Welcome to another weekly edition of Cyberbits—a weekly curated newsletter of fascinating finds on the internet, from random Reddit threads to weird webpages.

This Edition

On TikTok, the 9-5 is dead and entrepreneurship is for everyone. High school students can make $100K from their bedrooms and anyone can earn six figures from their phone while sitting on the beach sipping Mai Tais.

On GetRichQuickTok, across hashtags like #entrepreneur, #business, #wholesale, #passiveincome, #sidehustle, and #makemoneyonline, there’s an endless stream of TikTok creators sharing the secrets to building wealth. Kind of.

For Members

A paid subscription to this newsletter gets you access to interviews like the one above, as well the entire Every bundle of newsletters and podcasts, including Glassy, Means of Creation, The Long Conversation, Talk Therapy, Napkin Math, and many more!

You’ll also get access to our Discord community—this week, Rachel Jepsen, Editor extraordinaire, led a work session she kicked off with a ten-minute writing prompt. We also chatted about Los Angeles’s blossoming tech scene and the power of having the space to work on a project of your own.

Subscribe to Cybernaut

The Secrets of GetRichQuickTok

If you’re looking for the best way to waste your life, enrich someone else before yourself, and only make money while you’re awake, then stay in your day job. But, if a better life beckons, you might have seen it on GetRichQuickTok. Someone else has already done the hard work paving a path to wealth, and they’re benevolent enough to share it with you.

The spoils of their wealth are often on full-display: creators show off vacation destinations, multiple multi-million dollar properties, snapshots of luxury cars, videos of their descent down the steps of a private jet, and screen-grabs of their bank accounts with six-or-seven-figure balances. It’s the lifestyle of those who have made the jump to being The Boss. And you can make it too, if you stop listening to the naysayers.

Assuaging viewers with aesthetics and imagery of the 1%, GetRichQuickTok is a FOMO aggregator—it’s hard not to be curious about the seemingly regular people who are earning $20K a month, retired at 30, or have transformed their financial situation inside of a calendar year. These creators insist that their ten-second videos can substitute for a college degree; you don’t need four years, you need four steps. And so begins the infinite scroll.

Almightychaz, 19, shares his own success story in a TikTok with 1.5M likes—fired from his low-paying job at a chain restaurant, purchasing and flipping property yielding an 85K+ profit, and willing and eager to show you the ropes.

But real estate isn’t his only hustle, he also resells cars and shares the steps on how this gig can help you afford your dream lifestyle—without college or a 9-5, only “research”:

Buy a beat up car
Fix all the problems 👨🏽‍🔧
Find a cash buyer & sell for more profit 💰
Redo this process doubling your profit every time 💸

In a TikTok with over 2.6M likes, through captions and videos, am4nn shows snippets of his journey from saving money from his job at Pizza Hut and starting an eCommerce business to quitting his job and finding financial freedom.

Much of the entrepreneurship side of TikTok is imagery without an action plan: more inspiration than education. Am4nn’s channel contains scattered hints to his success, with quick clips on everything from how to “make money from your bedroom” or “how to end 2021 with 100K in your bank account”—both of which feature the following advice:

Grab Your Computer
Open A Shopify Store
Find A Product on AliExpress
Add It To Your Shopify Store
Make Videos on TikTok, Pinterest, FB Groups
Repeat And Take Profits 🙌🏾

Tat Londono, a popular real estate coach, asks watchers on TikTok if they want to be millionaires and lends her $0.02 on the subject.

She shares her own step-by-step advice, ranging from living with your parents to eating at home:

Avoid moving out for as long as possible
Avoid eating at restaurants and ordering food!
Stop buying overpriced clothes & products
Start educating yourself
Open an investment account
With the money you have saved buy a revenue property
Buy more properties

None of this is new. Almost all the creators on GetRichQuickTok recycle the same old wealth-building “secrets” that have been around for years: affiliate marketing, drop shipping, real estate, reselling, Amazon FBA, and a range of activities that feel adjacent to or indistinguishable from multi-level marketing schemes.

But on TikTok, recycled wealth advice is packaged to fit the platform’s quick bite format—advice on finding money and success is condensed into simple steps across a few seconds that frequently feels shallow or downright silly. More often than not, advice is set to rap lyrics that similarly describe the descent from squalor to six-figures (“...came from the bottom, down below, ‘member them cold nights, I was sleepin' on the floor.”)

Whether creators who promote these wealth steps are legitimately following their own advice and living the life of their dreams is hard to discern—it’s easy enough to borrow cash from the bank to flaunt on camera, rent a luxury vehicle for videos, or Airbnb a mansion for a day shoot. Many creators have been accused of exactly these maneuvers in the past.

And just like success hustlers have always done, those who preach the value of multiple streams of income are usually counting the money they receive shilling wealth secrets from their audience as one of theirs. If videos like “how I drive my cars for free” or “how to become a millionaire...with just a high school diploma” pique your interest, you can buy Londono’s ebook for $19 or book a 30-minute coaching session for $197 to learn “how to become a passionate Millionaire.” The link in am4nn’s bio is to a Discord group that’s $9.95 per month, where subscribers can find mentorship on wealth building and connect with “six-figure earners.”

On TikTok, comments are part of the content, and underneath these wealth videos, users aren’t afraid to question the veracity of the advice provided, mock the suggestions as unrealistic or nonsensical, or plainly call bullshit:

“Wait if you were broke how did you get 60K to buy the house”
“‘Everyone said I would fail’ why do people always lie about that? Like, literally nobody said that.”
“All that to sell a dropshipping course 😭😭”
“✍️buy✍️4✍️houses✍️”
“where does the money come from tho 😂😂”

This feedback does little to dissuade creators from making the same videos over and over again, slightly iterating on captions and music, but keeping the message the same: wealth can be yours in these simple steps with a little motivation and the right mindset. The steps to success do not include listening to the haters who point out that much of GetRichQuickTok’s entrepreneurship advice is a hustle of its own.