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.
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.
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.
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.