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The conclusions that wealthy young adults have a greater chance of success seems too bloody obvious. They don't just benefit from the $100,000 seed loan (cough grant)... but education, stability their whole lives etc etc etc
We should not assume that once family seed money has been provided, a billion dollar company automatically emerges. But that does not take away from the fact that entrepreneurship to a large degree hinges on class and wealth.
Millions of people have access to the kind of resources (or much more) a Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg had growing up, but very few have built successful companies. The article mentions that Warren Buffett's father was a congressman, which is true, but there are literally tens of thousands of children of federal representatives. None of them have done what Buffett has done.
I don't know why so many feel the need to reduce the effort, skill, and ingenuity of these founders and builders as if them building a Berkshire, Amazon, or Tesla was a given.
> I don't know why so many feel the need to reduce the effort, skill, and ingenuity of these founders and builders as if them building a Berkshire, Amazon, or Tesla was a given.
It was not a given, but these people are serial coin-toss winners and lazy observers claim they found a way to have an edge in the 50:50 coin toss odds.
In reality if you take a sample of 8 billion people somebody is bound to record 10,000 consecutive coin toss wins , and not because they consciously found a way to crack the coin toss process, but purely because of luck and law of large numbers
The initial hand over of money from rich parents is just the very start of wins in the long series of coin toss wins.
>In reality if you take a sample of 8 billion people somebody is bound to record 10,000 consecutive coin toss wins
Math does not check out. Perhaps you meant around 33 consecutive coin toss wins?
How many events contributed to Buffett, Gates, Zuckerberg, Trump, Biden...status?
Each and every event going their way.
I'm just objecting to the numbers here, you could have every person in the world tossing coins for the rest of their lives and the odds are that nobody would ever record 10000 consecutive wins.
AFAICT, if everyone in the world flipped a coin 10000 times the longest streak would most likely be around 33.
IOW each and every event in defiance of the odds that have always faced the least privileged of non-contenders for that exact reason.
This is completely missing the point of the article. None of them are 'self-made' and statistically probably wouldn't have been successful if their families didn't have money and connections. They didn't succeed because they can do something the rest of us couldn't, they just also had opportunity which is why we shouldn't put them on a pedestal as examples of self-made success and expertise. It's like praising someone for winning the lottery. If someone like Elon Musk started out poor in life he'd probably still be there.
It all depends on how you define self made. Traditionally, defining someone as self made means they didn't inherit their fortune. This is how Forbes does it for instance.
Today there seems to be a trend of saying that simply if you were born in a society, you're not self made, because after all, you didn't pave your own roads! This is just bizarre to me because everyone has access to roads and other basic functions of society.
If someone created a billion dollar fortune in their own lifetime, there's likely some unique and interesting character traits that they have.
These articles often target extreme examples, and don't address actual issues.
All I'd want to see is a system where everyone at least gets a shot, right now. If both of your parents are abusive drug addicts and they don't want you to go to college since they're afraid that's going to make you uppity, those drug addicts have an insane ability to stop you from doing anything.
It's beyond stupid. You effectively need your parents permission to go to college in this country, via the way our financial aid system works. Why not just give everyone financial aid, this would also help out struggling middle-class families which on paper don't currently qualify.
I'm not too worried that Zuckerberg are whoever got $100,000 to start his business, I'm more worried about the poor teenager who doesn't talk to his parents, and has no real option to attend college until he's 24. Of course, occasionally you teach yourself how to program and by the time you get around to finish in college, you don't qualify for financial aid anyway since you're already making six figures, but I like to think of myself as the exception, not the rule.
Then push for a 100% inheritance tax.
It's the only way
Usually it's the grandpa who was the financial wizard, or at the other end of the spectrum an outright thief.
And it can often extend back many more generations than that before you hit the ancestor who accumulated the original wealth.
>It's the only way
Inheritance tax is not the answer.
If lacking generational wealth is such a big disadvantage, that would make everyone too poor to accomplish major projects.
Not incentivize any building of lasting value.
Would be more progressive to quit taxing wages altogether, and allow wealth to build (much) faster among working people to the extent they can much more universally afford to invest that part of their wages more wisely in the same well-performing financial instruments that have been found in the trust funds of the most privileged heirs & heiresses.
Rather than destoying wealth with over-taxation, why not allow wealth to blossom by taking the burden off of the workers who have had to do without for generations, and allowing them to participate instead of cutting everyone out.
Sure, then the path to success is to be born into a family of government officials. Great.
The only place I hear the “rags to riches billionaire” narrative is in articles like this one, using it as a strawman to attack. Signaling that these people came from wealthy backgrounds is a way to dogwhistle that they are the “bad” people, worthy of scorn instead of admiration.
Most people don’t care if these founders were poor or middle class or upper middle class or whatever. The fact that someone received a $100,000 loan from a family member isn’t the reason they built successful companies. It was a factor, but it’s ridiculous to suggest that it was _the_ factor responsible for all of their success.
It’s equally ridiculous to suggest that the only thing holding other people back from becoming billionaires is the lack of a loan from their parents. Startup capital is easier to come by than ever before.
Comparing start up capital to free parental money is... Well, it's something. I've had friends make this argument before, and coincidentally they're all ones who had rich parents. "It wasn't the parental money that made me successful, it was hard work!" They all would say in unison.
It should be noted that the people comparing Ms. Holmes to Buffett, Gates, etc are journalists. This article refers to Inc. and Glamour and a local NBC affiliate (and the New York Times, albeit in a personal profile, not a news article). These are not "hard-hitting" articles, but puff pieces that were most likely paid for. Further, to the extent that such journalists have a bit of autonomy, they aren't very smart. They don't know any other billionaires, so these are the only comparisons possible. "Hard work" can apply to virtually anybody -- although spending your day in conference rooms and private jets and being driven around town certainly isn't the hardest of hard work, no matter how many hours you do it.
It's kind of ironic that a journalist can't recognize the rhetoric and myth-building of other journalists is almost entirely just b.s.