There’s a special breed of asshole on Instagram who wants you to know that you’re poor because you haven’t discovered the secret to making $30,000 a month from your laptop.
You know the guy.
He’s 24. He’s wearing sunglasses indoors. He’s leaning against a rented Lamborghini in Miami, and he’s about to tell you that working a regular job is for losers.
“Bro, I was literally broke two years ago.”
Of course you were, Tyler. You were 22.
But luckily, after years of grinding, hustling, and apparently discovering a revolutionary business strategy that nobody at Harvard Business School has ever considered, Tyler is now financially free. And because he’s such a generous human being, he’s willing to share his secrets with you.
For $997.
Limited spots available, naturally.
Because nothing says financial independence like desperately needing strangers to buy your PDF.
The entire business model is beautiful in its stupidity. Some guy tells you he knows how to get rich. You pay him to learn how. The secret turns out to be telling other people you know how to get rich and charging them to learn how.
Congratulations. You’ve just bought a $997 lesson in how to become the guy who scammed you.
And God forbid you ask what the actual business is.
“Dropshipping.”
“Affiliate marketing.”
“High-ticket closing.”
“AI automation agency.”
These phrases are thrown around with the confidence of a surgeon explaining a heart transplant, except somehow nobody can explain what the hell they actually do all day.
They’ve all got the same origin story, too.
“I was tired of the 9-to-5 grind.”
Buddy, your LinkedIn says you worked at T-Mobile for four months.
You didn’t escape the rat race. You quit before your dental insurance kicked in.
And the lifestyle content is even better.
Every video involves a luxury car, a rooftop infinity pool, a first-class airplane seat, or a suspiciously empty mansion with furniture that looks like it came with the Airbnb.
Then comes the motivational wisdom.
“Money is just a mindset.”
“Poor people trade time for money.”
“Your network is your net worth.”
Holy shit. Somebody get Warren Buffett on the phone. We’ve cracked capitalism.
They’ll tell you that wealthy people don’t work for money, that passive income is the key to freedom, and that the only thing standing between you and a seven-figure bank account is your limiting beliefs.
Not your income. Not the cost of living. Not the fact that most businesses fail. Not competition, luck, timing, or the inconvenient reality that money generally comes from providing something other people are willing to pay for.
Nope.
Your problem is that you don’t wake up at 4:30 a.m. and take cold showers.
And here’s my favorite part: these guys always talk about how they want to “help people.”
Really?
You’ve discovered a nearly effortless system for generating $50,000 a month, and your first instinct is to stop doing it so you can spend six hours a day making Instagram Reels convincing other people to do it?
Imagine finding a machine that prints hundred-dollar bills and deciding the best use of your time is selling instructions on how to build one.
Maybe the machine doesn’t work quite as well as advertised.
Now, to be fair, there are legitimate courses out there. People genuinely make money teaching valuable skills. Learning from someone with real experience can be worth every penny.
But a legitimate teacher usually tells you what you’re going to learn.
These clowns sell the outcome without explaining the process.
It’s never “Learn how to build and operate a profitable e-commerce business, including the parts where you lose money and want to throw your computer through a window.”
It’s “MAKE $10K A MONTH WITH THIS ONE SIMPLE SYSTEM.”
And if you fail?
Well, that’s your fault, too.
You didn’t want it badly enough. You didn’t trust the process. You had a scarcity mindset. You weren’t willing to invest in yourself.
Funny how the system is guaranteed to work right up until it doesn’t, at which point the customer becomes the problem.
The truly depressing thing is that these people understand their audience perfectly.
They’re not selling courses.
They’re selling an escape hatch.
They’re selling hope to the guy who’s exhausted from working 50 hours a week, to the woman who’s barely covering rent, to the 19-year-old who thinks everyone on Instagram is making millions except him.
They’re selling the fantasy that there’s a hidden shortcut around all the boring, difficult, uncertain parts of making a living.
And the internet makes that fantasy incredibly easy to package.
Rent a Lamborghini for an afternoon. Film yourself walking through a luxury hotel lobby. Put “7-FIGURE ENTREPRENEUR” in your bio. Post a screenshot of a Stripe dashboard without mentioning refunds, expenses, or whether any of the money is actually yours.
Boom. You’re a business guru.
Twenty years ago, these people would have been selling miracle weight-loss pills on late-night television.
Now they have ring lights and podcasts.
Same bullshit. Better production quality.
And look, if someone genuinely has a way to make good money online, more power to them. The internet has created real opportunities that didn’t exist a generation ago.
But real businesses involve customers, expenses, competition, mistakes, and a tremendous amount of boring work that doesn’t look particularly sexy on Instagram.
Nobody wants to make a Reel about spending eight hours fixing a broken checkout page.
They want to tell you that you’re one mindset shift away from a Porsche.
So the next time some shirtless 23-year-old standing in front of a Lamborghini tells you he’s going to teach you how to escape the matrix, ask him one simple question:
If your system makes you so much money, why do you need mine?
And if his answer involves booking a free discovery call, you have your answer.
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