How to become a billionaire in 2026:
- take a decent open weight model (kimi, deepseek, w.e u want)
- choose your benchmark-du-jour (don't do Arena WebDev, that already got used)
- get a few maxed-out codex and claude plans
- use the plans to RL the open model to fucking death against the benchmark you chose
- name it Model Z (ruin Tesla's nomenclature plans) and publish your results
- watch grifters on X go wild
- watch all-in podcast spend a month proclaiming frontier labs dead and bashing on anthropic (none of them has alloc)
- you have a 2 week window to close a round here you have to be quick
- take whatever terms so long as they land u above $1B valuation (not net worth yet)
- proclaim yourself the first solo unicorn, when people mention Pete Stein say it was worth $0 since he got paid in OpenAI equity and you are the death of frontier labs
- put up an api endpoint that just returns "500: model above capacity" errors (buys you 2-3 weeks)
- meanwhile pay chinese bot farms to push videos about how "model Z one-shotted this video game"
- slowly start to drip feed some usage to people by proxying to Fable 5 API (Ant won't care so long as you help get their rev back up right now)
- make sure the requests you let succeed are all IPs near VC offices in SF
- you've been getting emails/calls from every fund this whole time and ignoring. But now it's finally time to pull the big maneuver.
- Say some vague shit online like "we've found a breakthrough in foundations of modern AI and are ready to start scaling"
- Announce a deal with Nvidia and Amazon. Nvidia invest $10B in you, you pay Amazon $10B in cloud, they pay you back for Model Z, and you use the $10B to buy Nvidia chips. Do this as many times as you can before regulators start asking what chips are.
- With the topline, the strategic partnerships, the promising future go raise at a 30B valuation and take 990M out in secondaries. (don't do the 1B it'll bring too much attention)
- Quit your job for "health reasons" and go join OA or Ant to coast til they IPO. (this is where you get the remaining 10M)