> Bill Gates, for example, had a trust fund from his grandfather that gave him a cushion in case he failed.
Do you happen to have a source? I'd not heard this and was curious as to the amount.
Do you happen to have a source? I'd not heard this and was curious as to the amount.
However:
Several writers claim that Maxwell set up a million-dollar trust fund for Gates. A 1993 biographer who interviewed both Gates and his parents (among other sources) found no evidence of this and dismissed it as one of the "fictions" surrounding Gates's fortune. Gates denied the trust fund story in a 1994 interview and indirectly in his 1995 book The Road Ahead.[2]
So I'm inclined to think it's not true, although it does seem a fairly wide-spread story.
But at the same time, Bill Gates did come from a rich family, so he wasn't going to starve if Microsoft didn't work out.
[1] http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/
[2] https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/link-suggestion/wpcd_2008-09...
Even someone with a $1mil trust fund can make terrible enough choices to end up homeless.
And then, the thing is that family who was struggling the whole time, won't agree on dropping the best university with wonderful perspectives for some kind of crazy (at the moment it was very "crazy").
People are not "just risky" by default, they are influenced heavily by their life, and as someone mentioned here already, a lot of rich guys came from pretty decent living families, who can afford to fallback if something. For instance, a lot of world travellers, who try to live differently, actually have some passive income, property of just loads of cash, just in case something will go wrong.