Sharvenium 17.0

Aug 04, 2022

What better way to spend your birthday than to compare yourself to the world's most successful people. Here's a fun list of what the worlds most successful people (source: me) and some really successful people that I respect were doing at age 17 whether that is building companies or by net worth.

Here's a list

Elon Musk

At 17, Elon left his home in South Africa and attended Queens University in Canada. He started off by working at his cousin's farm, cut some logs and was cleaning the boiler room of a lumber mill for $18/hour.

Bill Gates

At 17, Gates founded Traf-O-Data with Paul Allen to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor.

Traf-O-Data made $20,000 in revenue in around 1972 and it was only in operation for about 3 years. So $20,000/3 adjusted for inflation is worth about $40,000 per year.

Warren Buffet

According to this CNBC article, Warren was doing a lot of stuff in his teenage years to make money. Although he was a son of member of the U.S House of Represetatives from Nebraska, he delivered the papers at 13 and invested the profits into a 40 acre farm. Then he started his Used Golf Balls Business, sold stamps to collectors, started Buffet's Showroom Shine and put pinball machines in barber shops at age 17. He made around $5,000 by 17 which is worth around $64,000 today.

Jeff Bezos

Unlike Warren and I, Bezos wasn't making billions as a 17 year old. Instead he got a summer job at McDonald's as a Grill Man. He said he learnt a lot about customer service from this experience as well. Also he was valedictorian and talked about colonising space in his graduation speech.

Mark Zuckerberg

In his teenage years, Zuck co-founded a music application called Synapse Media Player and Microsoft and AOL offered a million dollars at age 18 to hire him but he decided to go to Harvard instead of being working at the company for another three years.

Ken Griffin

According to this completely unbiased GME fanboy's reddit post and this news article from the 1980s, at age 17 Kenny G was the president of the math club and had a software distribution company.

But the lanky, bespectacled youth doesn't expect to make a profit until summer. To further ensure business success, he is not letting suppliers or buyers in on his age.

"Do you think anyone would trust their product line to a 17-year-old kid?" he asks with a wry smile.

Funny how Ken didn't make profits immediately while his current market making in crypto has already robbed me on every transaction I have made. Also interesting how he didn't let anyone know his age but decided to let the news know. Surely, in this day and age doing that would be stupid. One google search about the company and the suppliers and buyers can find out who they are dealing with.

Also this ties in with using pseudonyms, no one has to know who you are and while the internet made it easier for people to create and share content without a real name, money on the internet still involved real government names but with crypto it's no longer needed for monetary purpose as well. So it is possible to be a true internet native which is crazy.

Conclusion

Where do I stand?

Sharvesh