Controversial entrepreneur and investor James Altucher is not your usual self-help writer. Know for his transparency, Altucher has been considered by Forbes as “The Most Interesting Man In The World.”
From starting 20 different businesses to living with just 15 possessions to interviewing guests like Mark Cuban, Tim Ferriss, and Richard Branson, it’s hard not to say the opposite.
He made and lost a lot of money in his life, but as of 2020, James Altucher’s net worth is estimated at $40 million.
Early Life
After graduating from Cornell University and Carnegie Mellon University in Computer Science, Altucher found himself in New York with a lot of ambition and even more people to prove wrong.
That’s when rolled up his sleeves and managed to get hired by HBO working at the IT department, but weirdly enough doing his own program as well called III:am.
After leaving HBO 1998, Altucher started his first business called Reset, which was creating websites for corporations like American Express, the Wu-Tang Clan, and Warner Bros.
He found himself working 80 hours a week, and when he couldn’t stand it anymore, he decided to sell his company. He now had $15 million in the bank, and guess what, he just blew them all in two years.
Altucher shares in this video how he started to gamble, invest in early-stage startups, and just buy expensive things he didn’t need until he found himself with only a few hundred dollars in his bank account.
He went from remarkably wealthy to extremely poor. Grown in a middle-class family, he never asked much to his family before; he even sustained himself through college. Now that he was flat broke, he asked some money to his parents, but they said no. He didn’t return calls to both his mom and dad for months until, unfortunately, his father had a stroke and died quickly afterward.
He started contemplating suicide so that his children could have lived for a while out of his life insurance, but came back to sanity and reinvented himself (the title of one his books) in real James Altucher style.
Career
His friend Jim Cramer, founder of the popular financial news website TheStreet, hired him for writing about stocks.
From 2002–2005, he traded for several hedge funds, and from 2004–2006, he ran a fund of hedge funds.
Right afterward, Altucher, with Cramer of TheStreet, founded StockPickr, a social network for financial investors, which was named one of the 50 Best Websites of 2007 by Time Magazine. (source)
Despite initially labeling Bitcoin as a scam in 2013, he later grasped the value and started selling one of his upcoming books in exchange for the cryptocurrency. He then began trading cryptocurrencies and create a financial newsletter about it. He is known for controversial predictions like “Bitcoin will we worth 1 Million Dollars by 2020” or that “Amazon Is Going to Accept Bitcoin Soon.” Full disclaimer, he is not the only blockchain expert that claimed these predictions.
James Altucher Podcast
James Altucher is the host of an acclaimed podcast called “The James Altucher Show” that had as guests individuals influential individuals such as Mark Cuban, Richard Branson, Ramit Sethi, and Tim Ferriss.
He previously was hosting another podcast later dismissed called “Question of the Day” with the famous author of Freakonomics Stephen Dubner.
James Altucher Books
James writes everything something new, and he has authored about twenty books to date, including several bestsellers such as Choose Yourself, The Power of No, Reinvent Yourself, The Choose Yourself Guide to Wealth, among the others.
James Altucher Choose Yourself
The concept behind the most popular book by James Altucher, Choose Yourself!, is the importance of making decisions for our own. This sounds common sense, but it is not in our century when the concept of starting to work a corporation and remained there for an entire lifetime, allowing the executives to make decisions for ourselves, it’s not any more acceptable.
Our world is moving faster than ever, and taking our life and destiny in our own hands, it’s the most important thing that we can do. Altucher explains to you how he did it and how you can, too, in this book.
James Altucher Wife
James was previously married with Claudia with which he divorced. His second marriage happened with Robyn Samuels in 2019. She was widowed in 2015 and had three kids from that marriage. Robyn is the aunt of Florence Welch, lead singer of Florence and the Machine. James and Robyn have a total of five kids between them, and they happily live in NYC.
Hi, that is not Robyn Altucher in the wedding photo. That’s his ex wife Claudia.
Thank you for letting us now, I have updated the picture. Have a fantastic day!
Thank you Angelo! ?