
Why Are Young Billionaires So Boring? - pdog
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-09/why-are-young-billionaires-so-boring
======
cableshaft
So....young billionaires are boring because they're mostly in the tech
industry and haven't seen as much hardship as past billionaires (because they
have early access to a computer) seems to be the main thesis.

But...

1) even the hardships by old billionaires seems to be temporary or brief, i.e.
Warren Buffet finding a way to make thousands of dollars through his paper
route at the age of only 15

2) The writer provides a single instance of a 'boring' young billionaire,
being Mark Zuckerberg

3) The writer provides multiple counterpoint examples to the thesis in the
text with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sergey Brin as being tech billionaires
that came from nothing.

I wouldn't be too surprised if there wasn't some truth to the thesis (although
'boring' is a loaded and subjective term to begin with), but the writer does a
terrible job at defending their position.

I'm seeing a lot of these poorly written articles lately. Journalists have a
preconceived point they want to make, make it in the headline, and then
pretend they're writing something that supports it but not really supporting
their thesis at all, counting on the fact that most people are only going to
skim the article and not critically evaluate it so they can put their idea
into people's heads 'Hey, young billionaires are all totes boring, right?",
inception style.

~~~
a_bonobo
>3) The writer provides multiple counterpoint examples to the thesis in the
text with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sergey Brin as being tech billionaires
that came from nothing.

They didn't come from nothing - Elon Musk was 'bullied' but was still fairly
rich. Bezos may have been adopted, but his 'new' father was an engineer with
Exxon, and he went to a relatively fancy high school (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_Palmetto_High_School](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_Palmetto_High_School)
), Brin is listed as an immigrant, but his father was professor of mathematics
at University of Maryland, Brin also went to a reasonably fancy high school (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_Roosevelt_High_School_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_Roosevelt_High_School_\(Maryland\))
). To me Brin, Bezos, Musk are far shots from the article's 'earlier' examples
of people like Warren Buffett who grew up with unemployed parents.

~~~
canes123456
Palmetto high school is one of the better public schools in Miami but Miami
public school are pretty bad and under funded. Palmetto is far from an elite
high schools where only rich people go.

~~~
pofilat
Palmetto is the _highest_ achieving public school in Miami-Dade county. It's
no Bill Gates's Lakeside School or Zuck's Exeter, but it's where everyone in
Dade County public schools who cares about academic excellence sends their
kids if they can afford the nearby real estate.

------
kbcool
The simple answer is...because they're all geeks who just got lucky.

They didn't need to work their backsides off to get to where they are. They
just made a semi-decent product at the right time and money was thrown at
them.

There are millions who just weren't there at the right time and probably far
more flamboyant ones because the longer answer is the author is probably
mixing up boring with stable.

~~~
m52go
> They didn't need to work their backsides off to get to where they are.

Isn't is possible that they got incredibly lucky AND worked their backsides
off?

It should be clear that (1) abundant money and (2) abundant brains and (3)
abundant luck are ALL necessary criteria for out-sized successes.

~~~
Alex3917
This. To whatever extent Mark Zuckerberg's success is attributable to luck,
let's not forget that he's still probably one of the ten smartest people in
the tech industry.

~~~
pofilat
> he's still probably one of the ten smartest people in the tech industry.

That's absurd.

~~~
repolfx
Is it? Depends how you define smart but Zuck has consistently made
unconventional moves, very young, that turned out to be wildly correct.

He started by limiting Facebook to colleges so it could scale.

He was able to attract top class engineering talent to help him.

He entered a crowded market and obliterated all his competitors entirely
through having a superior social networking product.

He retained control over his own company - avoiding the kind of agist outing
that Larry Page and Sergey Brin experienced (i.e. investors who demanded
"adult supervision" in the form of Eric Schmidt).

He convinced Instagram to sell, and made it profitable, apparently.

He convinced WhatsApp to sell and probably will make it profitable.

How many people in the tech industry can point to such a track record at all,
let alone at Zuck's age? The guy doesn't only seriously understand tech. He
also understands people.

~~~
Alex3917
He also made the right call by going all in on mobile at exactly the right
time. And he has one of the best research teams in the industry.

For whatever missteps they've made, on the balance it's been absurdly well
run.

I think he easily makes the list of the top ten smartest people in tech, along
with Bezos, Scott Cook, Jonah Peretti, etc.

------
habitue
This story is isn't really a story. The "evidence" the author cites that older
billionaires are interesting is that William Buffet great up poor and had a
paper route. Extrapolating from this, apparently, the author comes to the
conclusion that other billionaires must be interesting.

But think, why is it that this article only talks about billionaires everyone
already knows? Why not dig into some lesser known figures on the Forbes 500
and show how interesting they are?

Probably because, as the author mentions in passing, a lot of billionaires
just inherited it. Which is about as boring a story as you can get.

~~~
ryanmercer
>This story is isn't really a story. The "evidence" the author cites that
older billionaires are interesting is that William Buffet great up poor and
had a paper route. Extrapolating from this, apparently, the author comes to
the conclusion that other billionaires must be interesting.

While that is certainly arguable there is a bit of truth there. Many of the
billionaires/venture capital types got lucky. They were in the right place at
the right time to leverage their private education and college education (in
most cases anyway, sure some came from nothing) to develop an app or website
that they sold for a mint then shotgunned little bits of their money at many
other similar types making even more money off of a small percentage.

Most of them lack any 'real-world' experience. They've never wondered how to
pay the light bill, they've never had to file personal bankruptcy, they've
never worked manual labor jobs, many of them have probably never worked retail
jobs. Most have never lost a parent in their youth or had a parent forced into
retirement early via a disability, or had a disability themselves.

There's a lot of diversity that is missing from the money-holders in the Bay
Area and similar locations. Don't get me wrong, some are doing awesome stuff
through things like Effective Altruism but they are severely limited on their
experiences.

I've dug graves for a living, my father died 12 days before my 13th birthday,
my single mother had to retire early from disability after battling thyroid
cancer and then having bone deterioration issues shortly thereafter. I was
delivering papers 3 cents a piece around age 10 and working as many hours as I
legally could by 16. Post my bankruptcy I was working as much as 90 hours a
week some weeks for the better part of a year and didn't even break a gross of
6-figures. I have a vastly different set of experiences than Altman or
Zuckerberg or Moskovitz and I still do, I make 32k a year after 12 years on
the job, if you look at the S&P 500 returns since December of 09 someone with
3 million invested in any one of those years in a fund has made anywhere from
1.29x to 30.36x my annual gross income. I still have to worry about every cent
I make, with a fraction of their wealth they can return from a fraction of
their net worth. They live in an entirely different world than I do.

Hell if one of them had 10 million in SPYD the quarterly dividend last month
would have grossed them 3.11x my annual gross income. When you have that much
money, you have no real fears. You don't have to worry about saving for your
future, you don't have to worry about the fact you might have to work until
the day you die, you don't have to worry about what happens if you get sick
and it ends up costing more than insurance will cover, you don't have the fear
of 'how am I going to keep a roof over my head and eat' nagging at your heels.

When you never need to work another day in your life, I imagine it's pretty
damn easy to settle into complacency and get boring. When you've never had the
experience of hardship, you probably don't even think about such things. You
worry about which charity you're going to give all your money to when you take
the Bill & Melinda gates challenge. You look for the next Uber or chat app to
throw a bunch of money at instead of thinking about ways you can make massive
change in your life and those close to you.

I absolutely get where the article is coming from. A lack of experience of
hardships can easily make you boring because you don't know what risk actually
is.

Edit:

I'd even add that I think anyone that wants to make a difference in the world,
that has a net worth at or exceeding say 15 million+ should hire personal
advisors from various income brackets and backgrounds. Say someone on
disability (compensated with a livable wage which would exceed ant disability
benefit), someone right at the poverty line, someone lower middle class. The
rest they're already surrounded by, solid middle class and higher.

I think they should regularly bounce ideas off of these people and every 5-10
years replace them with new individuals with more recent experiences. Use
diversity and hardship as a way to improve your ability to influence the world
for the better both through your personal and business endeavors.

------
bontaq
This is a long, meandering article with a pretty arbitrary notion of "self-
made." It wants to lament both how old-school billionaires are getting rarer
and decreasing class mobility. Both points are poorly made -- I read through
it and it was a waste of time.

~~~
paulpauper
mostly generalizations based on a handful of examples

------
SketchySeaBeast
I don't know if we can say Zuckberg is boring compared to Buffet - it would
seem to me an intraoffice messaging system is comparable to a paper route in
terms of the required skills for either profession.

In regards to the need for opportunity, I fully agree with that - I was trying
to teach myself to code at an early age, but the computer I was trying to
teach myself QBASIC with didn't have enough memory to load the help file, and
I didn't have access to any other resources growing up in a rural community in
the late 90's. Reverse engineering Gorillas and Nibbles was beyond me without
outside assistance, so it was wasn't until my late twenties that I was able to
rediscover the passion of my youth and turn it into a (still growing) career.

------
dokein
Not clear from the article:

\- What hardship / not-boring is (i.e. Buffet's father became a congressman
when he was still in his formative years; but that doesn't count for Bezos
because his adoptive father was well-off).

\- What proportion of "old" billionaires come from it

\- What proportion of "new" billionaires come from it

\- The difference between the two proportions, and whether it is significant.
A brief mention is made of inherited wealth (which is arguably the most
boring, by the author's definition) but isn't discussed further.

\- Why billionaires are used as the definition, given that exclusively
analyzing outliers is probably a poor way to assess class mobility.

The article optimizes for words rather than clarity of thought.

------
flexie
Did Warren Buffet really know more hardship than today's young billionaires?

His father - one of the few college educated of his time - was already a
stockbroker when Warren Buffet was a kid, and a member of the US Congress when
Warren Bufffet was 12. Warren Buffet is white, male and of the "greatest
generation" that went on to rule what became the most powerful country on
Earth.

I get it that he wasn't born rich, but he was middle class just as much as
today's billionaires.

------
mc32
Do other countries also have an obsession with rags to riches stories?

Our rags to riches archetype is steeped in the depression as well as
transformation from a rural to city existence and the emergence of commerce
(as opposed to sheer manufacturing) as the driving force.

We’re not there any more, the economy has evolved and different things are
required and opportunities now lie elsewhere. But that’s not to say rags to
riches has disappeared altogether, but it’s not spearheading the economy—and
that’s not the US only. Look st where new billionaires come from in other
places as well. That has changed too.

------
randysavage
> Just above them on the list in age is Sean Parker, now 38, who took up
> programming early and interned at Zynga while he was still in high school.

Well done Bloomberg.

~~~
pwinnski
What's the issue here? That Parker interned for Pincus directly, but not
necessary for Zynga? Or that he's more well known for his role at Napster a
year or two later? Or...?

~~~
repolfx
Zynga was founded in 2007. If Parker is 38 now then he'd have been at high
school 20 years ago, when Zynga didn't exist. It's a basic error anyone who
did two seconds of fact checking on Wikipedia would have caught.

~~~
pwinnski
So this sentence makes the same point, but accurately, right?

"Just above them on the list in age is Sean Parker, now 38, who took up
programming early and interned for Mark Pincus (later CEO of Zynga) while he
was still in high school."

------
dnomad
I think when historians seek to determine exactly _why_ America failed they
will have a really hard time understanding the psychology at work. After
launching a wholly illegal and unnecessary war abroad that slaughtered a
million innocent people and only empowered its enemies at the cost of ~6
_trillion_ dollars, the country turned inward, becoming ever more
isolationist, paranoid, fearful. Rather than save its middle class or, heck,
even, rebuild its crumbling infrastructure, the elites set about dismantling
democratic norms and looting the republic through regulatory capture and
grossly irresponsible tax cuts.

But, and this is the key question, where were the people? Why didn't they act
while their democracy was dismantled and the republic handed over to the
wealthy?

Historians will have to conclude that there was a marvelous delusion at work;
a blind faith that the very billionaires who had engineered one catastrophe
after another were actually going to swoop in and save them. The people were
literally on Facebook, "liking" and sharing propaganda stories like this that
celebrate the very enemies of their democracy. Having lost all faith in their
own government and themselves, the people now worried that their billionaire
ruling class was... too boring.

------
sologoub
This story misses a lot of points about the disadvantage that persists. It’s
not that the wealth gap prevents people from buying computers. This hasn’t
been true in US for over a decade - one can buy a fully programming capable
machine for $300-$400. Better yet, you can rent Amazon or Google servers for a
few cents at a time. I never imagined that as a kid.

Where there is will, there is a way. My first experience with computers was in
a relic of Soviet Science agency, when I was 5. Until 2000s, it was a struggle
just to get equipment to connect to the internet (pulse phone lines burned out
tone dial-up modems).

The advantage I had is that I knew about computers and the power they held. I
knew that math was the gateway to programming. I didn’t have funds for a fancy
new IBM or Apple, but I had knowledge enough to make things work.

I still meet people today on a daily basis that regard computer work as some
kind of borderline magic that they can never comprehend. This is the real
disadvantage.

I mostly blame our education system and the teachers that tell kids it’s ok to
not understand, that they are just “not good” at something.

If we can solve this attitude that mediocrity is ok, we’ll make a lot of
peoples lives better.

~~~
hellweaver666
your privilege is showing ;)

Seriously though. Lots of people are living pay check to pay check and
drowning in payday loans just to get through the month. $300 isn't something
that they have spare to blow on a computer. In this day and age there isn't
even a need to - not when they can get a €100 Android phone that will give
them internet access to do everything they want.

Of course... creating a business from a phone is all but impossible and this
is why we don't see many people from poor backgrounds becoming tech
billionaires.

~~~
repolfx
That's an absurd theory.

Firstly, you can buy computers for $30 if you need to.

But even if you want to get a laptop instead, the difference between $300 and
$100 is not significant if you care about saving for it. The idea that poor
people can't afford a computer is delusional - I've been to regions of Mexico
and China that are dirt poor and they have flat screen TVs. In fact I've
encountered lots of TVs in places much poorer than the USA. If they can buy
that they can buy a different kind of screen without a doubt. Poverty is not
an excuse for a lack of computer knowledge these days. Back in the 1980's,
sure.

------
skybrian
It's a clickbait headline. The story is more reasonable, about more
billionaires coming from middle class or better backgrounds.

This is what you'd expect with there being more middle-class Americans than
there used to be. I don't think that makes their stories boring.

I suspect availability bias. It misses billionaires not in the tech industry,
like Oprah Winfrey. (Not young, but what are some others?)

~~~
erikb
How do you define middle class? I think people going to these elite
universities either are rich(!), exceptionally talented or both.

~~~
whalerider
I'm not sure anyone in the rural area of my childhood would say that
Zuckerberg's parents (psychiatrist, and dentist) were just "middle-class". I'm
not saying he isn't talented, but he did have a software developer tutor him
privately in the 1990s.

------
paulpauper
What about all those Saudi princes and oil heirs. They don't seem boring.

 _In some ways, it 's great to live in the age of the nerd. And it’s tough to
mourn the decline of Wall Street-style corporate machismo. But a poor kid
growing up today may find it much harder to emulate the life path of someone
like Zuckerberg, who coded an instant messaging system before hitting puberty,
than that of even Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who grew up in Brooklyn
housing projects and at one point served concessions at Yankee Stadium to earn
extra money._

Becoming a billionaire is a pretty high bar for success. ..what I think there
are only 1000 of them.

Making a few millions is much more doable and till quite successful,. Someone
could have bought Facebook stock in 202-2013 and turned $20k into $200k. Or
Bitcoin. Stuff like that which does not require a genius IQ to make money .
There are opportunities to make money all around.

------
minton
> Today, Zuckerberg is a moral leader—a family man, and a donor to noble
> causes.

Facebook has a magic PR team.

~~~
jacquesm
Indeed, that jumped out at me as well. Whoever wrote that is either on the
take or terribly uninformed.

------
erikb
Hardship is still a story that is told in the Startup world, because how else
can you get talented young people grinding 120h/week on $40k with a high risk
of the company going broke in the next 1-24 months?

------
b_b
> a widening chasm between the rich and everyone else also presents political
> problems

This is definitely something we're already seeing, with contempt between
people of different educational levels, and the rising distrust between each
other.

On a related point however, I'd just like to mention that nowadays, the
Internet has made learning and information sooooo much more free and
accessible. Although you have to have a computer in the first place, I think
simple and cheap computers like chromebooks, or perhaps the smartphone you
carry, allow you access to much more information than before.

Being in a family where our earnings are below the US poverty line in a high-
cost area of residence, I am deeply appreciative of the wonderful people on
the Internet that have opened up their information for free access, and
especially to open-source for making programs and computing infinitely more
accessible.

The problem with all this of course, is that you have to have a computer and a
computing device in the first place. Internet can be very expensive, and can
sometimes be easy for a lot of families to cut away because it may be
perceived as unnecessary. The only solution I can think to that would be to
provide free internet for everyone, and educate them on how to use it
effectively beyond just the social media apps. Perhaps there are better ones?

------
imgabe
A lot of the older billionaires who had more "interesting" backgrounds grew up
during the Great Depression. A more likely explanation then, is that we simply
didn't have a Great Depression 30 years ago for today's young billionaires to
have grown up during. Zuckerberg and other young billionaires grew up in the
80s when the economy was pretty good.

------
southphillyman
Barriers to building wealth always existed. Large parts of the population had
no chance to do what Buffet's dad did because of discrimination and other
issues back then. Today it's a matter of the level of education you can afford
to have access to.

The bootstrap mythos was always just that. There is typically a large degree
of privilege and luck involved.

------
martythemaniak
The reason this is a bad article is because you can essentially the the exact
opposite article, and it'd still be as valid.

"The problem with today's billionaires is that they're too zany. The older
generation of billionaires is much more stable, perhaps even a little bit
boring. Look at Buffet and Gates working on eradicating disease, a boring,
detailed task that improves the lives people. Look at <some other older guy>
donating to <medical research>.

Meanwhile today's younger generation feels a need to be in the spotlight,
gather followers, construct outlandish personas and constantly perform for the
crowd. Notice Musk's launching a car into Mars orbit, Bezos' outlandish moon
colonization plans, Jack Dorsey's fashion forrays, Zuckerburg's flying drone
internet, Larry Page's flying cars. Where is their civic duty, boring causes,
etc etc?"

~~~
gspetr
Just recently Musk offered help in the Tham Luang cave rescue.

------
analog31
At the end of the day, a rich shopkeeper is still a shopkeeper. Nothing
against shopkeepers, but I see no reason for any one of them to be more
interesting than another.

"Well, I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other
frog."

\-- Mark Twain, "The celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County"

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Maybe because, besides being shopkeepers, they are also human beings?

~~~
analog31
Absolutely, my point being that there's no reason to expect them to be
exceptional human beings.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
There's no reason to expect more of them to be exceptional human beings than
any other group. There's reason to expect _some_ of them to be exceptional,
just like any other group.

But I suspect that I'm not really disagreeing with you...

------
natecavanaugh
Is there such thing as a canonical definition of a boring or interesting
upbringing?

Looking at my own life, some may find it fascinating, and some may find it
banal.

And when I compare it to my father's or some of my friends, it can seem really
tame. Compared against other friends, it could be riveting.

But I don't think I've met a person with a boring upbringing. Everyone has a
story, a list of hurts and triumphs that add the seasoning of their life
experience.

Assuming that the rich don't have these, or that they're required to enumerate
them to the press is its own form of myopic elitism.

And, I know plenty of people with interesting backgrounds who grew up to be a
net drain on society.

What are we measuring here, and really, who cares?

------
jessriedel
Dustin Moskovitz (number 5 at Facebook) and his wife Cari Tuna are very non-
boring billionaires.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dustin_Moskovitz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dustin_Moskovitz)

They started the Open Philanthropy Project, arguably the most exciting
charitable organization on the planet.

[https://ssir.org/articles/entry/giving_in_the_light_of_reaso...](https://ssir.org/articles/entry/giving_in_the_light_of_reason)

[https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-08795-0](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-08795-0)

~~~
pofilat
In the article, "boring" just means poor. Zuck has his sins, but anyone who
thinks Zuck is "boring" is crazy. The guy learned Mandarin as an adult, to
make a business deal. That's more hustle than selling hot dogs at the stadium.

------
zdragnar
"unlike yesterday's titans, the newest of generation billionaires don’t have
histories likely to assuage popular resentment."

Basically sums up the article. It's just another class warfare screed, full of
half truths and misdirection.

------
Alex3917
The barriers to entry of learning to code are falling dramatically though.
When I was a kid having a computer that cost several thousand dollars was
table stakes, and even then in practice most of the kids who got beyond basics
had parents who were also engineers.

These days a good enough computer costs less than $500, and in the last five
years the free resources on the web have gotten good enough that anyone can
teach themselves without needing any expensive classes. At most you might need
another couple hundred dollars worth of books. At this point English literacy
is probably a bigger barrier to entry than the monetary cost.

~~~
cableshaft
And you can get a refurbished Chromebook for as little as $110, walk to your
nearest free Wi-Fi source (Starbucks, McDonalds, local library, whatever), and
go to a site like REPL.it or Codecademy and start learning how to program.

Or get a used TI-85 for ~$30 and learn that way, which is how I learned the
basics of programming, 25 years ago. Back then those cost about $250, adjusted
for inflation. A Chromebook is much more versatile than that.

~~~
pofilat
You can't walk into McDonald's and buy an introduction to Silicon Valley
investors, and a depth chart of Harvard CS grads employees. Facebook was one
of a dozen competing social networks, and they won largely because of Zuck's
connections to capital and talent.

------
projektir
We seem very insistent on the value of hardship sometimes. But many of these
people didn't grow up as poorly as the spirit of the article would make it
seem. Seems like most had reasonable parents.

Not sure if anything really changed, billionaires were always very rare so
there is going to be lots of randomness involved and it seems we just have
more straightforward markers for privilege now.

------
federicobond
The US is much richer than 80 years ago, so it’s way more likely than
billionaires come from comfortable middle-class families, of which there are
many more now. If Warren Buffett or any of the others mentioned had been born
the year Mark Zuckerberg was born, they would have probably enjoyed a similar
upbringing.

------
seanalltogether
This article is ridiculous. Do you see many individuals in this wikipedia
entry that started from a scrappy poor underclass?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires#200...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires#2000)

------
jacquesm
> Today, Zuckerberg is a moral leader

Pardon?

Zuckerberg is _anything_ but a moral leader, he's the polar opposite of a
moral leader.

------
olivermarks
The anodyne personas of young billionaires is probably bought, trained and
presented by sophisticated handlers. I'll bet the private lives of these
people are very different to the public image, which is really important in a
very puritanical and judgmental western world. CF Zuckerberg

~~~
pofilat
What do you think Zuck does in private? We learned about what Kalanick did,
and Cuban and Trump make no secret of their lifestyles; but heard no such
things about Zuck.

~~~
olivermarks
[https://www.npr.org/2016/10/25/499213698/whats-it-like-to-
be...](https://www.npr.org/2016/10/25/499213698/whats-it-like-to-be-rich-ask-
the-people-who-manage-billionaires-money)

[https://www.amazon.com/Capital-without-Borders-Managers-
Perc...](https://www.amazon.com/Capital-without-Borders-Managers-
Percent/dp/0674743806)

------
golemotron
Key takeaway from this article: someone at Bloomberg had to write a story on a
deadline.

~~~
refurb
Editor: We're short one tech article for our website, I need you to do it!

Intern: But I don't know anything about tech!

Editor: Neither do I, but I'm sure if we put our heads together we can come up
with something good!

------
dionidium
Who cares about their boring pasts? I'm more concerned about their boring
_present_. Say what you want about Elon Musk, but at least he's _up to
something_. What's the point of having a billion dollars if not to develop
wild ideas?

These guys are all like Samir in Office Space: "You know what I would do if I
had a million dollars? I would invest half of it in low risk mutual funds and
then take the other half over to my friend Asadulah who works in securities…"

As Michael responds, this is kind of missing the point.

Does Zuckerberg really think the best thing he could do with his life and $77
billion is to incrementally improve the effectiveness of advertising on
Facebook? There's _nothing_ else he can think of to do?

~~~
pofilat
You seem to be confusing Zuckerberg with Facebook, Inc, and ignoring that Musk
is both 13 years older than Zuckerberg, and that bringing 4 billion people
onto the internet is "interesting". Musk cares about sci-fi things like going
to Mars by himself, and making luxury cars in the crowded EV market; Zuck
cares about doing something interesting for billions of people on Earth.

------
zeristor
So often people talk about social mobility as in people rising to the top, I’d
be interested to read about those who descend; illness, bad luck, or they just
don’t want to be rich.

Any suggestions?

------
tibbon
Perhaps I'm just not disciplined enough with money, but I know if I had that
type of cash I'd definitely be doing some really interesting things
artistically to push the scope and scale of art today. I'd love to see art of
10x the scale we see at Burning Man in cities around the world. The LED "art"
we see in many parts of Manhattan for example is just terrible application of
a medium/technique.

I'd love to build parks and spaces for people to connect, experience joy and
explore. Of course, I'd want to do participate in philanthropy too, but
there's something to be said for commissioning the art to define the 21st
century.

------
rahulmehta95
Interesting how the article makes no note of the Collison brothers' and
Stripe...that's a significant Valley success story that doesn't fit this mold

------
elorant
So tech billionaires are boring and everyone else isn't? Name five non-tech
billionaires who are more knowledgeable or interesting than Musk. Or Gates.

------
k__
They had no struggles, so maybe they're missing parts of life that let you
quesion the status quo?

------
jlebrech
you have to be boring to not want to just have fun past your first few
millions.

elon musk is the exception, as he just made money doing fun things.

