numbers are so large that the scale of the picture almost doesn’t make sense. It’s hard to believe, which is why the equation is useful.

Mind boggling, I know. That’s how much money has been printed by the Federal Reserve since the onset of the pandemic.

$4.5 trillion on quantitative easing. $3 trillion on “infrastructure” (most of that isn’t actually for infrastructure).

With visuals like this, it becomes very easy to quickly understand why the U.S. dollar simply buys a lot less than it used to.

Meals at restaurants and takeout food are now more expensive than ever. Labor costs have skyrocketed.

$13 trillion of money printing = inflation. And no, this is not good.

We’re not stupid. I don’t care what any talking head or government official tells us.

As a result, we are in a completely different kind of investing environment than we were back in the first quarter of 2020, before things got out of hand. And the direction that the Federal Reserve takes this year is critical to understand.

I explored these topics in a special event that I held last week. It won’t be available for much longer, so if you’d like to learn more, please go right here to learn about my forecasts for the coming year.

This time, it comes from the U.K.-based Joint European Torus (JET) laboratory. As a reminder, nuclear fusion is essentially the power of the Sun.

This produces an enormous amount of energy that’s 100% clean. And unlike nuclear fission, forms of nuclear fusion produce no radioactive waste.

But they are wrong. Nuclear fusion is coming much faster than most people realize.

First, the reactor maintained a super-hot plasma for five seconds. That may not seem like a big deal at first.

That’s nearly seven times hotter than the Sun. Maintaining it for five seconds is quite the feat.

What’s exciting here is the proof of concept. Right now, it’s five seconds.

Then five hours. Then five days… and so on.

JET’s Record-Setting Nuclear Fusion Reaction.

Here we can see the magical moment where the fusion plasma formed. And get this – the reaction produced a world-record 59 megajoules of energy.

It’s not a lot of energy, but that wasn’t the point. This is a great proof of concept for the tokamak nuclear fusion reactor design that will lead to even more progress.

A group with members from 35 nations around the world is building ITER in southern France. It has scheduled the first reaction for December 2025.

And it seeks to produce 500 megawatts (MW) from just 50 MW of input. This is enough energy to power 500,000 homes.

There is no other form of clean energy with little or no radioactive waste capable of providing base load energy requirements on a global scale. Most of today’s solar panels only convert 15–18% of the Sun’s energy that hits the panel.

Plus, solar panels have a useful life of 20 years or so and are made with some toxic chemicals. Right now, they are being hauled off to the dump to sit for centuries.

But it will only provide supplemental clean energy. And hopefully, the industry will be able to better recycle used solar panels and tiles so that they don’t end up in landfills.

That will put us on the path to limitless clean energy… something our world desperately needs. ITER is just a prototype.

But it will still be an important step towards proving the capabilities of a tokamak design. The future is in dramatically smaller fusion reactors that can fit roughly on the back of a semi-trailer, which can be manufactured at a fraction of the cost.

And if you’re reading this, we’re going to experience the excitement of watching this all unfold in real time over the next few years. Intel is historically known for overpaying for acquisitions.

Rather than building in-house, it reverted to acquiring other semiconductor companies in an attempt to make up for its own deficiencies. The result was that Intel was a place where acquisitions went to die.

And the best people quickly leave. Intel has been reluctant to let its acquisitions prosper, which is why its recent plans to spin out Mobileye and take the company public this year came as such a big surprise.

As a reminder, Mobileye focuses on mobility semiconductors primarily for the auto industry. It first developed chips for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).

Intel had very little exposure to the auto industry. That’s why it drastically overpaid for Mobileye.

Yet Mobileye isn’t a big revenue driver right now. It has only generated just over $1 billion for Intel.

It wasn’t that the acquisition was a bad one. Mobileye was a very interesting company back in 2017.

And that’s what this announcement is all about. By spinning out Mobileye and taking it public, Intel hopes to recapture at least a portion of its original acquisition costs.

Mobileye is partnering with Benteler EV Systems and Beep to launch Level 4 autonomous “last-mile movers” in the United States. This is an interesting take on autonomous vehicles.

Source: Benteler EV Systems. As we can see, these last-mile movers are basically self-driving shuttles.

And these companies designed them for both enterprise use and public transport. These shuttles will be perfect for short-distance transport.

BART connects San Francisco with Silicon Valley. But the problem is the system stops about a mile from where the office buildings are in San Francisco.

That’s incredibly inconvenient. And it takes a lot of extra time.

They could cart passengers across that last mile into the city. This is a less expensive approach that would be far more efficient to move passengers from point A to point B.

And because they are autonomous, these fleets can be repositioned throughout the day based on normal commute patterns. To me, this shows that there will be multiple segments within the autonomous driving space.

This will be an interesting launch to watch. Mobileye expects the first shuttles to go live in 2024.

And, of course, we’ll be tracking Mobileye’s IPO closely this year. We don’t know what the valuation will be yet.