The law and schools
Schools
1️⃣ Schools aren’t designed to make you rich
- They train people to be obedient workers, not owners.
- The curriculum focuses on memorization, following rules, and fitting into existing hierarchies—not building wealth or questioning the system.
- If schools taught financial independence, critical thinking, or how to break free of the system, the system would collapse.
2️⃣ Laws protect the status quo, not justice
- Laws don’t exist to create “fairness.” They exist to keep the current holders of wealth and power secure.
- When an average person breaks the rules, they get punished. When a billionaire bends or rewrites the rules, it’s called “innovation” or “lobbying.”
This is why:
✅ Those who get rich often ignore or work around the rules until they’re powerful enough to write their own.
✅ People who strictly obey the system usually get stuck inside it.
Most billionaires didn’t get rich because they were “good students” or because they played fair—they hacked the system in one of these ways:
🏴☠️ 1. Operating in the grey zone (or outright breaking rules)
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Jeff Bezos (Amazon)
- In the early days, Amazon avoided collecting sales tax in most states to undercut physical stores. This was a “loophole” that regulators later closed.
- Amazon’s warehouses pushed labor laws to the edge, paying fines when caught but making billions meanwhile.
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Uber (Travis Kalanick)
- Uber launched in cities without permission, breaking taxi licensing laws worldwide. Their model depended on scaling so fast that governments couldn’t shut them down before people got addicted to the app.
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Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX)
- Tesla repeatedly broke environmental and labor laws at its factories. Musk is infamous for ignoring SEC regulations on stock market communication (“funding secured” tweet).
💸 2. Exploiting financial engineering
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Warren Buffett
- Uses insurance companies (like GEICO) as “cash machines.” Premiums from customers give him billions in float to invest before he ever has to pay claims.
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Private equity & hedge fund billionaires
- They use complex legal and tax tricks (carried interest, offshore accounts) that let them pay lower tax rates than their secretaries.
🌍 3. Benefiting from weak/poor countries
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Mark Zuckerberg (Faceb00c)
- Faceb00c grew in countries with almost no internet regulation. It used cheap Android phones to onboard billions in the developing world, sucking up user data that local governments didn’t know how to regulate.
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Resource billionaires
- Many mining and oil billionaires (Glencore, Gazprom bosses, African resource tycoons) got rich by bribing officials to hand them state assets for pennies during privatization.
⚖️ 4. Turning laws into weapons
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Bill Gates (Microsoft)
- In the 90s, Microsoft used monopolistic practices that were later ruled illegal. By then, it was too late; they already owned the market.
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Jack Ma (Alibaba)
- Benefited from connections(network) with local officials. Alibaba’s payment system initially violated CN banking laws, but regulators later rewrote rules to make it legal once Alibaba dominated the market.
🧠 The Pattern
✅ Start small by doing something technically illegal or unregulated
✅ Scale quickly to gain public dependence
✅ Once powerful, pay fines or lobby to legalize your model
✅ Use wealth to build political protection
This is why average people following the rules rarely get rich: the rules are written to stop them while allowing those at the top to rewrite the game.