How To Become A Trillionaire (and Lose 20 Lbs)

Twelve is a very mystical number. There are twelve planets in our galaxy, if you count Earth four times, five if you don t consider Pluto to be a planet. There were twelve people (aside from Jesus) at the last supper. And there are twelve letters in the name Barry Manilow. So it s no surprise that when Alcoholics Anonymous was trying to come up with a catchy way to get people to stop drinking that they came up with a twelve step program. My 12 step program is better than AAs in that they only promise you sobriety. With ours you ll make tons of money, and you don t even have to be sober. Heck, you don t even have to follow all twelve steps; you should be fine if you follow just one. And if that weren t already enough, if you buy now, I ll throw in an extra step. But please, pay careful attention or you might just only become a billionaire.


Step 1: Make People s Lives Easier


This morning, I woke up and immediately went to the bathroom. But only fifteen years ago, I would have been forced to go outside to an outhouse. Indoor plumbing has certainly made your life and mine a lot easier and made one or two inventors quite wealthy. And yet, I still have to get out of bed to go to the bathroom; there are still no toilet beds. Invent a toilet bed, matching sheets and toilet paper, and you re on your way to trillionairehood.

How can you make your life or the life of others easier? I still have to put sugar, then milk into my coffee every morning. And that s not all. Then, I have to stir. Why hasn t anyone yet invented sugar milk? Or better yet, why hasn t anyone invented a sugar milk spoon that would melt in my coffee as I twirl it around? I would no longer have to spend countless seconds looking for my milk and my sugar. I m exhausted before I take my first sip. How about a sugar-milk-coffee spoon that would just melt in your mouth. Note to self, call Starbucks and see if they re interesting in going in fifty-fifty on this project with me.

Step 2: Make the Universe a Better Place

Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, more commonly known on the street as Mother Teresa, cared for refugees, the blind, disabled, aged, alcoholics, the poor and homeless, and even those that overused the expression, as a matter of fact . But she never really did much for the rich, except perhaps make them feel guilty. So she died pretty poor. On the other hand, Sir Walter Reeses boldly took two great tastes (chocolate and peanut butter) and put them into one candy bar: Reese s Peanut Butter Cups.

Mother Teresa is up to become a saint, but Walter got knighted just like Sir Paul McCartney and Sir Elton John. Sirdom is a lot more financially rewarding than sainthood. I digress.

How can you make the universe a better place, particularly for the rich? Many people focus on what the poor don t have; but what about what the rich don t have? Do they not matter? In Greenwich, Connecticut you can call your next door neighbor s mother a pedantic endomorph, but will gang violence ensue as a result? Probably not. So some brilliant entrepreneur invented Playstation 3 which brings all the fun of livin in da hood to your own home movie theater. And thanks to ingenuous businessmen like Sean P. Diddy Combs, bad boys throughout Connecticut can listen to hip hop music, dress like gangsta bitches, and play with their X-boxes. Isn t the world a great place?

Fear not, there s still room for improvement. The rich still get herniated discs, indigestion, and have to spend time on the weekends with their whiny kids. Has anyone come up with a golf bag that is easier to carry from your garage to your car and can play with your kids while your sipping a martini? Maybe one that can get out of your trunk and into your garage with a simple verbal command. Go out and make the world a better place. For the rich.

Step 3: Solve Problems That Don t Really Exist

There are two types of problems: those that exist and those that don t exist. Solving actual problems (or the ones that actually exist) is difficult, time consuming, depressing, and never financially rewarding. Focus on problems that don t exist. Some people have a difficult time telling the two apart. So let me help.

The North Koreans have nuclear weapons but don t have any food. So they tend to wake up cranky. It s just a matter of time before they sell a nuclear bomb to a group of terrorists that own an all you can eat buffet. This is a real problem. The fact that we are all going to die, probably as the winner of the next season of American Idol is just about to be announced is not only depressing, but who the hell knows how to solve this problem. Not me.

The Canadians do not have nuclear weapons. But they come into our country, dress like us, eat like us, and take our most coveted jobs. People bitch and whine about the Mexicans. But Alex Trebek, who has 100% full control of what you see on Jeopardy, the categories chosen for both Jeopardy and Double Jeopardy, is not Mexican; he s Canadian. The late Peter Jennings who used to always tilt world news to a Canadian perspective would dip his Doritos in maple syrup, not guacamole. Will & Grace. Grace- Jewish and originally from New York. But Will- Canadian. Not right.

But there s a solution. Why doesn t someone come up with a line of T- shirts that say, I m not Canadian! Of course, you would have to show your birth certificate in order to get one of the T-shirts. They d come in all different colors. There are about six billion people floating around that are NOT Canadian. So the market is pretty big.

So how can you come up with some problems that don t really exist? If the truth be known, as it seldom should, my ability to solve problems that don t exist is just a natural talent that I was born with, along with my ability to worry about ailments that I don t yet have. This is not something I learned. So how the hell can I explain to you how to come up with your own non-existent problems? Shit, this is a real problem!

Step 4: It s Necessary You Just Don t Realize It Yet!

Do you remember back in the 90s when NBC used to call their Thursday night line-up, Must see TV. ? A couple of years before Friends was going off the air, I wrote to the president of NBC and told him to change it to Please watch TV. We re not promising anything, we re asking you a favor. Didn t listen to me, and they lost trillions of dollars in advertising. Although not everyone can come up with solutions to problems that don t really exist, we all should be able to determine when something is necessary even when we don t realize it yet. The key to this is to not live your life in the present. Live in the future. Perhaps this is also the way to solve problems that don t really exist.

My daughters are all under five. But I often worry what if they marry men that I don t like? Everyone has children so as to have someone to complain to when you get old. How come you never come visit me or how come you only come to visit me once a day or how come nobody has massaged my feet today? But what if your future son-in-laws don t know how to massage feet? I ve written up a contract that all my daughters have signed that gives me veto power. I d be happy to send you a copy to have your kids sign. Just send me a check for $586 and a self addressed stamped envelope. Don t live for the day, live for tomorrow. Everyone is so focused on what baby boomers are going to want when they are retired and no longer working. But what are they going to want when they are dead and no longer period? Am I the only one who has come up with the idea of psychedelic tombstones or being able to be cremated at your death and to be recycled into an incense candle?

Step 5: Defending the Homeland

Who was the greatest businessman of the 20th century? That s right, you guessed it, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR coined the very clever phrase, There is nothing to fear but fear itself. Fear sells. Depressions, communist invasions, Nazi s taking over Europe. He made people so worried that they didn t know what to buy first. Sadly, communism is dead, and the Nazis have been relegated to just running our public schools. But there are lots of other things to be afraid of.

You re 85 years old and afraid that you will not be able to perform with your 22 year old girlfriend? Fortunately, there s now Viagra that assures an erect penis. But what happens if your 110 year old mother suddenly rings the bell and wants you and your 22 year old girlfriend to take her food shopping? Can t shop with an erection! Someone needs to come up with an Unviagra.

Afraid that global warming will ruin your daughter s bat mitzvah? Start selling global warming insurance. But be careful, fears are very trendy and easily fall out of favor. Although after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing everyone was afraid of our home grown terrorists, they quickly fell out of favor for the foreign ones who often have names we can not pronounce, making them automatically more scary.

Step 6: Help the Rich

My partner Michel regularly goes on business trips where he stays in five star hotels. Last week he suggested that I come down for a night or two with our oldest daughter. Since I m too cheap to ever spend my own money on a luxury hotel, I thought it would be nice and cost nothing to show my four year how the rich live. We took a taxi from the train station to the hotel where we were greeted by a hotel employee who opened the taxi door for us. Since I was not going to be paying for the hotel, I thought what the hell, and gave him a 25 tip. Then there was another employee who opened the hotel door for us. Another quarter. A maid came to our room to offer to shine my sneakers. As soon as she left, someone else was there offering a big chocolate chip cookie to my daughter. Within the first fifteen minutes of being at the hotel, my free night at the hotel had already cost me $5. I didn t care that it was only 3 in the afternoon, I told my daughter to get in her pajamas, we were going to sleep for the night while I still had some cash left in my wallet.

It s costs a lot of money to be rich. So while the poor don t really need all that much money, the rich do. So any way you can help them, I believe that you shall be rewarded. When you are a trillionaire, remember those billionaires who are less fortunate than you are and try to help. There are lots of young, rich people out there that don t really need your love but could really use some of your money.

Step 7: Take Advantage of the Needy

The advantage of helping the rich is that you can charge huge mark-ups like 19,000%. But it is difficult to find people who can afford to spend $38,000 for something that costs you $2 to produce. You can t charge the needy as much, but look around you, there are so many of them. They re everywhere. For example, the other day I stopped by my parents house while they had some friends over. As I arrived they were talking about Barry Manilow, how gorgeous he is, and how at sixty-three years old, he still sings like a twenty year old. O.K., they were delusional, but they were not hurting anybody. And then for some unknown reason, they started talking about hip hop, 25 cents, Dr. Drech, Iced Coffee, and Tupac Schomberg. They were like deer caught in the glare of some car s headlights. Someone was going to get him. I left before anyone got hurt. But on my way home I thought about how wonderful (and profitable) it would be to create a book on Explaining Hip Hop to Jewish Senior Citizens. You could then follow up with a book on Explaining Square Dancing to Jewish Senior Citizens or Explaining Hard Liquor to Jewish Senior Citizens.

Step 8: Your Health

Whenever I give out advice to people, I like to preface it with the fact that although I am not an official psychologist , I did take a course in psychology in high school, and I got an A in the class. Self actualization is a key term and concept that is studied by us psychologists. Since you probably did not take high school psychology, I ll try to keep this simple. Self actualization is the full realization of one s potential. So, if you are fat, ugly, and stupid, self actualization basically means that you accept yourself for who you are and will work very hard to reach your very limited self potential. Fortunately, most people are totally unaware of self actualization, and few strive to become it. This is good as there is no money to be made in a self actualized crowd. Letting people believe that they can be smarter, better looking with little to no effort, now that s where the money is. Your nose is too big; your penis is too small. But here s a pill that you can take that will change all that. And although none of this really works, isn t it wonderful that you are helping people to reach their better potential.

Step 9: For the Kids

My partner Michel is French, and it s so difficult to buy anything for him. He s so fussy. If I buy him a sweater, he wants it be in his size, not mine. If I buy him music, he wants it to be music he likes. But he likes opera. My kids, like all kids, love everything. You can take two sticks and put it in a box, and as long as you tell kids that they are magical sticks, they will love them. Hey, that s not a bad idea for a business! So while I would suggest shying away from selling anything to the French, kids are a great market. Forgot to make dinner? Put out a bag of Doritos. Kids will eat it. The French won t. And although most people hate spending money on their French, they love spending money on their kids.

Step 10: Stop the Madness!

From Baghdad to Brussels there are millions of people dying every day in religious strife and none of my tupperware tops go with the containers. It s crazy! But I am forced to buy a wide range of shapes and sizes as I never know what leftovers I ll have. The world we live in is insane, and there s lots of money to be made as a result. How can you stop all this madness? There s really nothing to do about all the people dying in religious strife, but I think we can improve tupperware. Could it be made of a more malleable plastic? Should Tupperware come in neon colors?

Step 11: Learning

I ve always had a hunger to learn. When I was eight, I memorized the names of all one hundred and seventy exits of the New Jersey Garden State Parkway. And it payed off well. About a month after learning this I was down in Florida visiting my grandmother when two of her friends (a husband and wife) were arguing whether the entrance for the New Jersey Turnpike is Exit 129 or 139 off of the Garden State Parkway. The husband was right (129), and paid me a dollar for my knowledge. I later found out that the wife would have paid me five to have lied. But it didn t matter. I realized that my knowledge could be profitable and quickly became a consultant to anyone needing to know anything about the right exit to get off on The Parkway. At the same time that I was learning all the exits on The Parkway, my sister memorized the exits of the Turnpike. But there were only sixteen of them, and she was never really able to capitalize on her knowledge. So make sure to learn something valuable. If you go to a coctail party, someone may ask you who was the 8th president of the United States (Martin Van Buren), but nobody ever asks who the 8th vice president of the United States, who by the way was also Martin Van Buren. I kid you not. There are no exits on the Garden State Parkway that make any reference to Martin Van Buren. I kid you not.

Step 12: Entertaining the Masses


According to Forbes, Jessica Simpson made more than 14 million dollars in 2005. That figure could have been double or even three times that amount if she actually had any talent. Tom Cruise made $67 million in the same year. His twin brother Rush Limbaugh made $30 million. If Tom Cruise can maintain his star status for the next one hundred years, he will have made over 6.7 billion dollars. It s not a trillion, but if he invests in the right infomericials, he can get pretty close. Entertain the masses, and don t worry if you have any talent. It s not stopping anyone else.

By: Murray Trillionaire

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Dr. Murray Trillionaire (www.murraytrillionaire.com) is the author of the book How To Become A Trillionaire (and lose 20 lbs). He is a self taught man with a PhD in Yiddish Country Music from Brigham Young University and a post doctoral degree in the History of 14th Century New Jersey from the University of Atlantic City. While getting his joint degrees he discovered the secret formulas for amassing large sums of money in under a month while losing weight.