“There are a lot of different ways to build wealth, but all of them revolve around ownership as opposed to getting salaries.”
Most business owners struggle with how to get rich without getting trapped in a salary. They make it too safe, too incremental, too dependent on monthly pay. They use income as proof of success. They forget that equity, not effort alone, is what scales.
Amjad Masad is the founder and CEO of Replit.
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Amjad Masad was born and raised in Amman, Jordan. A self-taught programmer, he studied electrical engineering at Princess Sumaya University for Technology.
Growing up in a modest family in Amman, Jordan, Masad didn’t have his own computer. He started experimenting with computers around age 6–7. That’s when his father brought home an old IBM PC. The first program that he wrote was to teach his younger brother math.
Reliable access to the internet came through using public internet cafes.
“And then when I was a teenager, I was really obsessed in Counter-Strike. So I would go to these internet and LAN gaming cafes, and I would, like, you know, whatever money, scraps of money I have, I would, like, put it into that and just play. Play a lot of Counter-Strike and strategy games and things like that. I got very good at them to the point that it was like a source of income. I was actually winning tournaments and things like that. So I got into Esports early on. So that’s like another branch of my life.”
He created client server management software for the internet cafes. He did side work in cybersecurity before moving to the US. He worked at Yahoo, Codecademy, and Facebook.
He taught himself programming through trial and error in these cafes. Setting up coding environments each time. Not being able to save work. It was a frustrating process.
But that’s what inspired Replit’s core idea:
A browser-based IDE where anyone can start coding instantly without setup.
The soft, boring angle is that he is a visionary immigrant founder democratizing code.
Doesn’t that sound like every other founder profile?
We want to know how he became a billionaire.
Forbes real-time net worth: Approximately $2 billion.
He joined the billionaire ranks in March 2026.
It was following Replit’s $400 million Series D funding round. Which valued the company at $9 billion (a 3x increase from $3 billion only six months earlier.
“Most people in the world are time rich and sort of money poor… we needed to go up market, go to a place where people actually were time-poor and saving them time is a thing that they would want to pay for.”
Masad’s wealth logic was not “earn more.” It was “own more.” And his business logic was not “serve everyone” It was “serve the people whose time is expensive enough to pay.”
Don’t go after people who will spend time to save money.
He is saying the mass market may love you and still not fund you; the people who buy are the people whose hours are costly.
As for building wealth, you need equity.
“You are not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity, a piece of the business to gain your financial freedom.”
Most business owners struggle with turning labor into wealth. They work for income when they should be working for ownership. Masad’s mindset was “building wealth as opposed to getting a salary.”
Early in his career, Amjad joined a startup. This is what he said to negotiate the job:
“You can just like pay me enough to eat. Just give me as much equity as it can give me.”
That is the opposite of how cautious professionals think. They optimize for cash compensation. He optimized for ownership.
And he did not stop there. Early on, someone offered to acquire Replit for an
“insane amount of money. We were, like, six people at the time and, you know, the numbers that were thrown around is between $500 million to $1 billion. We were six people. And so it would have made me insanely rich, right?”
He decided not to sell to avoid regret. Realizing the full potential of his company was more important than cash.
Instead, he chose concentrated upside over immediate liquidity. Most investors diversify. Not Amjad Masad. He concentrated on the one asset he could control.
He rejected a life-changing exit instead of locking in safety. Investors usually spread risk. He concentrated risk in ownership. That is dangerous. It’s irrational by portfolio theory. But it’s exactly how many extreme founder fortunes are actually made.
Capture equity over wages.
This is the ownership-first approach:
“Your job is to build equity... The best way to build equity is to start a business.”
Stop treating money as something to preserve first and deploy later. Masad’s message is to create ownership early, then let compounding do the heavy lifting.
Create asymmetric upside.
And yes, you can turn that into financial freedom by trading short-term comfort for equity.
I like you,
– Sean Allen Fenn
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