Everybody wants to get rich. Almost nobody wants to wait.
That tension drives a lot of money decisions, from chasing meme stocks to buying a course that promises six figures by summer. The fast lane is crowded, loud and full of people who swear they found the shortcut.
Read more: Warren Buffett explained how he’d turn $10,000 into $30 billion if he were starting over
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once asked the world’s most famous investor why so few people take the slow road instead. The answer could fit on a sticky note.
“I once asked Warren Buffett, why don’t more people copy your investment strategy?” Bezos said on stage at the America Business Forum in Miami in 2025. “It’s not that difficult to understand in principle. And he said, ‘Oh, Jeff, that’s easy. My approach is a get-rich-slowly scheme.'”
“And people don’t like those,” he continued. “But there’s a lot of truth in that for everything, which is if you can think in terms of seven years instead of three years, and you can defer gratification and think long term, that will give you a head start against all of your competitors because most people can’t do that.”
Patience costs nothing. Most people still won’t spend it.
Buffett never hid the playbook
Berkshire Hathaway chairman emeritus Warren Buffett, who handed the CEO job to Greg Abel at the end of 2025, built his legend on a strategy that sounds almost boring. Buy great businesses at fair prices. Hold them. Let compounding do the heavy lifting.
“Our favorite holding period is forever,” Buffett wrote in his 1988 letter to shareholders.
Buffett is 96, and much of his fortune piled up in his later decades. The early years of compounding look sleepy. The later ones are where the money shows up.
Bezos ran Amazon the same way
Bezos didn’t just admire the approach. He built a company around it.
His first letter to Amazon shareholders in 1997 carried the heading “It’s All About the Long Term.” Amazon spent years plowing cash into warehouses, technology and new businesses while critics wondered if it would ever make money. The company didn’t post its first full-year profit until 2003.
That’s the seven-year thinking Bezos described in Miami, while most competitors played a three-year game.
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Musk bet everything on the long shot
Tesla CEO Elon Musk took a louder route to the same place. Musk made about $180 million when eBay bought PayPal in 2002, and instead of retiring, he poured nearly all of it into SpaceX, Tesla and SolarCity.
By 2008, SpaceX had three failed rocket launches behind it and Tesla was scrambling to make payroll.
“I gave Tesla last of my remaining cash from PayPal. Didn’t even own a house or anything sellable,” Musk wrote on Twitter, now X, in 2021.
It worked, but it wasn’t quick. Tesla didn’t turn a full-year profit until 2020, 17 years after its founding. Even the boldest builder in business needed a long runway.
O’Neal got in on the ground floor
Then there’s the path that doesn’t require launching rockets. Basketball Hall of Famer Shaquille O’Neal backs businesses early and lets them grow.
O’Neal invested in Google before it went public and later bought into Ring, the video doorbell startup that left “Shark Tank” without a deal. Amazon bought Ring in 2018 for a reported $1 billion. He also owned as many as 155 Five Guys locations before selling them.
O’Neal has said he borrowed a rule from Bezos, looking for businesses that will change people’s lives. He didn’t need to run those companies. He needed to spot them early and stay put.
Patience doesn’t trend
Nobody brags at a barbecue about an index fund they’ve held for 20 years. Fast money just makes better stories.
But Buffett’s strategy was never a secret, and Bezos nailed why so few people copy it. Rockets, doorbells or dividend stocks, the edge keeps going to whoever can wait the longest.