There are lots of ways to make money in GTA Online. You can rob stores, pull off heists, steal and sell cars, perform dangerous contract jobs, or engage in illegal street racing. But getting to a billion dollars takes more than just small-time jobs. Getting a cool billion takes grit, cajones, and above all, a lot of time on your hands.
Take Reddit user jamcar70. They recently shared their player profile on the GTA Online subreddit and revealed both their bank account balance and their total playtime. There in black and white was the balance of $1,000,341,581, and above it, a total playtime of two years, 34 days, and four hours. That's about 18,350 hours of nothing but GTA Online, and averages out to about six hours of gaming per day since GTA Online’s release back in 2013.
While this might sound like jamcar70 made GTA Online their full-time job, they admit in the comments that it really didn't feel that way. Mostly because many of those hours were spent AFK watching security cameras for his nightclub as it slowly siphoned cash away from NPCs.
"Only active an hour or so a day, remaining time is AFK whilst businesses & safes refilled," wrote jamcar70. "Passive income to $1B. I know, slow-ass way to do it, but it is what it is."
A billion dollars is an accomplishment regardless of how it was done, but what do you say to two billion? Just four months before jamcar70 ticked over a cool billion, another Redditor by the name of ChloeWade revealed their account balance was sitting at $2 billion in cold, hard cash. Unlike jamcar70, who just waited for the economic winds to blow hard enough in his favor to accumulate all that scratch, ChloeWade actually earned their billions through the sweat of hard labor. Or to be more accurate, through grinding heists.
Their first billion came through grinding the Diamond Casino Heists twice a day for a full year. That's the heist where you have your choice between smash and grab, sneaking in and out, or conning your way past guards to either sneak or blast your way out. The potential payout for the Diamond Casino Heist was around $2 million, and ChloeWade did it twice a day for a full year. Their second billion came from the Cayo Perico Heist, which can net you over a million each time you do it. Repeat twice a day for a year and there's another billion or so.
Some might say this is doing things the hard way, and ChloeWade would agree. In the comments, they said they really just "enjoy grinding" and "I think our brains are just wired different to non-grinders. We love seeing the number increase ... GTA is a great game for that."
Doing a heist twice a day isn't too much to ask, and it's certainly easier when these heists have such massive payouts. One of GTA Online's earliest billionaires was The Professional, a YouTuber who plays GTA Online as, well, a professional. Over the course of many months and many videos, The Professional slowly built a bank account balance that was close enough to a billion dollars that he could just sell all his businesses and claim the title of billionaire. At least until 2020’s first update dropped, at which point he had plenty of cash to buy everything that Rockstar provided.
Since that time, there have been many more billionaires added to GTA Online. Rockstar doesn’t keep a list of billionaires, but judging by the game’s total player count, one could imagine it’s at least as many billionaires as exists in the real world. The only difference is you’ve got a much better chance of being a billionaire in GTA Online than in real life.