and if everyone invested $100 per month in their local community we’d have colonies on the moons of jupiter
So if you invested 10% of your monthly income every month for 20 years, in a single company, you could be worth 0.00001% of what bezos is worth. Or you could have picked the wrong company and have every cent of your savings wiped out. Sounds like a win/win!
Don’t pick companies that will lose, man, simple
According to the NY State PowerBall Lottery, If you had invested $1 in 23 5 12 34 7 17 on Jul 8, 2025, your investment would now be worth $100M. Capitalism works when people can participate.
My mistake, I played mega millions instead of powerball.
“when people can participate”
You go back in time to when you’re living paycheck to paycheck and zero financial literacy. You convince yourself to invest $100/month in Amazon no matter what, because it will be worth it. You eat nothing but instant ramen, forego preventative care, get sick from malnutrition. Your quality of life is horrible because you forego basic necessities to invest in Amazon. The dot com bubble wipes out 90% of Amazon’s value but you continue to invest because your past self told you about this, but if you just endure, Amazon will recover and you will be a millionaire.
In this timeline, Amazon never recovers and goes bankrupt. On Twitter, you read a post about George Shaheen’s wedding, and how he’s entitled to his billions, despite predatory and exploitative practices, because his wealth could have been yours. If you had only invested $100/month since 1996 into WebVan, you’d be a millionaire.
Investing is, at the end of the day, a gamble.
investments are super safe, provided you invest in your local community
mutual aid is a great life hack
Or: Everyone decreases their discretionary spending to invest in companies that make consumer goods.
As a result, few people are buying the products these companies sell, like books and iPods, and they don’t become successful.
I understand not everyone can afford to gamble $25 a week but it’s not really the difference between eating ramen and eating steak. It’s more like the difference between eating ramen and eating rice. It’s not going to improve your life dramatically, your health is still going to suffer and it’s not going to cover the cost of preventative care in the US.
$25 a week on groceries in 1997 is around $50 today based on currency inflation, not even accounting for purchasing power. That could easily make the difference between a nutritious diet and one that leads to chronic health conditions for people living paycheck to paycheck. In 1997, the average weekly expenditure on food per person in the US was $34. You could probably have survived off of $15/wk for food back then and maybe find an extra 2-3hr of minimum wage to meet your $25 investment, but it wouldn’t have been pretty.
Fun fact, a $25 steak today in the US cost about $8.50 in 1997.
The key lesson here is that anyone can find $25 / month to waste on WebVan stock.
How much would I have if I invested $100/month in Enron during that same time period?
Yeah and if I kept investing $100 a month in the lottery it could be worth $500M today. Or it could be worthless because, as this clown already knows, no one can predict the next 30 fucking years like some clairvoyant.
OK, Biff, if you’re so smart, what’s the play right now? Why aren’t you investigating $100 a month in a small online bookstore that will one day be a tech supergiant?
1998: I invested in this small company that makes this pretty decent way to search for things on the internet. Can’t imagine it will be able to compete with the big boys like Yahoo!Search or even edge out the cool new guys like AskJeeves, but I like that they have “dont be evil” as part of their company rules.
2025: I own every detail of your lives. Our eyes are always watching. I’m richer than God. Our search engine is almost useless.
You should have invested in the exploration of America
Funny thing is, in 1792 $10 would have been a big load of money
How may millions before inflation?
Not everybody can fucking participate, Vijay.
Also, you can’t do basic arithmetic.
Well based on the principle of compounding interest I think that number might be right. It really kind of depends on your returns every month.
His logic flaw here is that millions gamble on startups like that and hindsight is very much 20/20.
Buying stocks is kind of like sports betting for a different target audience this way.
That’s why you’re only supposed to invest in successful ideas, duh.
It’s always a good idea, before investing in any company, to call the head office and say “I need a straight answer, so don’t give me the runaround: will you fail?”. If they say “no”, it is a safe investment. If they say “yes”, it is not quite as safe an investment but you may still want to invest.
Wow, the real investment tips are once again buried deep in the comments
Before investing, freeze the company’s CEO in a block of ice. If you still want to invest after chipping them out of the ice, it’s probably a worthy investment.
There’s no compounding interest here. You have to look up what the share price was every month for 28 years to find out how many shares you would buy (after trade fees) and then also keep track of share splits and dividend payments. Finally you add the total dividend with share number multiplied with current share price. I promise you that Perplexity AI didn’t do a single step of this. Instead it put down something that sounds likely.
Finally you have to throw all of this away since the premise is completely flawed. It’s not Jeff specifically but the fact that capital is taxed less than labour people are protesting.
$38,400 invested would be $100/mo. for 29 years, not 28.
You’re missing a non-formulated assumption that you should have diversified your investments, so it’s 100$ in Amazon, and 100$ in competitor2, 3, 4,… Get to 10 and you have a good chance 1 or 2 will make it!
What? You can’t afford 1000$ of risky investments per month??
Bezos wasn’t diversified like that though
He gambled and it happened to pay off.
For every one of these success stories there’s thousands of families. Take speak at r/wallstreetbets. Practically a daily post about someone blowing up their account on a risky bet. And those are just the ones who feel like sharing
Yeah right? See also: Cryptocurrencies.
Also they spelled Perplexity wrong.
Also I stopped using Perplexity, despite a 2 year free premium membership, when the CEO decided to be a dipshit.
when the CEO decided to be a dipshit.
Do you know how little that narrows it?
Last line is the kicker. Capitalism is a pyramid scheme that only works (solely for those at the top who actually collect from said pyramid) when an ever growing percentage of people are cut out from being able to participate in capitalism (don’t worry! those people cut out, still contribute to the pyramid).
I was 6, where the fuck am i getting $100 a month.
Lemonade stand. Spiced up with some crystal meth.
Yeah you just needed a 100 bucks a month as a 6 year old and also ESP to know which stock to pick!
Its your fault your poor, now leave him alone while he spends daddy’s money.
What a moron.
If people could predict the future stock market speculation and all that wouldn’t exist.
Knowing which company will take off is impossible and just guesstigambling.
I can’t be fucked to type it all out but I was about to write a fake reinventing of the S&P500 and 401ks - which is the “safe” [citation needed] version
You’d have to be clairvoyant to have known that in 1997, though. And if you’re clairvoyant, casinos offer a better return on investment.
Pets.com is held up as the example of these late 90s tech bubble. No one could ever believe your have pet supplies sold online when you have a pet store a short drive away.
The problem with the company’s business plan was that pet supplies of all types—food, toys, clothing, and so on—could be found easily at the nearest grocery or pet store. Given the choice between ordering online and waiting for delivery or walking into the nearest store to buy the product and take it home immediately, the majority of people preferred the latter.
But now Chewy is a very successful company with a loyal customer base and even Amazon covers much of what was sold at Pets.com.
People will say things like it was a good idea that was too early. But at the time it was ridiculed for the naivete and exuberance of people in the tech world.
if you’re clairvoyant, casinos offer a better return on investment.
I dunno… suddenly demonstrating clairvoyance in a casino sounds like a great way to experience cheater’s justice…
Yah if i could see twenty years into the future I’d have far more than $25 million in the bank
I’m going to be treated like a pariah for this, but many successful companies (and like, influencers etc) are successful due to government (sometimes CIA) intervention. And none of us know which company is going to be picked and who lobbied the right way and fucked the right people and was a relative of so and so and accidentally did a hit and run or has blackmail on them.
Reminder the CIA had their own airline, available to the public and not known to most of their customers that it was owned by CIA. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_America_(airline)
There’s also an article directly on the CIA’s website about Air America but I am reticent to directly link to them, you can google it though.
My investments/trades have actually done much better since incorporating the idea that the government controls much of the markets, not hardly anyone else. The government makes crypto - Chillguy for instance, Bukele made a national currency of El Salvador. And it’s randomly up right now and I’m pretty sure that’s because they are funnelling/LAUNDERING the Big Beautiful Bill money into that coin (and others) to pay BRICS currency.
A bunch of these coins are inflating currently, and technically if you take more money from them than you put in, you’ve successfully waged economic war against them. They usually have a baseline their bots (slaves) maintain - Trump coin is around $7-$8 for eg but can dip lower - and then they will increase this baseline and start swing trading it, usually opposite the US sleeping schedule but not always. They seem to all have different patterns and some switch them every 3 days in line with game theory re: prisoner’s dilemma. They run tons of online ads, have influencers talk about the coin, and have slaves talks about it in videos about video games etc to hype people into buying. So there’s tons of volatility that they are introducing deliberately and then they swing trade it, sometimes 3 to 6 swings a day.
Ofc this isn’t trading advice or me suggesting people band together to attack trades as that could be considered maybe illegal.
Elon also has a lot of coins too, and South Africa is part of BRICS, there’s no reason he can’t be some kind of asset of theirs or any or several countries. Elon’s coins tend to follow a very classic Andrew Tate style immediate rug pull though, as they could simply be payments from who knows to him.
Fartcoin and Trump coin follow the same general patterns as each other.
They also funnel money into Russian coins and Russian memes, as well as Chinese ones and so on.
Any woke themed coin or poor coin is generally a scam meant to hurt poor people and leftists.
And of course, they have donation coins where they basically give money to Nazis and racists, which is how Trump supporters and Nazis and methheads in trailers got so much money - they deliberately have been funding them wirh crypto UBI.
