> if the economy is growing at 2.5%, how do you sustain 15% over 5 years?

US GDP is $31.82 trillion dollars per year. Taking the 2.5% growth rate, that's nearly $800 billion dollars per year in new GDP.

The economy very obviously does not progress as a bunch of soldiers marching in a straight line. Some firms will shrink 100%, some will growth 10,000%. This much is obvious by just looking around. But even if no businesses shrank, no wages were docked, nothing bad happened... even still there would be $800B in more GDP.

So if the economy is growing at $800B per year, it's extremely obvious how a company could even grow from $1M to $1B in revenue per year without doing anything shady... Just capture some of the new economic activity that cropped up this year!

And it's even easier when we're talking about an entrepreneur's net worth. Their net worth is going to be mostly holdings in company stock. The value of company stock is some multiple of the company's theoretical future financial earnings.

So if a company is making $1M revenue today, and growths to $5M revenue by the end of the year (15% MoM growth), at let's say a 30% EBITDA margin, they have made $1.5M EBITDA. And let's say that fast growth is rewarded at an extremely rich 50x EBITDA multiple. That company is now worth $75M. If this founder is lucky and owns 50% of their business, they now are "worth" $37.5M.

If they were only at $1M * .30 * 50 * 0.50 = $7.5M net worth at the beginning of the year, and then were at $37.5M at the end, their net worth increased by 500% in one year! And all they had to do was capture $4M / $8000M = 0.05% of the increase in GDP.

Like, none of this is either shady or complicated.