They all sound the same to me!
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Ponzi Scheme: Take money from investors promising massive returns. Instead of getting those returns pay the investors back with their own money telling them it is the massive profits you promised. Siphon off some of the invested money for personal use until the whole thing collapses (a flow of new investors can perpetuate the scheme for a time).
Pyramid Scheme: An “investment” scheme that depends on recruiting new “investors”. Profits do not come from investment but from new lower tier recruits. Each tier the number of investors increases and passes their money up the chain towards the top of the pyramid. This process of course cannot be sustained forever and the lower tiers will be left at a loss.
MLM: Multi-Level-Marketing is a business arranged in levels or “tiers”. New members are pitched the idea that they can sell a product directly to consumers instead of a retail store, paying a percentage of the profits to the company itself. But also they are given the option of recruiting new members themselves to work for them with a similar deal; sell the product and pay a percentage of those profits to whoever recruited them, who then keeps some while passing another percentage on to the company. The dream pitched is that someone can eventually not sell products themselves but live just off the profits of people they recruited and anyone *those* people recruited, etc.
An MLM can easily also be a pyramid scheme when there is no real product, or predatory practices generate money from new recruits instead of new sales. Things like charging for “training” or inspirational classes, mandatory minimum inventory purchases, and the like are all signs an MLM is a pyramid scheme.
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