Alex TopDev | $400K Top 1% Upwork freelancer
4.2K posts

Alex TopDev | $400K Top 1% Upwork freelancer
@topdevfreelance
Freelance millionaire • Freelancing since 2021 Top Rated Plus @Upwork • Software architect Freelance tips, personal finance, AI

What are the underrated ways to make money that a lot of people are not aware of?


Back in Warsaw since a few days and the VIBES SUPERIORITY to Zurich is obvious. Warsaw is COOL. Vibrant, young, creative, growing, chill, (relatively) affordable. Zurich is OLD. Nerdy, boring, corporate, stiff, extremely expensive, stressed out, somewhat stagnant. — I’m happy to have set up my business in Switzerland and to have a foot there in these volatile times. But I’m not sure that long term I see myself as someone living somewhere because of “taxes and stability”. Obviously there’s more to life than that.


i have no desire to be rich so i can buy a rolex or a lamborghini. i want to be rich so i can control my time and go to the gym at 3pm on a monday. sit at a cafe and relax for an hour on a rainy afternoon. so i can cook meals at home with fresh ingredients. spend on my family and friends without worrying about a budget. that's my idea of a rich life, not the fake consumerist idea shoved down my throat.







So I bought over $1M in Google today Kinda crazy but also not so crazy I've been the biggest Google hater for years, it was completely mismanaged, destroyed by politics and lack of any leadership, fumbled inventing Transformers etc. Then Sergey returned and suddenly Google is dominating not just in the AI benchmarks and leaderboards but in real usage AI benchmarks can and are easily rigged But me running an AI startup and always wanting to use the best models makes me conclude something basic now: it's really just Google and Elon Musk and the Chinese in the end who will probably win The models I use are all by either Google, xAI, or the Chinese (ByteDance, Kling, Minimax) As you know Google now has its own chips (TPUs), Google has the biggest data set in video (YouTube), images (Google images) and generally the web (for LLMs), still the one of the biggest general user bases (Google Search etc), and they finally have a real engineer being the de facto CEO now (Sergey Brin) Elon Musk with xAI you can't bet against cause he simply has the sheer willpower to get things done The Chinese are similar, sheer willpower and they don't sleep and they really want to win, and companies like ByteDance (TikTok) have massive data sets in video too of course In my opinion everyone is still staring too much at LLMs, I've always been more interested in image models, video models and now the nascent 3d and world models, that's where it's going and where we'll be able to prompt entire worlds or apps or whatever, it's hard to imagine WHAT exactly With my app Photo AI I try be a little part of that journey there of course Now I can't invest in xAI, I'm a bit invested in the Chinese via the ICHN ETF, but of course Google anyone can invest in and so I think I should I've reduced my Nvidia investments already months ago, as it was inevitable there'd be real competitors to their chips at some point, with Google's TPUs there are now I'm not an expert, and you should mostly just buy ETFs, and you shouldn't listen to me and this is not financial advice





This is Sergey Brin's yacht He got so bored of sitting on this $450M yacht that he had to get out and go create things again The only true long-term satisfaction for man is to create, either things, or babies



One of the main things I learnt from the fall of the Spanish and Portuguese empires is that they both never re-invested their wealth They instead built gold plated palaces (see the one in Mafra full of Brazilian gold) and other types opulence And they thought the colonies would remain forever so they were fully dependent on the wealth from there (sugar, gold, silver, coffee) But once they became independent, they lost a large share of their GDP overnight, Portugal lost about 80% of their income after Brazil went independent in 1822! If they would instead have re-invested the wealth, they could have developed industry and new businesses but they became resource dependent instead One interesting thing about the relatively young states of UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia is that they do exactly that. UAE and Qatar heavily invest their oil money to become destinations to live and Saudi Arabia is one of the top investors in tech startups worldwide On a personal level I also learnt from this to do the same, don't waste the money you made on assets that don't return (like cars, boats, general opulence) Instead try to re-invest most of it so you get income from new sources so that if the income sources that made you the wealth (for me my startups) eventually dry up (almost guaranteed in business, see the business or "product life cycle") you have already switched to the new industry I personally do that through ETFs, stocks, real estate and a little bit of startup investing So yes don't be like the Spanish or Portuguese empire 👌



