Dylan Taylor, founder of space-tech company Voyager Technologies, became a millionaire at 27 — five years before Warren Buffett reached the same milestone, according to Fortune. Fortune reviewed a summary of his financial records, which verifies his billionaire status.
Taylor's advice to Gen Z workers is blunt: stop negotiating for a bigger salary and start negotiating for equity instead.
"I think it's very difficult to make a lot of money working for somebody," Taylor told Fortune. "There's two different ways to make money: income and equity. Whether you're an employee or a founder, I think you should push for more equity and less income. That's really what compounds over time."
Taylor says he followed his own advice early in his career, choosing equity over a higher base salary in the deals he negotiated. He built his fortune running public companies in electronics, finance and banking, while also investing in real estate and firms including Robinhood, Relativity Space and Calm. His wealth ultimately crossed the billion-dollar threshold on the strength of those investments and Voyager's IPO.
According to Taylor, even a worker just a few years into their career can make the ask. "If someone came to you and said, 'I actually want to make less money, but I want more of the value we create together' — I think most bosses, assuming they're not totally insecure and see this person as a threat, would welcome that," he said. Managers who lack authority to approve equity, he added, will often "run it up to the next level," because "with equity, you only really pay on success."
He acknowledged the strategy has limits. "If you're working for an industrial valve company in Newcastle, I'm not sure you'd be able to do that. But if it's a tech company, they're issuing options — so there's no reason why you can't ask the question."
Taylor also recommends a barbell investing approach: 70% of savings in the FTSE 100 and 30% in Bitcoin, a split he calls counterintuitive but effective.
He's not alone in the equity-over-income pitch. Martin Mignot, the first investor in Deliveroo and now a partner at Index Ventures, became a millionaire before turning 30 by betting early on Revolut, Trainline and Personio. "It's about owning equity, that is the key," Mignot told Fortune, adding that joining a company like Revolut, Robinhood or Figma early — even as employee 100 or 200 — can build serious wealth. Ramit Sethi, the New York Times best-selling author, offers a lower-risk variant for workers without stock options: automate contributions into a low-cost index fund and leave it alone.
The common thread across all three is ownership, not a paycheck, as the engine of wealth. That is a market lesson, not a government one. No subsidy, tax credit or redistribution scheme built Taylor's fortune — a willingness to bet on equity, and companies free enough to issue it, did. For a generation raised on talk of guaranteed incomes and wealth taxes, the advice from three self-made millionaires points the other way: capital rewards ownership, and the surest path to it runs through free enterprise, not a bigger line on a pay stub.
