Robert Kiyosaki

Robert Kiyosaki was born on April 8, 1947, in Hilo, Hawaii, into a Japanese American family. His father, Ralph H. Kiyosaki, held a Ph.D. in Education, but the family was far from rich.⁠[1][2][2][2]

By his account, at the age of 9 he met the father of his best friend Mike, who became the “Rich Dad” of his book: a successful entrepreneur and investor who taught the two boys financial ideas while playing the board game Monopoly with them; his own father was the book’s “Poor Dad.” The two fathers held sharply contrasting views on money and on whether to be an employee or an entrepreneur and investor, and he spent years reflecting on and testing their views. Critics have pointed out that no one has ever been able to prove that the book’s “Rich Dad” actually existed.⁠[2][2][3][2][3]

Kiyosaki attended the United States Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, New York, graduating in 1969 with a Bachelor of Science degree and a commission as a second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps. By his own account, after graduating he turned down a well-paying job with an oil company and chose to join the Marine Corps, where he trained as a helicopter pilot and was deployed to the Vietnam War.⁠[1][2][2]

In 1973, Kiyosaki’s military service ended. He worked in sales for the Xerox Corporation during the day, eventually becoming, by his own account, the company’s top salesperson in Hawaii, while taking MBA courses at night; after six months, he concluded that entering the MBA program had been a mistake and dropped out, reasoning that the instructors were not business owners and lacked real-world experience.⁠[2][2][2][2]

After leaving Xerox, he and his brother founded the company Rippers, which brought out the nylon and Velcro “surfer” wallet. The product was an instant success, but the business was not, and he went through financial difficulties that almost forced him into bankruptcy.⁠[2][2][2][2]

By Kiyosaki’s account, in the early 1980s he met and studied with the futurist, inventor, and architect R. Buckminster Fuller. Shortly after Fuller’s death in July 1983, he read Fuller’s final book, Grunch of Giants, whose ideas he has repeatedly discussed in many of his own books.⁠[2][2][2]

In 1993, Kiyosaki published If You Want to Be Rich & Happy under the name Robert T. Kiyosaki, identified as a co-founder of the Excellerated Learning Institute.⁠[1][1]

In 1994, Robert and Kim Kiyosaki were earning more than $10,000 a month in passive income, enough to cover their monthly expenses of $3,000; in their words, they were now “out of the Rat Race.” The two later released CASHFLOW, a board game that teaches investing; to promote the game, which was difficult to market, Kiyosaki began drafting a brochure that eventually became Rich Dad Poor Dad.⁠[4][4][4][4][4]

After several publishers rejected Rich Dad Poor Dad, the Kiyosakis self-published it in April 1997, with the accountant Sharon Lechter as co-author. The book recounts his upbringing and the sharply contrasting financial philosophies of his two “fathers,” explains the importance of assets, liabilities, and passive income, and advocates financial education as a path to wealth.⁠[4][3][2][2][2]

Sales of the book kept climbing, landing it on bestseller lists across the United States, and from 2000 to 2008 it spent years on the New York Times bestseller list; after the Kiyosakis appeared on Oprah, the book and the company gained international fame, and the book was later reprinted by a mainstream publisher. His financial advice has also been criticized by financial journalists and personal finance professionals as unreliable; for example, the book advocates buying property with as little money down as possible, and in another book he suggested that it was easy to short stocks in a margin account with no money on deposit.⁠[4][3][4][3][3][3][3]

After the book’s success, Kiyosaki co-founded The Rich Dad Company with Kim Kiyosaki; its offerings expanded from books, games, and seminars to coaching programs, digital courses, live and livestream events, and newsletters. He also hosts the Rich Dad Radio Show podcast.⁠[2][2][2]

Beginning in 2001, Kiyosaki was a featured speaker at Learning Annex expositions. On September 7, 2005, Learning Annex and Rich Dad signed a nonbinding memorandum of understanding to cooperate on free seminars and follow-up paid courses; on September 15, Lechter, then a member of Rich Global’s management team, sent an email authorizing Learning Annex to hold free Rich Dad seminars in the United States and Canada. On February 2, 2006, Rich Global ended the relationship through an email from Lechter, and on July 18 of that year it signed formal agreements with Whitney Education Group instead. From 2007 to 2010, this free seminar business brought in $437.8 million in cash sales, of which Rich Global received nearly $45 million in royalties.⁠[5][5][5][5][5][5][5][5]

Lechter left the company in 2007 and sued the Kiyosakis, alleging that they had enriched themselves, diverted assets, and wasted money in a business she claimed to have helped build from scratch, and claiming that she had often rewritten large sections of the books they co-authored. In September 2008, the suit, which had been set for trial at the end of December that year, ended in a settlement: Lechter received an undisclosed sum and sold her interest in the Rich Dad Co. to Kiyosaki. She ultimately received $10 million in the dispute.⁠[6][6][6][6][7]

Learning Annex sued Rich Global and other companies in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (case No. 09 Civ. 4432). On July 13, 2011, a jury awarded $14,688,194 against Rich Global and Cash Flow Technologies on the quantum meruit claim; on September 13 of that year, the court entered judgment for a total of $20,620,614.71 including 9% prejudgment interest, and the unjust enrichment claim was dismissed.⁠[8][8][8][8][8][8]

On January 11, 2012, Judge Shira A. Scheindlin granted Rich Global a new trial on damages; on April 30, the jury in the new trial awarded $15,863,696. On July 13, the court denied Rich Global’s motion for judgment as a matter of law or another new trial; on July 17, the court entered judgment in favor of Learning Annex in the amount of $23,687,957.21. Rich Global appealed, and Learning Annex cross-appealed.⁠[5][5][5][9][9]

On August 20, 2012, Rich Global LLC, whose business address was in Scottsdale, Arizona, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Wyoming, staying the New York litigation. The Kiyosakis were the sole members of Rich Dad (Rich Dad Operating Company), which in turn was the sole member of Rich Global; in its filing, Rich Global listed $1,783,358.12 owed to it by the Kiyosakis on notes. The district court had earlier required Rich Global to post a bond equal to ten percent of the judgment in order to appeal; Rich Global did not post it and instead filed for bankruptcy.⁠[10][10][9][9][9][9][9]

In October 2012, Mike Sullivan, CEO of Rich Dad Co., said the judgment would not be paid out of the Kiyosakis’ personal assets, that the company that had dealt with Learning Annex had not been in business for a number of years, and called the amount of the judgment “outlandish.” At a meeting convened by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2012, a Rich Global representative denied that the company had transferred assets or rights to royalties before filing for bankruptcy. In October 2012, Kiyosaki wrote about the dispute in a blog, saying that being rich makes one a target for lawsuits and advising people who own assets to consider the protection offered by a corporation.⁠[11][11][11][11][7][7][7]

The bankruptcy trustee reached a settlement with Learning Annex: it resolved the two sides’ appeal and cross-appeal in New York, with Learning Annex paying $100,000 to the bankruptcy estate and being allowed a general unsecured claim of $23,690,000.41. Rich Dad, the Kiyosakis, and Rich Global objected, and Rich Dad offered to indemnify the trustee and the estate so that the trustee could pursue the appeal. On July 16, 2013, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Wyoming overruled the objections and approved the settlement in an opinion, finding that it did not fall below the lowest point in the range of reasonableness; the court noted that the Kiyosakis were not creditors but parties who owed the estate on a promissory note.⁠[9][9][9][9][9][9][9][9]

In August 2014, Rich Global’s bankruptcy trustee, the Wyoming lawyer Tracy Zubrod, sued Kiyosaki and several of his companies in litigation that proceeded under seal, seeking among other things a “turnover of property” and “recovery of money” from Kiyosaki and his companies; the complaint and other documents were not made public. In February 2016, Learning Annex asked the Wyoming bankruptcy court to unseal the case; Learning Annex accused Kiyosaki of moving “tens of millions of dollars plus other lucrative assets” among his companies to avoid paying royalties. Lawyers for Kiyosaki’s companies had earlier said in the litigation that they were concerned Learning Annex would use the sealed information to attack the companies in the press.⁠[7][7][7][7][3][7][7]

On November 9, 2025, Kiyosaki posted on X “CRASH COMING,” saying he was buying, not selling. He said his $27,000 target price for gold came from his friend Jim Rickards, and that he owned two gold mines and had begun buying gold in 1971, the year Nixon took the U.S. dollar off gold. In the post, he listed his 2026 price targets: $27,000 for gold, $250,000 for Bitcoin, $100 for silver, and $60 for Ethereum; the Ethereum target, far below the price at the time, prompted speculation that he may have meant $6,000 or $60,000.⁠[12][12][12][13][13][13]

In January 2026, Kiyosaki published a question-and-answer post on X, asking himself whether he cared when the price of gold, silver, or Bitcoin went up or down and answering “No,” because the U.S. national debt keeps rising and the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar keeps falling.⁠[14][14][14][14]

On June 20, 2026, Kiyosaki published a question-and-answer post on X that began by noting that gold and silver prices were falling and asked, “Am I buying or selling?” He answered that one of his mistakes had been letting price determine when to buy or sell, and that he had learned to look at the context the asset is in. In the post, he said he watches whether political and financial leaders are solving or worsening problems in the U.S. and global economy, and that he believed current global leaders were incompetent; he said he was monitoring the technical charts for gold, silver, Bitcoin, and Ethereum and would buy when the downtrend reversed, and that the gold and silver charts showed prices were poised for a massive rise.⁠[15][15][15][15][16][16][16][17]

On October 3, 2026, Kiyosaki published a post on X titled “WHY I AM A PREPPER,” recounting that during a talk he described himself as a “prepper,” and when an audience member asked whether that was pessimistic and whether positive thinking was healthier, he asked in return whether the person had insurance on their car.⁠[18][18][18][18]

The core of Kiyosaki’s investment philosophy is the distinction between assets and liabilities, and he advocates acquiring income-generating assets such as real estate and businesses; he has invested in real estate himself for decades and has also commented on precious metals, entrepreneurship, and cryptocurrencies, with an approach that goes beyond traditional savings and employer-provided 401(k) retirement plans or pensions. As of October 2026, he had written 32 books, including two co-written with Donald Trump, both before Trump was elected President of the United States.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2]

The Rich Dad Company: Official website: https://richdad.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2]

X: Public account: https://x.com/theRealKiyosaki (opens in a new window)⁠[19]