How to Get Richer Than Elon Musk in Thirty Minutes

Here is a plan that needs no talent, no network and no product. It needs $1,000, a blackjack table and a free half hour, and at the end of it you are richer than Elon Musk. There is no trick in it. Every number below can be checked, and the arithmetic is the kind you can do on a napkin.

Sit down, put the $1,000 in the betting circle and play one hand. If you win, you have $2,000. Do not pick anything up. Leave all of it where it is and play the next hand. Gamblers call this letting it ride, and it has one lovely property: every win doubles the stack. $4,000. $8,000. $16,000. After ten wins you have about a million. After twenty, about a billion. After thirty you have $1,073,741,824,000.

That is $1.07 trillion. Forbes puts Elon Musk at about a trillion dollars. The figure moves every day, so check it before you leave the house; on the day this was written it was $1.027 trillion. Thirty wins clears it with about $47 billion to spare, which is enough to tip the dealer.

Thirty minutes is not a figure of speech. Some hands end in a tie, a push, where nobody wins and the bet simply stays, so thirty wins take about 33 hands. A dealer gets through about 209 hands an hour with one player at the table and about 52 with a full table of seven. That is ten minutes alone, or 38 at a crowded table. Half an hour, give or take the crowd.

One simplification, stated up front. A natural blackjack pays 3 to 2, and good players sometimes double their bet or split a pair. This plan ignores all of that and treats every win as even money. You could not double anyway: doubling means putting a second stake next to the first, and all of your money is already on the table.

The best bet in the building

Blackjack is the right game for this, because played properly the house barely has an edge. Under liberal Las Vegas Strip rules (six decks, the dealer stands on soft 17, doubling after a split is allowed, late surrender) and perfect basic strategy, you win 42.43% of hands, push 8.48% and lose 49.09%. The house edge comes out at 0.28%. On every $100 you bet, the casino expects to keep 28 cents.

Look closer and something is off. You lose more hands than you win, by almost seven points, yet the money edge is a quarter of a percent. The extras close the gap: the 3 to 2 natural, the profitable doubles. But the streak does not care about money. It counts wins and losses, and in the count the house is further ahead. Leave the pushes out, since they change nothing, and a decided hand is won 46.4% of the time.

Against a coin, that is 46.4 against 50. Sitting at the table you could not tell the difference in an evening. The gap is too small to feel, which is exactly why it is worth looking at.

What thirty in a row costs

The plan needs thirty decided hands in a row to go your way. The chance of that is 0.464 multiplied by itself thirty times, which comes to about 1 in 10.4 billion.

A fair coin would do it 1 in 1.07 billion times. So the few points between 46.4 and 50, which you cannot feel on any single hand, make the streak about ten times harder over thirty. Compounding is usually sold as the thing that works for you. It has no opinion about whose side it is on.

A gap you cannot feel on one hand becomes a factor of ten over thirty. Compounding does not care who it works for.

For scale, take the lottery, the usual shorthand for hopeless. The EuroMillions jackpot is 1 in 139,838,160. The streak is about 74 times less likely than the jackpot. In fairness to the plan, the jackpot does not make you richer than Elon Musk.

Not impossible, though

Here is where the honest answer gets awkward. One in 10.4 billion is small, but it is not zero, and there are about 8.2 billion people on Earth. Suppose every one of them takes $1,000 to a table and runs the plan once.

The expected number of new trillionaires is 0.79. The chance that at least one person makes it all the way is about 55%, a little better than a coin flip. Run by all of humanity, the plan more likely than not produces a winner.

Everybody else loses their $1,000. Together that is about $8.2 trillion, roughly eight Elon Musks, poured onto the felt to produce one.

Now think about what you would hear afterwards. Not from the 8.2 billion, who have nothing to report and go home. From the one. The survivor writes a book about the system. It has a chapter on discipline, one on nerve, and one on the moment at hand nineteen when everybody at the table told him to stop. Every word of it is true, and none of it made any difference. Eight billion people followed the same system with the same discipline. They are not on the podcast.

The plan works for exactly one kind of person: the one whose advice you will end up hearing.

This is survivorship bias with the volume turned all the way up. The Genius Trap is the same filter running over careers instead of hands, and the winner’s story is evidence that many people tried, not that the method works. In The Cemetery you can watch luck crown a handful out of a thousand and then hand them the microphone.

The wall comes first

All of this assumes the casino lets you play. It does not. Every table has a maximum bet, and the maximum is the casino’s real answer to this plan. Major Strip casinos usually have some tables with a $10,000 maximum. In 2007 Caesars Palace raised its blackjack limit to $50,000 a hand and advertised it as the highest posted limit in town.

Walk the stack up against that. $1,000, $2,000, $4,000, $8,000, $16,000, $32,000. Six wins and you hold $64,000, and the table takes $50,000. At the seventh bet the plan is over, not because you lost, but because you are no longer allowed to bet everything.

Kerry Packer, the Australian media owner, negotiated private terms with the MGM Grand in 1995 to bet $250,000 a hand. Give yourself his deal and you buy exactly two more wins. Eight wins put $256,000 in front of you, and the ninth bet is over the limit again. Twenty-two doublings short.

You could spread the $64,000 over two tables. Then two hands have to win for the stack to double, and the chance of each doubling falls from about 46% to about 21%. Splitting the bet squares the odds against you, which is the wrong direction for a plan that already needed a miracle.

Getting to the wall is rare as it is. Six decided wins in a row at 46.4% happen about once in a hundred tries. So the limit does not stop the one-in-ten-billion streak. It stops the one player in a hundred who has started to believe in it.

Wikipedia, of all places, has the reason in a sentence: maximum table limits prevent the casino from taking too much of a gamble. The house has the edge but cannot control variance, and one lucky player betting big could wipe out a month. The casino is the one player in the building that has done this arithmetic, and it declines to let it ride.

The other way to double

There is a second famous doubling system, and it runs in reverse. The martingale doubles the bet after every loss, so that the first win recovers everything and adds one unit. It wins small amounts often and loses everything rarely. The rare loss is a bad run long enough to push the next bet past the table maximum, at which point the system can no longer double. Letting it ride and the martingale hit the same wall from opposite sides: one in the rare good streak, the other in the rare bad one.

What to take from a get-rich plan

None of this says never sit down at a blackjack table. It says what the plan really is: a lottery ticket with worse odds and a ceiling bolted on. Four habits come out of it, and they work on any get-rich plan, not only this one.

Where this is wrong

The payouts are simplified. Real blackjack pays 3 to 2 on a natural, so a natural would multiply the stack by two and a half instead of two, and the trillion would arrive a little sooner. It would not change the chance of any single hand going your way, and that chance is what the streak is made of.

The rules are the friendly ones. The probabilities assume a six-deck game with liberal rules and a player who never deviates from basic strategy. A worse table or a tired player loses more often, and every lost point gets raised to the thirtieth power.

Hands are treated as independent. In a real shoe the cards already dealt nudge the next hand, which is what card counting lives on. The streak arithmetic ignores that. It is close enough for a number with ten digits.

Musk is a moving target. The comparison holds on the day this was written, by about $47 billion. His number moves daily, and on a good day for him you need thirty-one wins.

Eight billion people cannot all get to a casino. The survivorship figure is a picture of scale. It shows that one in ten billion acquires a face once enough people try, and that the face will be the one you see.

Thirty doublings take you past the richest man alive. Six take you to the edge of the table. The casino read the arithmetic first. Watch a stake compound in both directions in The Average Is a Liar, and see a crowd of identical bets from the side of the one who won in The Cemetery.