- The average age for becoming a millionaire is 37.
- The average mark for becoming a billionaire is 51.
- The gap between becoming a millionaire and billionaire has ranged from one year to 26 years.
Some people say that making the first million is the hardest.
Others, like oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens have quipped that the first billion is a “helluva lot harder”.
Regardless of which is true, it’s interesting to examine how long it took the world’s wealthiest to reach the million and billion dollar benchmarks, as well as how many years were in between.
MILLIONS TO BILLIONS
Today’s infographic comes to us from Betway, and it provides a study of the 100 wealthiest billionaires that topped the 2018 edition of the Forbes Rich List.
Based on the top 100 billionaires studied from the Rich List, the average age for hitting millionaire status is 37. Meanwhile, the billion dollar mark is hit on average at the age of 51.
This puts the average time period to go from millionaire to billionaire at 14 years.
MAKING THE JUMP, BY INDUSTRY
Even with this small sample size, it’s clear that how fast this jump happens depends greatly on industry.
Tech entrepreneurs were by far the fastest on the list to go from millionaire to billionaire, with an average time of only 7.3 years. That number is averaged down by entrepreneurs such as Jeff Bezos, who has singlehandedly been able to amass an impressive empire of companies and assets in a very short period of time.
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