00-Gen Z’s Richest Generation Gives Advice to 20-Year-Olds: If I Were Malaysian or Taiwanese, This Is How I Would Make Money

A 20-year-old young person: Don’t first chase a respectable career narrative—first chase your first cross-border cash flow, your first replicable operating model, and the options that can free you from being trapped in a single local market.

Recently, a netizen systematically distilled and organized more than 500 answers from Zhihu account “00后富一代” by author Vida, trying to reconstruct her set of money-making methodology tailored for the AI era. Among them, a hypothetical response titled “If I were 20 years old now” has sparked intense discussion online, especially the strategy suggestions aimed at young people in Malaysia and Taiwan, which have been viewed as a highly controversial but reality-oriented blueprint for getting rich.

Vida believes that if you’re a 20-year-old young person in Malaysia or Taiwan, you can provide digital services to high-censorship countries (such as China, Iran, and Russia), including VPN or adult content distribution, and while outputting freedom, you can also monetize it.

Advice from 00后富一代 Vida for 20-year-olds

Based on the organized content, Vida summarizes the opportunity core of the AI era into three major directions, and emphasizes that “information advantage + execution ability” is still the key variable.

First is arbitrage in the market for AI tools and APIs. Vida points out that if she went back to being 20, she would prioritize entering the “AI intermediary services.” She would integrate the major model APIs (such as OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) and conduct secondhand sales. She believes many overseas companies have API usage demand of several thousand dollars per month, but differ in price sensitivity and the level of information they have—this gives middlemen an opportunity to create alternatives that are “cheaper but still usable” through bulk purchasing or technical integration.

The key isn’t the technical barrier—it’s market positioning: not service-minded developers who calculate every detail, but corporate customers who are willing to pay for efficiency.

If I were Taiwanese or Malaysian, I would monetize while exporting freedom

The second direction is even more controversial. Vida believes that if you’re in a relatively open region like Malaysia or Taiwan, with language and cultural advantages, Chinese people may have the opportunity to provide digital services to high-censorship countries (such as China, Iran, and Russia), including VPN tools or adult content distribution. She packages this kind of model as “exporting freedom while monetizing,” and emphasizes the regulatory arbitrage space created by geographic location. However, such a strategy also involves legal and ethical risks, and under different jurisdictions it may face a high degree of uncertainty.

The third is industrialized content and cross-market repackaging. Vida proposes a “fully automated content generation system”: first use AI to rewrite and remake popular novels or short dramas, then use video generation tools to produce short videos in different styles, and finally place ads for monetization across major platforms.

She especially emphasizes a time-machine strategy: take content that has already been proven successful in the Chinese market, translate it into versions for Europe and the US, India, or Spanish-speaking markets, and then distribute it a second time on platforms like TikTok and YouTube. The essence of this model is to shift content creation from “original competition” to “distribution and localization competition.”

Don’t chase a respectable career path first—earn your first bucket of cash first

If you look back at the three pieces of advice Vida gives 20-year-olds using the thinking framework she was distilled from, the focus isn’t on the AI intermediary stations, ladders, and adult content—or on the three tracks of AI bulk content themselves—but on the same money-making logic they share behind them.

Low asset, low cost, and rapid trial and error

First, these directions are all businesses with light assets, low costs, trial-and-error, and the ability to set up quickly. This matches what she said: for 20-year-olds, what’s most valuable isn’t stability, but the right to fail and the number of times you can try. What young people should do isn’t to bind themselves to a high-barrier system with long return cycles, but to enter models that can quickly validate the market, quickly adjust, and quickly scale up.

Don’t compete inwardly—go for arbitrage

Second, fundamentally, all three don’t make money by working hard or relying on professional authority. They make money by exploiting information gaps, language gaps, regulatory gaps, cultural gaps, and mismatches between supply and demand—that is, by taking advantage of price differences across markets and regions, rather than staying in the most inwardly competitive local market and fighting everyone head-on.

Chase your first cross-border cash flow

Third, what Vida truly values is “replicability” and “globalized distribution”: whether it’s repackaging AI supply and selling it to overseas companies, exporting suppressed demand to high-censorship regions, or moving a content template proven in one market into another language market—the core is the same: first find a structure that has already been proven effective, then use automation, packaging, and channels to scale it, instead of betting on originality from scratch.

In other words, Vida is telling 20-year-olds: don’t first pursue a respectable career narrative—first pursue your first cross-border cash flow, your first replicable operating model, and the options that can free you from being constrained to a single local market.

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