I don't think the argument is that only billionaire heirs have a running start in life and access to significant family investments and connections.
Also, I think that we can agree that a Cuban national that is employed by Exxon as an engineer can provide way more opportunities to their children than your average cuban immigrant.
The narratives nowadays always try to paint Gates as a pillar of the community and ace businessman. But in reality his start was down to pure luck and then building a monopoly through illegal business practices and totally unethical behavior. The guy always will be a cretin.
All tech cloned (C#, Excel) or aquihire (Simonyi/Brodie for Word from XeroxParc) or corp acquisition (too many to mention), or some combination (Myrvold DSR, acquire a smart guy's company with a clone of IBM multitasking).
I don't know, I've seen an increase in people viewing "philanthropists" as, essentially, oligarchs trying to go under the radar -- using their money to mold society in the way they think is best, and ultimately just exercising power in a way that seems altruistic. Perhaps sometimes it is altruistic -- but there are clear examples of continuing to spend money on ideas they believe strongly in spite of the evidence (e.g., Bill Gates' billions spent on evaluating teachers based on test scores).
The Zuck has proven that getting lucky with one webpage is more about being in the right place at the right time, as opposed to any skill or business acumen he has. The strategy to buy up all the potential competitors in your space allows him to take the scattergun approach to extremes. But Zuck has proven that anything his Facebook company tries to grow organically is a disaster.
Well, there are anecdotes contrary to this proposition. For example Google's cofounder Sergey Brin [0] comes from an immigrant family of modest means, upper middle class perhaps but not rich.
> Behind Every Self-Made Millionaire Is a Father with Money
Dumb headline, obviously wrong. It may be true for those billionaires but there are many millionaires for which this isn't true. I know single-digit millionaires who ran away from home as teenagers and never had anything to do with their parents again.
Ah, I remember when a billion really was a billion. These paltry thousand millions are chicken feed.
"Previously in British English (but not in American English), the word "billion" referred exclusively to a million millions (1,000,000,000,000). However, this is not common anymore, and the word has been used to mean one thousand million (1,000,000,000) for several decades."
The big thing here isn't that they get loans. It's that they can keep taking risks, knowing they'll be OK if they fail.
I can't remember the exact quote, but essentially middle class people have one big shot they can afford to fail at. The children of the wealthy can keep taking them.
To be honest, I do care way more about how horrible work conditions they provide in their companies. Especially to the more vulnerable and low paying positions.
It should be apparent that the movement of balance sheets (in the form of income sheets) can be modeled approximately by (discrete and/or discontinuous) partial differential equations. The fundamental principle is rate of change of the balance sheet is relatively proportional to the amount present. Qualitatively, "It takes money to make money." Thus, a homeless person getting from $0 to $1M cannot be had without some range of help of others and a person growing at roughly $100M to $101M shouldn't be as difficult per se.
Corollary: If you can count your money, then you're not rich. (Liquid net worth is always an educated guess, varies by kinds of assets and debts, liquidation timeframe, and varies by the day.)
> It may be true for those billionaires but there are many millionaires for which this isn't true.
The term "with money" is subjective and open to interpretation, but I don't think that it means "middle-class" either.
Due to inflation, the term "millionaire" today does not convey the same meaning that it did a few years ago. Middle class families with high 5-/low six-digit incomes can aspire to become millionaires by passively saving their salary.
I agree, but the article was written in 2023 when middle class families can reasonably aspire to become millionaires, so making the headline talking about millionaires being impossibly privileged just seems inexcusably lazy and dishonest to me.
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 than the average person? There's a big difference between withdrawing a quarter million dollars from the bank and taking out a home equity loan and risking your security to help your son's business venture.
Everyone who knows anything at all about mining knows that "owning a mine" (any kind) says nothing whatsoever about the wealth of the owner. It's quite common to put more money into the ground than you ever get back out.
I've known several gold mine owners over the years. To be blunt: none of them had a pot to piss in. Some of them made enough to get by, but that's it. Others had to subsidize their mines by working in town part of the year.
Musk has a million dogecoin bounty for anyone who can prove that claim. There are interviews with his dad where his dad says basically he bought some emeralds from an Italian guy who was chiseling them from a rock in the ground. That's a far cry away from an emerald mine fortune, when I think "emerald mine" I think John of God level fortunes, and they used what money they made to move out of South Africa. From my understanding they were middle class at best.
Middle class does not exist in South Africa. Look up their Gini index. If you think wealth inequality in the U.S. is bad, it’s 10 times worse in South Africa
I find entertaining the show of cynicism when Musk himself started the rumour about the emerald mine [0]:
> Elon Musk: "... In South Africa, my father had a private plane we’d fly in incredibly dangerous weather and barely make it back. This is going to sound slightly crazy, but my father also had a share in an Emerald mine in Zambia."
Musk's father gave an interview [1] where he explains what the mine business was about. He also shares that he had to sell his "ocean going yatch" to send his family money overseas. Musk is not a trust fund baby, but he wasn't coming from middle class either.
A private plane is not a private jet, and a sailboat is not the Fulk al Salama. I'd bet the private plane was a little cesna and the "ocean going yacht" was probably a medium sized sailboat or catamaran. Rich? I suppose, but not wealthy. Upper middle class maybe.
Elon Musk stans are something else. The loops they jump through to convince themselves that the teenager who was walking around with emerald from his family's mine in his pockets was not a rich privileged kid are out of this world.
I don't idolize anyone. I just find this recent vitriol from people who 5 years ago fawned over this man as a visionary exhausting and like to inject some sanity into the discussion. He was a darling to the progressives, until he expressed opinions. Now he's a lepper who never had a good idea in his life and paid other people with his inherited old money wealth to build several of the most successful companies in the world for him. Spare me.
The first article you linked to says it was a twin engine Cessna that he got for fifty grand. The second one says him and his brother sold 2 emeralds for 2000 bucks. Well off, sure. Comes from money? I don't think so.
> Most emeralds (and other precious stones, too, but especially emeralds) that come out of the ground are essentially worthless.
As the legend goes, a 16 year old Elon walked into Tiffany's with two emeralds in his pocket which he sold for around $2k only to learn that they were worth 30 times that value.
Paywalling a news site is understandable - I mean it's a business that needs to make money somehow.
But (mostly) personal blogs? It's insanity that accessing it requires either a medium account (so you can be tracked) or that you use the app (so you can be tracked).
So his "father with money" is a Cuban immigrant? That kind of changes the narrative.