In This Article:
Kevin O'Leary says the simplest path to millionaire status starts with one habit: siphon "15% of your income ... and invest it in the index of the S&P 500."
What Happened: The Shark Tank investor hit X with the prescription this week, insisting savers don't need to pick winners — or even "understand what a stock is" — to build real wealth.
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He doubled down on the math: "If you're taking that 15% every two weeks/month on an average salary, you'll end up a millionaire when you're 65 plus. ... So it's about learning how to not buy sh*t you don't need and investing that money instead." O'Leary framed the strategy as anti-debt armor, arguing index funds beat the temptation of ill-timed trades.
Long-term data backs him up. The S&P 500 has delivered more than a 10% annualized return since 1957, smoothing out crashes and recessions along the way, according to Investopedia research.
Personal-finance evangelist Dave Ramsey echoes the formula, urging followers to "invest 15% of your income in tax-advantaged retirement accounts." Vanguard founder Jack Bogle spent decades preaching the same low-cost gospel, while Warren Buffett told his own heirs to park 90% of their inheritance in a cheap S&P tracker.
That said, skeptics are abound. Personal-finance guru Robert Kiyosaki, earlier this week, dismissed index funds and ETFs as mere "paper assets," urging investors to flee to hard assets like gold, silver and Bitcoin instead. According to a MarketWatch article, hedge-fund titan Bill Ackman likewise warned in his 2016 Pershing Square letter that massive inflows are inflating benchmark constituents and creating an "index-fund bubble." David Einhorn, on the other hand, says the dominance of passive strategies has "fundamentally broken" market structure by siphoning capital from active managers and concentrating power in a few megacap stocks.