Deconstructing the System That Runs the World

My biggest, baddest and best article yet on using business as an engine to build wealth.

My first gig on Wall Street, fresh-faced and armed with a financial modeling spreadsheet that could choke a supercomputer, was an education. Not in the way the university brochures promised, but in the brutal reality of incentives. I saw managing directors pull down seven-figure bonuses, numbers that seemed galactic to me at the time.

But then I saw the partners.

The guys who owned the firm. Their wealth wasn't an annual event; it was a constant, humming, compounding machine. The MD’s bonus was a rounding error on the partner’s K-1 tax form.

That’s when the first crack appeared in my worldview. I was playing the game, but they owned the casino. I was focused on the income statement; they were focused on the balance sheet. I was being paid for my time. They were building a system that paid them to exist.

I co-founded a hedge fund after that, chasing alpha, trying to outsmart the market. We did well. We moved value around, slicing off our two-and-twenty. But the feeling lingered. We were still just a clever cog in a larger machine. The real value, the creation, was happening elsewhere. It was happening in tech, where people weren’t just trading existing assets, they were forging entirely new ones from little more than code and imagination. The dropping cost of intelligence and the exponential rise of technology made it obvious: finance was the past, tech was the future.

So I jumped.

I dove headfirst into machine learning, into the architecture of systems, into the elegant logic of building engines that create value — I write about technology of tomorrow exclusively here:

My obsession shifted from financial models to ML models, from market arbitrage to process automation. I now spend my days building revenue engines—complex systems that integrate strategy, data, and automation to create predictable, scalable growth for companies.

Soon, I bet every investor will be focusing on using technology to add superpowers to their portfolio companies.

And here’s the punchline: The very principles I use today to build powerful revenue engines for tech companies are the exact same principles the truly wealthy have used for generations to build powerful revenue engines for their own lives.

They’ve just given it a different name: business ownership.

Forget the pablum about "following your passion" and "working harder"…

That's the playbook they hand out to the employees to get them to “grind mode” and “rise and grind”.

The real secret of the wealthy isn't a stock tip or an exotic investment. They don’t lean-in with more time or effort. It's a structural advantage. It’s the mastery of a system that rewires the very cash-flow dynamics of life. It’s about building a fortress of assets that makes money, externalizes expenses, gets you paid to live the life you want, and treats the tax code not as a burden, but as a rulebook full of exploitable asymmetries.

They run an unpublished but very lucrative operating system.

Let’s deconstruct the four core modules of this OS.

The Multiplier Effect: Strategic Debt as a Feature, Not a Bug

In the salaried world, debt is a four-letter word.

It’s the credit card you maxed out on vacation, the student loan that follows you like a shadow, the mortgage that feels like a life sentence. It is, almost universally, a tool for consumption, paid for with post-tax dollars. It makes you fragile.

Poor people think of debt as a quick fix, and big problem. Tomorrow’s problem.

In the world of the business owner, debt is something else entirely. It's leverage. It’s a strategic tool for expansion, a powerful multiplier that creates profound asymmetry. When a business owner uses debt, they are not taking on a burden; they are acquiring an advantage.

The mechanics are deceptively simple. A business owner doesn’t go to the bank and take out a personal loan against their salary to start a new venture. That’s amateur hour. Instead, the business borrows. It borrows against its assets—its real estate, its inventory, its accounts receivable. Or it borrows against its future cash flow. The owner’s personal assets are often shielded, walled off from the risk.

The business, a separate legal entity, bears the weight.

This creates a beautiful asymmetry that would make Nassim Taleb smile.

The bank, the lender, has a capped upside. They get their principal back plus a pre-defined interest rate. That’s it. Their potential reward is known and limited. The business owner, however, has a potentially unlimited upside. If the borrowed capital is used to acquire a competitor, launch a new product line, or scale operations, the returns could be 2x, 10x, or 100x the cost of the debt. The owner captures all of this upside, while the lender just gets their fixed coupon.

But it gets better. The interest paid on that business debt is a tax-deductible expense.

Think about that.

The government is effectively subsidizing your use of leverage. Every dollar you pay in interest reduces your taxable income, lowering your tax bill. A salaried employee paying off a credit card pays with after-tax money. The business owner pays with pre-tax money. It’s a different universe of financial efficiency.

Then there’s the silent partner in this whole arrangement: inflation. We’re programmed to see inflation as a thief, eroding our savings. And for the saver, it is. But for the strategic debtor, inflation is a tailwind. You borrow a million dollars today, when a dollar is worth a dollar. You pay it back over ten years with dollars that are progressively worth less and less. You are repaying a hard asset loan with a constantly depreciating currency. The Federal Reserve's mandate to maintain a low but steady rate of inflation becomes a built-in feature of your wealth-building engine.

I once knew a real estate developer who built his entire empire on this principle. He would buy an apartment building with 80% debt from the bank. The rent from the tenants would service the debt and pay the operating costs. The interest was deductible. The building's value appreciated. And inflation eroded the real value of his loan. He was using the bank’s money, the government’s tax code, and the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy as the core components of his personal wealth machine. He wasn't working for his money; he had built a system that did it for him. That's not just finance; that's brilliant system design.

Before you get any ideas about real estate being a “wealth hack”, read this:

There are better wealth generators than real estate, and more efficient wealth batteries, too.

The API for Life: Deducting the Everyday

The concept of a "business expense" is the most misunderstood and underutilized tool by the average person.

For most, it means deducting a portion of their cell phone bill or maybe a sad little home office. For the sophisticated business owner, it’s an art form. It’s the systematic and legal integration of their desired lifestyle into the operational framework of their business.

Think of the business not as a place you go, but as a wrapper around your life’s activities. The key is to establish a clear and defensible business purpose, documented with the meticulousness of a systems engineer. When you do this, the line between a personal expense and a business expense doesn't just blur; it’s strategically repositioned.

Let’s talk specifics. Oh, and grab a coffee. We’ve got a lot to talk about.