Donald Trump. Bill Marriott. William Hilton. They're all billionaires. Not millionaires with an "m." Billionaires with an "I can buy whatever I want because price tags no longer have any meaning." And they didn't come into this wealth by being movie stars or rock legends. They earned their wealth as hotel moguls. That's right, they invested their money into an industry that nearly everyone uses at some point, and struck gold.

 

Start with a pool, though. All the billionaires have pools in their hotels. (Source)

Now, becoming a billionaire hotel mogul doesn't happen overnight, of course. There's no guarantee you'll ever get to the "hitting it big" stage—you may never even make it to the "chain" part of being a hotel chain owner. We're not trying to be downers here, but the fact of the matter is there are many different ways to begin a career as a hotel chain owner, but no exact formula for becoming one of the few billionaires of the world.

The exact salary figure for a hotel chain owner is hard to come by, but it's somewhere between $40,000 and $60,000 (source). No, we're not joking; the average franchise owner, the ones who aren't Messrs. Marriott, Hilton, and Trump, make about as much as a college professor. The above-average ones can see profits in the millions, as the aforementioned guys have proved (source). 

If you haven't clicked out of this page in disgust by now, then let's talk turkey. The main thing standing between you and your billionaire hotel owning dreams, is...cash. Each one of those hotels in your signature chain will require a lot of money to get off the ground.

 

I...totally don't vant to suck your bank account dry. (Source)

Wait, what? You need to have a bunch of money before you can start building your hotel chain fortune? Unfortunately, yes. You're going to need investors. And because people with lots of money don't generally hand it out without good reason, those investors will probably want some assurances that you'll be able to pay them back. 

That means two things: first, you need to have some financial assets of your own to stake your claim in the business; second, you need to prove to them you have the ability to build, furnish, staff, and maintain a hotel.

If you do manage to get your hotel chain backed by investors, you're going to be looking at non-stop, round-the-clock work. From getting it built to finding people to work in it, all the responsibility will fall on your shoulders. And to add some pressure to an already tense situation, the investors will be breathing down your neck constantly.

Then, once you spend all your time and pour all your money into that first hotel, you'll start raking in the millions, right? Wrong. Once the first hotel is done, you won't be out of the woods. If you do manage to get the first hotel up and running, and if it's successful enough to allow you to pay back your investors, keep your building ship-shape, pay your staff a decent wage, and keep a little bit for yourself, you can get cracking on the "chain" part of being a hotel chain owner.

In other words, you get to do it all over again. It'll be a little easier to get investors' money in your pocket if you've proved that you can create a successful joint, but make no mistake: the investment process will never be a picnic. Unless your idea of a picnic is sitting in your office and stressing out about money, in which case...what kind of picnics did you go to as a kid?

If, on the slight off chance your franchise is wildly successful and you become a household name, you'll probably be able to hire somebody to stress about money while you kick back and enjoy being a mogul. Nobody will say that you didn't earn your place at the top. Well, some people probably will. But you won't be able to hear them from atop the mountain of which you are king. Happy endings sure are great.

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