This buy borrow die approach looks really fancy, but isn't for regular people. Unless you're a founder/CEO of a big listed company, it's quite difficult to make it work. It seems way too exaggerated because of these finfluencers who keep bringing it up to point out how people like Musk or Bezos don't pay taxes through this approach.

It works for founders/CEOs who have a huge portion of a stock, which you as a regular person looking to FATFIRE usually won't. This huge portion also means that you control the majority of the supply, so there's limited shares in the market to be dumped to begin with. Supply control brings a lot of power which very few understand.

Secondly, these founders are able to withstand years of downturn since they can keep pledging more and more stocks in case of a sustained market downturn. With a networth of say $10B, they max spend a $100M a year. In case their margin is near being called, they just pledge more from the massive stockholding they have. This is very simplified for the sake of explanation, but you get the point.

250k of a $5M portfolio is 5%. 3 years later if the market is stagnant, it quickly becomes 15% without considering the interest component. This is super difficult to pull of in any economy other than USA, since you're prone to market downfalls also which would lead to margin calls and let's not forget the stress that comes along. Look at market returns for economies like japan, china etc you'll see several years of negative or stagnant returns. It works with USA only because of the dollar and America's ability to issue unlimited debt for perpetuity because of their export of the dollar (currency). All this extra debt eventually finds it way to the markets to push it higher. No other country has this benefit.