I'd say it's something that has to grow exponentially for a very long time.<p>That rules something like finance out, which compounds very poorly, and hasn't produced trillionaires despite being around for centuries.<p>I'd bet on education. Colleges and universities can be worth billions each. While the billion dollar ones are pretty good, the sub billion ones aren't and are getting competed with by several month courses.<p>It seems something mostly neglected. Universities hire the smartest people, but teaching still uses the same old lecturing technique for decades, despite all this interactive technology. We've learned a lot about psychology and productivity. We have tried improving education technology, but it seems to just be a side gimmick. This can also be combined with upcoming new tech like AI to work better.<p>It seems like something that compounds very well. If you can hack your brain to have, say, 90% comprehension, and comprehend harder things, you can also discover better education techniques and train others.<p>Energy would be second. Oil has already produced trillionaire families, but it's too big to concentrate on one person.<p>I'd imagine Bill Gates's shiny new nuclear plants could push him into trillionaire territory. Combined with the new electrical vehicle trend, people could be migrating from oil to electricity.
Honestly, probably something finance/investing-related. It's one of the only industries where profits can be pretty much completely divorced from the value actually created for customers, so there's basically unlimited upside. Everything else ends up somewhat limited by GDPs, population, or anti-trust regulations.<p>If someone figured out a way to accurately predict market trends in a positive-ROI scenario, they could become a trillionaire without ever having to do all the pesky parts of actually creating a sustainable business.
Artificial General Intelligence is creating the first group of multi-trillionaires<p>Elon Musk & Andrej Karpathy <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBklltKXtDE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBklltKXtDE</a><p>Elon Musk & Max Hodak
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wqb7P3u5ujw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wqb7P3u5ujw</a><p>Larry Page & Sergey brin<p>Bill Gates
<a href="https://youtu.be/s7O3oCWZgjE?t=225" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/s7O3oCWZgjE?t=225</a><p>Mark Zuckerberg & Abhinav Gupta
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-swj_rj3luE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-swj_rj3luE</a>
<a href="https://research.fb.com/publications/canonical-surface-mapping-via-geometric-cycle-consistency/" rel="nofollow">https://research.fb.com/publications/canonical-surface-mappi...</a><p>Jason Kelly
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaVsc65iu6E" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaVsc65iu6E</a><p>John & Patrick Collison
<a href="https://youtu.be/_4t12rS6_jo?t=700" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/_4t12rS6_jo?t=700</a>
------------------------
To make a trillion<p>- sell ~33,333,333 cars at $30,000
- sell ~2,000,000,000 devices at $500
- sell ~10,000,000 virtual developers at $100,000 / year
An industry involved in space will produce the first trillionaire. Simply because the money needed is so high that the return on investment will have to be just as high.
Jeff Bezos was right around the corner in 2017 per this article: <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/27/richest-man-alive-jeff-bezos-could-become-the-first-trillionaire.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/27/richest-man-alive-jeff-bezos...</a>