Patrick Bet-David

Patrick Bet-David is an American entrepreneur, financial advisor, and motivational speaker.

Patrick Bet-David was born on 18 October 1978 in Tehran, Iran. In the late 1980s he fled Iran with his father during the Iran–Iraq War; they lived for two years in a refugee camp in Germany before immigrating to the US in 1990, when Bet-David was 12 years old. After high school he enlisted in the US army and served with the 101st Airborne Division.

After leaving the Army he got a job at Morgan Stanley. After a dinner event with American journalist George Will in 2009, he launched a website called Saving America and later a radio show broadcast in Los Angeles, to encourage people to be entrepreneurial and to educate people about fiscal responsibility. Later that year he opened a financial services agency offering term and permanent insurance, debt settlements, and 401(k) rollovers into indexed annuities called PHP Agency, which stood for "People Helping People".

Before starting People Helping People, he was part of another financial marketing organization called World Financial Group from 2002-2009. He went on to become one of the Chairmans of the company before 2009 where he began PHP Agency.

In 2013 he gave interviews advising people to avoid debt, and based on the housing market at that time, not to buy houses but instead rent, and to use any wealth they had acquired to start a business. In 2015 he gave an interview advising people graduating from high school to avoid the debt of going to college unless they had a clear professional goal of being a doctor or lawyer or want to play professional sports, and advised them instead to travel or intern for a year.

Bet-David has published four books, two with American entrepreneur/investor, Thomas N. Ellsworth.

• Doing The Impossible: The 25 Laws for Doing The Impossible (January 16, 2012) - a self-help book about realizing one's goals
• The Next Perfect Storm (April 22, 2014) - the books shows how people can profit from bubbles like the real estate market in the 2000s and the stock market of the late 1990s
• The Life of an Entrepreneur in 90 Pages: There's An Amazing Story Behind Every Story (June 11, 2016, with Thomas N. Ellsworth) - the book outlines a basis for starting a business
• Drop Out And Get Schooled: The Case For Thinking Twice About College (January 23, 2017, with Thomas N. Ellsworth) - the book makes the case for practical business lessons over college education