If you are a semi-competent software engineer with some experience, move to the Bay Area, get a position at any large company that pays well (350k-500k including RSU is pretty feasible these days), live absolutely frugally (under 40-50k a year), invest the rest in VTSAX+VTIAX and don't keep them in your company stock (perhaps some 30% fixed income too to smooth the ride) and you'll be there in ~5 years with absolutely minimum risk (if the market crashes it might take maybe 7? But if you buy a slice of bonds you'll have dry powder to rebalance into equities as they fall).<p>I've been doing that for a few years now and I'm at ~1.6M all liquid and on track to retire before I'm 40 (32 now) and I'm a standard software engineer working in infra. I wish I would have known that earlier instead of completely wasting my time working as a startup employee for pennies, but I also had immigration issues (H1B visa) that prevented me from freely navigating the job market (or at least that's what I like to tell myself as a poor excuse for not taking more control of my future sooner...).<p>If you want to reduce those ~5 years, you can start putting your money in speculative bets (e.g. crypto, leveraged etf, option trading), but that's not my cup of tea, I am way too aware of how much easier it is to go from $1M to $0 than from $0 to $1M.<p>The biggest advice I have for you is: if you're interested in seeing financial returns on your time/work, don't work for a startup, ever :-)
Depends on risk tolerance. In general, the less risk tolerance, the longer it will take.<p>The most surefire way is to work at a FAANG for ~10 years and keep your expenses under control or work your way up to an executive/partner position in a medium-sized business, but that's clearly not super fast.<p>The fastest way is the roulette wheel mentioned in another comment or the lottery, but that is realistically almost never going to pan out.<p>Entrepreneurship is IMO a good middle ground between the two paths.
Old wise man once told not the fastest, but the most successful way -
"If you want to make good money, focus on creating value and money will take care of itself"<p>Create value.