Forbes abounding list is Slim pickings Richard Adams Comment is free

Top of the Forbes abounding list: North American billionaire Carlos Slim Helú. Photograph: Jason DeCrow/AP

There"s a stage in the joke How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in that dual workers are opposed for promotion. When their physical education instructor tells them he will endowment the graduation on the basement of merit, one of the workers – who is the arch executive"s nephew – complains: "That"s not fair!"

Similarly, seeking at the ultimate Forbes list of the world"s billionaires, it"s usually not satisfactory that abounding lists should be cramped to usually those with the majority assets. What about the rest of us?

Looking at this supposed "list" of billionaires, there"s a crafty thesis in that all of them crop up to be really abounding indeed. But what else sets them apart? And how did they get to be so rich? More importantly, how can the non-billionaires between us get a little of that action?

1. Invent something

Inventing things seems to be an assist to appropriation shedloads of cash. Hence, Bill Gates, who invented the computer with Al Gore and Alan Turing, is second on the list. Also, Warren Buffett, who invented the smorgasboard character of dining, is series three.

Then down at series eleven is Ingvar Kamprad, who invented flat-pack furniture, a elementary thought of offered sawdust-planks encased in cardboard. Just buy sufficient of those "packs" and smoke-stack them on a building and you have a bench. Put a mattress on tip and voila: a dining table. Kamprad"s might was to sell these planks with pointless assortments of screws and brackets, along with keys belonging to a man declared Alan and "instructions" – or to have use of the Swedish term, "Rappakalja Ikea dumheter" – that show a man smiling with a screwdriver and afterwards a line sketch of the accomplished product but any inserted steps. He gave them outlandish names such as SKRÄP and GOJA ... and the rest is history. Also, glorious meatballs.

2. Come from a abounding family

Coming from a abounding family appears to be a utilitarian support to apropos abounding yourself. Extraordinary. Maybe all that income rubs off on you? Yes, zero helps similar to being means to say: "Hey mom, pop, can I steal the car? And $500m?"

That doesn"t meant that a little of the abounding family groups on the abounding list didn"t begin from common beginnings. Look at the list"s entries for billionaires 12, 15, sixteen and 18: the Walton family. Many readers will stop how the Waltons struggled during the Depression and the saw-mill commercial operation that Paw and Grandpaw worked so tough on to have ends meet. Well, the family incited that being TV show in to mega-bucks interjection to first a sequence of cut-price mega-stores well well known as Wal-Mart. (One question: because doesn"t John-Boy crop up on the list? He regularly seemed similar to the crafty one.)

3. Be American

There"s been a little regard between American bloggers that the US has lost the No 1 billionaire spot, right away that Carlos Slim, the bona fide Mexican businessman, is tip of the Forbes list for 2010. Many of them censure Barack Obama"s revolutionary system of administration of crippling open healthcare for this. And yet, being American still seems to be a big assistance nonetheless, formed on the actuality that Americans have up the singular largest billionaire nationality: 400 of the rounded off 900 billionaires in the universe (measured in US dollars, naturally). Also, Carlos Slim, being from Mexico, is North American (true fact) and that"s most the same as the US, and any way President Clinton sealed that tip covenant well well known as Nafta that joined the US, Canada and Mexico in to one country. USA, still series one!

So here"s the recipe for billionaire success: get innate in to a abounding family, invent something and sell it to Americans. Win.