What Bill Gates was doing at 20 years old

If you become successful people will use it as bragging rights. Otherwise you go back and finish the degree and no one hears about it.

That would have made a client wait based on a lie ('we already have the software') and depend of them (when the client could have gone shopping elsewhere where they do have the software he needs), which could have cost millions in damages (e.g. failure to get its products to market, because the component he though he bought didn't actually exist when it was supposed to delivered)...

Is that so? I was doing roughly the same thing at roughly the same time (perhaps a couple years later). I talked my way into the local university to use their Unix machine. Was I able to do that because I was the son of an Electrical Engineer and because I attended the private school next door to the university? Hell yes.

However by 1970, CCC had gone bankrupt, which meant that the boys had to find another place to continue to work with computers. Luckily, Allen’s father worked at the University of Washington, so they gained access to computers there.

Of course he probably still worked pretty hard, but lots of people wouldn't have been within 100 miles of a computer before they were 20.

Also, he went to a private school that had a computer for him to use.

I watched an interview of his where he admitted that if he hadn't gone to private school, it is unlikely he would have ended up founding Microsoft.

Yes, a stolen OS he had no part in developing.

I don't doubt that he's a competent programmer (or was at one point). I see no evidence that he's a great one. There are programmers with ten times his ability who will never see 0.01% of his money.

You are disagreeing with him but just adding to his points. If my father had a company with his name inscribed on a building I would have had some connections for my own business. Instead pop struggled to put food on the table and barely owned a flower pot

Rags to riches are fairy tales. Reality is different. Even Elon musk's father is a millionaire

People coming from a powerful, influential, well connected families have countless opportunities to start business or get into politics or anything else.

In many countries in the world any random 20-years-old trying to talk to IBM would be laughed at.

Research has shown that parents social connections are the most significant factor shared by today's billionaires.

It shows how grossly unfair the "fortune" of the wealth of parents' is... and it's becoming less and less fair over time.

More than ever, I think it's essential, that as much as possible we move towards ensuring everyone starts with the basics. Health, education... We can't control parenting, but we can create conditions for it.

It's not just fair for the individual, but fulfilling the potential of all makes for a better nation. This would not affect the people already at the top within a nation... except through the contest between nations. Those that do not nuture their human resources will be replaced by those that do.

This is how the USA rose to dominance... and this is how it falls.

Poor parenting is a result of poverty. It is massively difficult to parent well when you are in financially dire situations constantly, surrounded by other people who are also in dire financial situations, and sending you kids to massively underfunded public schools.

You have the relationship backwards: being white meant no barriers. He never showed up for a meeting to be pointed at the back door or asked whether he was there to apply for the job as janitor or security guard. Nobody assumed he was there to take notes. He didn’t face constant questions about whether he could actually do something or was just “the diversity hire”.

That’s huge, especially when you look at the stats for things like loan or VC approval rates. Starting a company as a white man isn’t easy but it’s still easier than what most other people have to do.

No one is devaluing his accomplishments, they are calling the article out for pretending he’s some kind of special snowflake, when in reality he had been dealt an ideal hand in life.

Articles like this remove all historical context to convince lower middle class people of all races that it just takes dropping out college and faking it to you make it to get what you want. This is not to say that there isn’t some truth to that, but let’s be real about the massive head start Gates got, so we aren’t just ultimately implying that poor people are lazy and deserve their lot in life, because if rich white boy Bill Gates can do it, anyone no matter how poor, unlucky, underfunded their public education or broken their family is can do it too.

I’m not saying people should just whine and accept their bad luck and victimize themselves either, you have to play the hand your dealt to the best of your ability, but articles like this just perpetuate a contextless ashistorical lie to sell to other mediocre neolibs.

You also get to enjoy a lot of otherwise impossible social biases in your favor. People tend to perceive your success to come naturally and hence set you up for it.

Other benefits include access to a network of successful people all over the economic ecosystem. That in itself is a huge boost to anything you would do.

So in REALITY elon musk had an even bigger advantage being white in africa than whites do in america.

You are now smarter and hopefully less racially bias

Think a black kid - even a wealthy black kid - with a thick alabama accent would have had the same chance?

A broad spectrum of recent well-known examples:

Jan Koum, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin, Jim Clark, Jerry Yang, Craig Newmark, Sheldon Adelson, David Tepper, Howard Schultz, Larry Ellison, Shahid Khan, John Paul DeJoria, Harold Hamm, Jensen Huang, Jack Dorsey, Ev Williams, Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, Marc Andreessen, Kirk Kerkorian, Carl Lindner, Ralph Lauren, Alec Gores, Ken Langone, Carl Berg, Thomas Peterffy, Michael Jordan, JR Simplot, Mark Cuban.