This influencer thinks you can be a millionaire by walking around 'asking for a dollar'

TikTok isn’t just for sea shanties, cat videos and Matt Hancock. In recent years, influencers have started giving out personal finance advice.

On the surface, teaching young people how to make their money go further seems like a good thing – especially in the middle of a cost of living crisis. But for every Martin Lewis-like financial expert, there are people proposing utterly unhinged plans to get rich quick and going viral for it.

TikTok user Noah Kagan is one of them. The finance influencer regularly brings others from the world of finance onto his show, asking them to pass on their wisdom. His most recent guest did just that, but the answer left some of his audience scratching their heads.

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“Anyone can really become a millionaire,” said the guest. “All you gotta do is get a dollar from a million people out of like 8 billion. If you just walk around every single day asking for a dollar, you can get $1,000,000 pretty easily.”

Whether the guest was saying people should actually go around begging from a million people, or whether he was trying to say you can get to $1m with a cheap but widely sold product is unclear, but he was quickly mocked by people who had watched the video.

“Lmfao this guy is an absolute moron,” one commented on the video.

Another person asked: “So why aren’t all homeless people millionaires if they beg for money all day?”

One commenter did some quick maths to see whether the influencer’s method was viable, and said: “One dollar every five minutes for eight hours a day is actually 17 years.”

Kagan was an early employee at Facebook, but admitted that he got fired from the social media giant when it was in its infancy. In a 2014 ebook, he admitted that he was sacked after leaking information to the media outlet TechCrunch while drunk at Coachella festival.

The influencer wrote that he told TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington about plans to expand Facebook beyond college students to a professional social network for other companies, according to Business Insider. The ebook is no longer available on the internet.

Kagan has nearly 170,000 followers on TikTok, so if you see a sudden influx in people begging for a quid so they can become a millionaire, you’ll know why.

Perhaps the best financial advice for them? Don’t quit the day job.

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