A reader sent me a message last week that I've been chewing on. It was one of those questions that sounds like a knockout punch until you realize it's hitting the wrong target.
"James, look at Nvidia. Microchips are famously difficult. Yet thousands of Nvidia employees are millionaires. Probably a hundred thousand people in the global chip industry are worth seven figures. Now look at influencers. Is there any chance the top 100,000 creators are millionaires? No. So it seems like high difficulty actually yields better odds than high density. How do you explain that?"
It's a brilliant question because it uses real data. But it's comparing two completely different animals and calling them both fish.
Employees vs. Empires
The first mistake is comparing an employee ecosystem to a winner-take-all brand economy.
When you look at the influencer economy, you're not looking at an industry of employees. You're looking at an industry of sovereign brands. MrBeast isn't an employee. He's a corporate entity with one employee. In a brand-driven market, there is zero room for 100,000 winners. If I spend an hour watching a top-tier creator, that's an hour I can't spend watching a mediocre one. The market is a replacement model. There is no middle class.
The chip industry is the opposite. It's an infrastructural platform. Nvidia employs tens of thousands of people to build the machine. They're cogs in a wealth-generating engine that distributes equity, bonuses, and stock appreciation to a broad base of contributors. The comparison isn't Nvidia employee vs. influencer. It's platform vs. brand. Two different architectures entirely.
But let's fix the comparison. Let's put the Nvidia employee up against someone actually playing a high-density, low-difficulty game. Let's talk about the scavengers.
What the Nvidia Path Actually Costs
You want to be one of those chip millionaires? Let's rewind to 2014, before the AI boom made Jensen Huang a household name.
You had to be an elite student. Top 0.01% of your high school to get into a top-tier engineering university. Then you maintained a grueling "high-school senior" level of stress for four years to secure a scholarship to an elite US grad school. Then the visa lottery. Then brutal corporate politics. Then a decade of grinding through performance reviews, reorgs, and the constant threat of being optimized out by someone younger.
The path is incredibly obvious. Fully mapped out. There are textbooks, internships, university pipelines, LinkedIn influencers telling you exactly how to walk it.
But obvious means saturated. Everyone knows the rules. Every genius on the planet is competing for that same spot. Being in the top 100,000 engineers globally sounds impressive until you realize the player base is in the hundreds of millions. You're not special; you're just the one who survived the attrition.
High difficulty doesn't mean better odds. It means extreme competition for a fixed number of seats.
The Scavenger's Math
Now let's look at a genuinely high-density, low-difficulty market: market arbitrage scavenging.
In any massive global trading platform processing hundreds of billions daily, humans make pricing errors. Algorithms experience microsecond latencies. This creates tiny, fleeting anomalies—an asset mispriced by a fraction of a cent, a fat-finger trade that hits the wrong button, a liquidity gap that lasts three seconds.
I estimate there are fewer than 80,000 people globally who actively, consistently scavenge for these micro-errors. It's an incredibly niche, obscure ecosystem.
Let's say a mid-sized exchange processes $200 billion a day. The "waste" generated by friction and human error is maybe a few million dollars daily. After the giant institutional quantitative algorithms take their massive bite, there's perhaps $1 million left over in pure, narrow arbitrage errors.
That $1 million is split among a few dozen scavengers on that specific exchange.
Do you need to be the smartest person in the room? Do you need to out-compete a Harvard quant with a supercomputer? No. If an institutional bot wants an error, you let them have it. You wait for the scrap they missed. You pick up a few thousand dollars a day that nobody else bothered to bend down and grab.
You don't fight to the top of the pyramid. You sit at the bottom and collect what falls off.
Why You've Never Heard of This
Why is the Nvidia path famous while the scavenger path is invisible?
Because the economy is designed by the people at the top. The elite need millions of highly educated, hardworking people to build the infrastructure that generates their wealth. They want you to fight for the top of the corporate ladder. That's why they built universities, corporate hierarchies, prestige structures. They're training you to pull their cart.
There are no university courses on how to scavenge market arbitrage. No MBAs. No LinkedIn influencers. Because scavenging doesn't build the empire—it just extracts free capital from it.
I often think about a pond of Koi fish. At the surface, they're fighting violently for a few pellets of premium food. Meanwhile, at the bottom, the scavengers are quietly consuming the organic waste that drifts down, growing fat without ever competing for the spotlight.
Fighting for the premium food is a strategy. Eating the waste is also a strategy.
The elite fight for the food. They want to be the best, the smartest, the most prestigious. But there are so many elites fighting at the top that the scraps falling to the bottom are incredibly rich.
There are perhaps 80,000 scavengers globally, but there is enough waste capital falling through the cracks to feed 800,000. They cannot possibly consume it all.
The Two Bars of Gold
If there are two bars of gold on the ground—one sitting on a velvet pillow guarded by ten heavily armed men, and the other sitting in a pile of mud guarded by no one—which one are you going to take?
The one on the pillow is prestigious. Everyone can see it. Everyone wants it. You'll probably get shot trying to reach it.
The one in the mud is invisible. It's dirty. It doesn't photograph well. But it's just as much gold.
Prestige is an illusion. Capital is just capital. Wash off the mud and put it in the bank.
— James, Mercury Technology Solutions, Tokyo, May 2026
