Social media ranked the top reason 55% of Gen Z and 44% of millennial investors say they got into investing, according to a survey of 300,000 investors over five years by the Oliver Wyman Forum. 

In their search for alternative pathways toward financial security, personal finance influencers are providing solutions. Videos describing how to invest $1,000 in the stock market or explaining “the stock market tea” in terms of the Kardashians or The Real Housewives franchise get hundreds of thousands of views across platforms. 

Vivian Tu, better known as Your Rich BFF, has 2.7 million TikTok and 3.8 million Instagram followers and gives advice on investing, financial planning,and tax loopholes.

“Suddenly, you have someone who doesn’t look like your dad’s financial advisor. You have somebody who looks like I could be anybody’s college best friend,” Tu previously told Fortune. “I want to entertain my audience and turn finance into funance and just make talking about money more accessible for the next generation of rich BFFs.”

Creator Rebecca Ma, who goes by Becca Bloom online, has 8.2 million followers on Instagram and TikTok. She shares her daily routine, feeding her cat caviar for breakfast and showcasing her endless luxury clothing hauls. Each one gets millions of views and likes. 

The popularity of these videos shows a common desire for extreme financial success. The Oliver Wyman Forum survey found in 2022, 18% of people said they felt pressure to make money to feel successful. By 2025, that number had climbed to 33%, and this feeling more than doubled among low-income earners and boomers nearing retirement. 

Economic uncertainty is driving Gen Z to invest early  

More than half of Gen Z started to learn about investing before entering the workforce, compared to only 20% of Baby Boomers, according to a World Economic Forum survey from 2024. Nearly a third started investing in college or early adulthood, twice the rate of millennials who invested at that age. 

Early investing is part of a strategy towards financial independence, which is now the fastest-growing unmet financial need, according to the survey. Economic nihilism is growing within Gen Z as they face a stagnant job market and are pessimistic about the future of safety net programs like Social Security. 

“There’s this genuine interest to learn,” said Natalya Guseva, head of financial markets and resilience initiatives at WEF, which has surveyed investor habits every two years since 2022. She sees Gen Z’s lust for financial literacy as “driven by various things,” but overwhelmingly a sense from them that they can’t rely on things like governments and pensions as much as prior generations did. She also points to more access to information and diversified products to invest in as a draw for Gen Z.

Across all age groups, financial independence is the top skill people wished that they had learned more about earlier, according to Oliver Wyman. Gen Z has taken this very seriously and is set on making as much money as possible.  

“Gen Z and young people in general have many financial goals, and we see many of them are actually quite medium to long term,” Guseva said. “Only about a tenth or fewer of our investors say they want to beat the market or speculate.”

Young people prefer AI over traditional advising

Nearly half of people consult AI when investing, compared to just over a third in 2023, according to the Oliver Wyman survey. Investors using AI typically use it as a sounding board rather than letting it independently invest their money. Compared to traditional financial advising, AI provides a judgment-free environment to learn, respondents said, and makes them feel more understood than human advisors. 

“We also see that younger generations, especially Gen Z, say that they would trust an institution more if it had an AI chat bot. ” Guseva said. “Many are using AI to learn about investing” 

With increased pressure, Gen Z is making riskier investments. While Oliver Wyman Forum found that Gen X and Baby Boomers’ investment portfolios tend to have more traditional compositions with higher levels of diversification and risk-hedging, cryptocurrency makes up more than one third of 71% of Gen Z investors’ portfolios, according to WEF.

“We see that more people know how to access crypto than stock, ETFs, and bonds, and more people feel like they can understand crypto than stocks, ETFs and bonds,” Guseva said. “What that shows to us is that what crypto has done is had a really great marketing campaign and awareness campaign. To us, it’s a lesson on, how do you meet people where they are?” 

Gen Z’s pivot toward higher-risk, high-reward assets like cryptocurrency isn’t just a trend. Their financial habits rank second among the areas where they feel most misjudged, the survey found, and their rejection of slow and steady wealth accumulation is a sign that they’re done with conventional wisdom that doesn’t fit their vision of the future.