Bezos, Gates, Zuck, Behind every “self-made” millionaire is a father with money

A few thoughts, none of which are specifically intended to support or refute this article&#x27;s thesis:<p>- &quot;Every&quot; is a big word. What about Jobs and Woz (I actually legitimately don&#x27;t know)? I&#x27;m sure there&#x27;s lots of &quot;actual&quot; self-made millionaires. But I bet you they all have the same kind of story: somewhere along the way, someone, whether family or not, showed up with a lot of money.<p>- It is kind of intuitive that having money, a very versatile tool, can help increase the success rate of your business. Sometimes it means a longer runway, sometimes it means being able to even try.<p>- There&#x27;s a survivorship bias, I think, given the above point. What&#x27;s the success rate of startups built by people with money vs. people without money?<p>- To me, this relates loosely, perhaps analogously, to the tremendous value of having a social safety net. People with money are usually in a position to take risks. Those who are thinking about where their next meal or rent payment comes from usually aren&#x27;t.

The title claims &quot;behind every self-made millionaire&quot;, then the article subtitle claims &quot;behind most self-made millionaires&quot;, then the article body just points at a grand total of 4 human beings that are millionaires that had rich fathers, as proof that most&#x2F;every self-made millionaire had a rich father. The article is nothing but class-warfare propaganda.

Look, I don&#x27;t disagree with the premise, but this needs a hell of a lot of proofreading. What even <i>is</i> this sentence?<p>&gt; This other tweet, emerged in the thread of the aforementioned, illustrates it perfectly: if Bezos was able to get to where he is today, it is due, in part, to the fact that his parents gave him more than $ 240,000 dollars to prevent his idea, Amazon, will fail.<p>Click through the site, it&#x27;s fucking bizarre, like a showcase for &quot;here&#x27;s the kinds of blogspam I can write for your needs!&quot;

Most people born with family whealth waste the money and loose it in a few generations. Very few manage to turn their resources into facebook, tesla or amazon.

We search for universal, objective, pithy summaries of messy, complicated situations. Both of the following seem to be true:<p>1. It would be effectively impossible for someone from a disadvantaged background to start Amazon, Microsoft, or Facebook.<p>2. Bezos, Gates, Zuck are extraordinary business people who achieved what 99.9% of their peers would be unable to achieve from the same starting point.<p>I&#x27;m not sure why we keep debating whether these guys are good or bad, impressive or not, as some sort of universal truth.

&gt; “We were fortunate enough to have lived in other countries and saved some money, so we were able to become an angel investor. The rest is history,” explained his adoptive father, Mike Bezos, a Cuban immigrant who worked as an engineer. at Exxon, one of the world’s leading oil companies, in 2015.<p>I think all that these stories mean is that “self-made” applies to a few generations rising up from poverty to great wealth, rather than a single person. Rather than denigrate these successful people we should applaud their predecessors for helping the next generation get ahead, and encourage society as a whole to adopt this mindset. Too often it seems like generations have a “I got mine” drawbridge mentality and refuse to sacrifice if it means future generations will have a chance to get ahead.<p>I point at climate change, public debt, private debt, gutted social programs, etc.

There seems to be an important distinction here. This is not inter-generational wealth in the traditional sense. For instance, Bill Gates did not inherit his fortune, but rather he had some advantages when it came to funding of school, help getting started, and other resources. I see a lot of people mention inheritance taxes when this sort of topic comes up, but of course an inheritance tax would do nothing here.<p>In fact, I&#x27;m not sure what could or even should be done to prevent this sort of situation. Does anyone expect parents not to invest in the success of their children? Imagine if you&#x27;re lucky enough to be well off. Will you move to the worst school district you can find for your child to &quot;even the odds?&quot; An idea like this would simply never get any real adoption.

The word &quot;millionaire&quot; in the title isn&#x27;t reflected in the article, and it seems poorly chosen. There are tens of millions of millionaires in the US alone. It&#x27;s still a lot of money, but it&#x27;s no longer a ridiculous sum accrued only by plutocrats. It&#x27;s a comfortable middle-class retirement fund.<p>That was already a joke in 1997, when Dr. Evil demanded &quot;one million dollars&quot; in Austin Powers, and was laughed at.<p>That may just have been a poor choice of title (often written by editors and not the original writer, though this is just a blog). The rest of the article doesn&#x27;t mention &quot;millionaires&quot; in that sense.<p>The thesis may well apply if you change &quot;millionaire&quot; to &quot;billionaire&quot;, but it&#x27;s a weird mistake to make in the title.

Articles like this try to make people think the reverse correlation is true. That people with well-to-do parents will automatically become millionaires. The reality is that there are ten&#x27;s of millions of parents of similar means and circumstances, and that very, very few of their children will end up millionaires.<p>The real conclusion of this article and many like it; is that success is not just blind luck and not purely egalitarian, but the combination of the two. There is no useful information to glean from so a large generalization.

I went searching years ago and noticed that at the very least, most of these people were from, at least, upper middle-class families. They probably a very stable home life.

There are many successful businesses where the founders were backed by a substantial sum of money from family and&#x2F;or friends.<p>There are also many successful businesses where the founders had to scratch and claw for every dime needed to get it off the ground.<p>I guess you just pick the narrative you want to promote and run with it. There are plenty of examples you can use to support your viewpoint. This article is typical of so many these days.

I find these kinds of articles so tedious. There are many millionaires that came from nothing. Self made if you will. But they choose to highlight 3 of the most successful people in the modern world (not “just” millionaires but multi-billionaires) and say “see, their parents were not poor, that means self-made millionaires all come from families with money!”. Such lazy thinking.

Is there any truly rags to riches story? In modern times, at least?<p>I remember stories about rich individuals who began with absolutely nothing. Many of wealthy today began with seed money, better liquidity, and a network of supporters. Jeff Bezos wasn&#x27;t rich but he raised a sizable amount of money from friends and family.

I don&#x27;t see why an already rich person who became much wealthier than their parents cannot be praised for their ventures. Also, many people become rich by working for these companies, and they create new companies which provide more jobs. Some of these people become rich and have children as well...

It can be reduced to this:<p>Any business founder who has taken funding, VC or otherwise is automatically disqualified from the title of &quot;self-made&quot; million&#x2F;billionaire regardless should they choose to sell. Period.<p>I think those who have bootstrapped their company with their own money are fine being called self-made.

The only way you can tell that this article isn’t chatgpt is the frequency of grammar mistakes

Does it even matter?<p>Yes, they came from wealthy families. They could have easily coasted on that money like tons of kids do.<p>It made it _easier_ for them to build successful businesses, but success isn&#x27;t guaranteed!

So, many, commas, what could, it, mean? .

Chamath palihapitiya was a refugee to Canada and he worked at Burger King (so he claims)

I’m shocked when people think they are rich when they make 150k&#x2F;year. While that would be comfortable for most areas, the scale of capitalism favors my family and our ability to take on risk. We can fail so many times we look like we are business geniuses when in reality you don’t see the failures. Other people fail and they are out of the market, our family just keeps trying. People just are not good at understanding big numbers. Can you really imagine infinity? That’s the amount of money we seem to have. Can’t spend it faster than it comes in.

Wow, it’s almost as if wealth is generational &#x2F;s

People harped on Trump for that (taking a loan to start his businesses) but to be fair many SV types do <i>that</i>.<p>Excellent article.