To inherit a small fortune and just not lose it is admirable. Yet this person is mocking Bezos for turning a quite small fortune into one of the largest on the planet. As if it doesn't count if he didn't start from scratch. Privilege does not erase accomplishment.
>“this person is mocking Bezos for turning a quite small fortune into one of the largest on the planet”
No, he didn’t do that all. He’s just providing context about the early beginnings of Amazon that allowed Bezos to built this. Bezos deserves credit for what he built but let’s not act as if he came from the gutter.
Nobody is erasing anything. It's just merely noted that in order to make a billion dollars, it helps to start with a million dollars. Just common sense if you understand capitalism, but with some examples in this case.
If the amount of stress-relief that having a small cushion of a couple tens of thousands of dollars, (such as what I and people in my peer group would have had when we were getting started) scales up to having a million or more to start with then it definitely makes a huge difference.
The simple fact of knowing but there's a place to fall back on for a few weeks or a few months that isn't flipping burgers or scraping together money to get your car out of impound because it wouldn't start and you had to leave it on the street for a week to get it looked at. The ability to give yourself the liberty of taking time away from "producing stuff" to attend some social event or mixer where you might meet someone who could put you in touch with others who are interested in your idea, without having to cold call grind every single investment lead. The network that having this kind of money around brings to you. these are incalculable advantages that are often glossed over or dismissed when arguments about supposed envy and jealousy of others' mega-success come up.
And even more intangible but still very present in the mindset of people who are trying to get a startup off the ground at all, is that having family with this kind of money available, even if they don't give you a single cent of it, is likely to make you feel more comfortable about taking a risk because it's very likely that your family understands the upsides of taking a risk. Which is completely different from coming from a background where everyone close to you expects you to work an honest trade or profession for a regular paycheck, and with whom you have to rationalize your life choices - why didn't you just become a doctor or a lawyer, etc. - always on the defense about why you were doing what you're doing instead of getting even notional support from them instead.
