Self-Made Billionaires Debate

Yes. You were lucky to be born into a family with money to invest and to grow up with a father around. Not everyone has those advantages.

I know nothing of your family, deduce nothing about them and have nothing to say about them.However younger people often have little or no idea what happened before them. Perhaps among the aunts and uncles of a family, an older brother or sister sacrificed for years working at a dead-end job in order to put a younger brother through college. Then as things work, the younger brother moves across the country has some success, and the older brother is working in a dead-end job. This was the s

You do realize that 80% of people worth >$1 million had parents that were not millionaires right?

I'm pretty sure most of those people were born into homes with plenty of access to good food and education.Elon had a nice computer from an early age in the early 80s, and went to a fancy prep school. Gates had parents who were successful lawyers, and who got him into Harvard. Bezos went to Princeon. Woz's dad was a well paid enigeer at Lockheed and went to UC Berkeley.Lots of mobility for sure, but it really does take a couple generations in most cases. None of those people you

As a general principle I don't credit that kind of statement by that kind of person. This is because every time I've looked into one of them in depth it was very misleading. That kind of rich person generally misunderstands the question and misses significant support.Edit: For example, while he did work on a farm to pay for college that farm was owned by his Mom's cousin. Working for family is generally a significant advantage.Edit2: Having a wealthy childhood has enduring b

I hate that word, self-made. I think of Bezos, Buffet, Gates and all three of them had investment from their parents or had a business relationship made possible by their parents. Of the billionaires I know of, all them came from at least an upper middle class family. Certainly they are a special kind of talent and a big part of their own success, but they were raised by nurturing families with significant resources.

Parent income may be correlated but it is not an input.As someone who grew up poor, big tech was my best way of building wealth. I didn’t need connections, didn’t need to work unpaid internships. I just had to get an interview and pass it.

Somehow all of those explanations seem to gloss over the fact that you generally need to be born into a wealthy family in order to have the cushion to take the risks that allow you to collect billions. As an example, Paul Graham would have been far less likely to attend Cornell and Harvard if his father had a blue collar factory job instead of being a nuclear physicist. Almost none of the 'bootstrap billionaires' of the tech world come from less than an upper middle-class background,

Funny, the only mention of Elon Musk is in the description of the header photo... I wonder, why include him in the photo at all if you're not going to talk about him? Did he have rich parents?So what I'm getting from the article is that these three men lived in middle class households in the 70s, 80s and 90s, a period in America with a strong middle class, and that by today's standards had well off parents, but by the standards at the time, maybe only a little better off

They want people born on second base, those who didn't inherent millions but got an upper middle class education and a stable family to rely on. I know people who were born with millions, they are very risk averse as they don't feel they could rebuild what they have if they ever lost it.Note how the successful founders weren't rich, they had educated parents and went to good schools, but they didn't inherent millions so they had to work through life.