Billionaires: Do they Wake up at 4 AM?

As someone who prefers writing early in the morning, because of my busy schedule, I am now getting up at 4 AM to help me reach my goals. That got me wondering about Billionaires and if they also wake up at this hour. Thus, I’ve made my research and would like to share with you the information I got.

Some but not all billionaires wake up at 4 AM. While there are successful people who wake up at 4 AM like Thomas Edison, not all successful people have this habit. In fact, it is more common to find Billionaires who don’t wake up at 4 AM.

That information got me wondering why this is the case. I mean I instantly noticed that my productivity increased when I started waking up at 4 AM. However, upon deep-diving into the detail, I now start to understand why do most of them don’t wake up at 4 AM. We’ll talk about this in this article. We’ll also talk about the average time billionaires wake up, why you should wake up at 4 AM, and why you shouldn’t.

Do all billionaires wake up at 4 am?

Not all billionaires wake up at 4 am. While waking up at 4 am gives a great boost in productivity, most billionaires don’t wake up at 4 am. As an example, Warren Buffet wakes up at 6:45 AM. However, waking up at 4 am is still a good way to boost productivity.

As I’ve made more research, it became apparent that there are only a few billionaires who wake up at 4 AM. In fact, I am going to share with you the data I’ve found on what time they usually rise later.

I’m going to explain first why this is the case.

Waking up at 4 AM significantly boosted my priority. I mean if I can count, it doubled my productivity because I can work quietly without any distractions.

Waking up at 4 AM is great especially when you are starting a business or building something big for your future.

This leaves us this case on billionaires waking up at 4 am.

There are days when Billionaires also wake up at 4 am. This is especially true when they have big projects to take. But when we are talking about their actual routine, they usually don’t wake up this early.

One of the reasons why billionaires don’t really wake up at 4 am as their routine is because they are already successful and properly delegated their tasks to their employees.

For example, in my case, I wake up at 4 am because I am still building my future. I have no people to hire and to delegate some work because right now, I still can’t do that as my income is not that big.

But billionaires, on the other hand, have successfully built their businesses. They have thousands of employees that work for them. Therefore, the need to wake up at 4 AM every single day is not necessary.

That’s the reason why most only wake up at 4 AM is when they really have something big to attend to.

This just shows the power of delegation. In fact, I also plan to delegate some of my work in the future.

When I saw the exact reason why billionaires enjoy their life despite being very busy, I was greatly inspired.

But this doesn’t mean that waking up at 4 am is a bad idea. In fact, when you are first building your startup or just want to improve yourself, I suggest you also wake up at 4 am to increase your productivity.

But once you’ve built up your business and carefully hired and delegated some of your tasks, then it is better to get up later.

The reason I said this is that I’ve found that billionaires prefer sleeping full 7-9 hours of sleep.

And the reason why they prefer having enough sleep is that carefully analyzing reports from their employees requires a lot of brainpower and analytical skills that sleep gives us.

Sleep has been found by science to increase logical thinking and performance. When working on delegating tasks to employees, it is better to have deeper analytical skills to give the best task depending on the type of employee you have,

Another is that numbers such as statistics and reports need a lot of analytical and logical thinking to plan the next moves in your business.

With the shift from manual labor to managing a whole business, billionaires usually adopted from waking up early for increased productivity, to sleeping full 8 hours just to have enough logical and analytical thinking.

But I also said that some Billionaires wake up at 4 am on occasions where they are really needed for a project or deadline. That’s what we will be talking about in the next section.

Why do billionaires wake up at 4am?

Billionaires wake up at 4 am when they have bigger projects to take on or their businesses are currently in a busy season. The reason is that waking up at 4 am significantly improves a person’s productivity. Therefore, they can do more work within the day.

As humans, we are all prone to changes in our schedules. Billionaires included.

While billionaires require a lot of analytical and logical skills to manage their employees, there are times that they also have to be extremely productive when necessary.

For example, if their business is in a busy season, or when they have a big project deadline.

As an example, Elon Musk starts to sleep in his office when they are working on a deadline or a new exciting project. The reason is that for a short period, they need to work more hands-on in their business since their business is very busy.

One reason for this is that billionaires are good leaders. They know that since their businesses are busy, their employees are also busy. Showing their employees that they are also with them boosts the morale of the business.

They know that people will work better if they can see their leader also working with them. Thus, they know the value waking up at 4 am gives. If they wake up early just to see their employees, it could be used as an effective morale booster.

That’s why there are billionaires who wake up at 4 am. But it is hard to find one that wakes up at 4 am as part of their routine.

How early do billionaires wake up?

On average, billionaires wake up at 6:45 AM. This data came from getting the average of the wake-up routines of billionaires. The reason for this data is because most billionaires care about getting full sleep because they need more analytical skills for managing people.

It would be hard not to explain here how I got that data. How I got 6:45 AM is from pulling data on the wake-up time routine of each of the billionaires I’ve found.

Here is the data of how early do billionaires wake up:

Billionaire	Wake up Time
Oprah Gail Winfrey	7 AM
Elon Musk	7 AM
Donald Trump	5:30 AM
Jack Dorsey	5 AM
Warren Buffet	6:45 AM
Jeff Bezos	8 AM
Sara Blakely	6:30 AM
Anastasia Soare	7 AM
Mark Zuckerberg	8 AM
Bill Gates	7 AM
Average	6:45 AM

Upon getting these data, I started to calculate the average time they wake up which is about 6:45 AM.

So how early do they wake up? it’s around 6:45 AM.

So the thing I want to impart in this article is this.

Waking up at 4 am is good for productivity. In fact, you will get an instant boost in productivity once you started waking up at 4 am. Billionaires also wake up at 4 AM but it only happens when they need to. Getting up at 4 am is not their usual routine.

Source:

Strøm‐Tejsen, P., et al. “The Effects of Bedroom Air Quality on Sleep and Next‐day Performance.” Indoor Air, vol. 26, no. 5, 2015, pp. 679–86. Crossref, doi:10.1111/ina.12254.