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>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 ), 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_... ). 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.

Just a quick fact check. Howard Buffet was temporarily unemployed during the Great Depression. By the time Warren was 9 years old his father had a successful brokerage and was elected to the Omaha Board of Education. By the time he was 12 his father was elected to the US House. He went on to give Warren the initial investment for his investment company.

Warren didn’t grow up with unemployed parents.

I'm only basing it off of how the writer presented the argument. He didn't mention these facts, but he presented these as if they were also people with hard backgrounds, effectively arguing against his main point, which had only a single person he would point to in support of it.

Like I mentioned earlier, there's probably some truth to what he's arguing for, she just did a piss poor job making a case for her point.

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.

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.

DC area resident: Eleanor Roosevelt High School might be the best high school in Prince Georges County. I'm not sure that it counts as "reasonably fancy". Still, if your father is a professor of mathematics, high school may not matter that much.

It’s hilarious what passes for “self made” when you read stories about the wealthy.

> 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.

Honestly, though, isn't that what information is? You can try to make it perfect, but I bet you'd wind up inventing just as much new stuff as you would uncovering 'the truth'. It's a philosophical argument, what is perspective, what is understanding, what 'should' be conveyed versus what is simply being repeated, what has been discovered, what is the true representation of reality versus what is a selectively biased data set.

There's probably a balance of how much criticism a journalist can expect to obtain when they are looking to uncover something mundane and tailored to a crowd, versus something truly groundbreaking.

Honestly I think a lot of people are just exhausted from the internet. Everywhere you look, it's either extreme criticism on 'group think' or being uncertain whether to engage in agreement because agreement can be criticized as 'group think'. Then you get divergence of opinion, need to distinguish oneself, but you can be different in a billion ways and that still doesn't make every variation of different better than whatever base you opted out of, especially if that change is done in a lazy, circular, thoughtless fashion.

It's very circular. That doesn't necessarily make it bad. I don't think trying to speak out necessarily means one is trying to shove ideas into people's heads inception style. I honestly think if that's something you are afraid of, that's probably because you've entertained the thought at least once or twice yourself. And that sort of stuff just happens, being a fish of indeterminate size in a pond of indeterminate size.

My main point is if she wanted to make this point, she could spend a little more time digging for examples in favor of that point, of which I'm sure she would be able to find if she wanted to, and less time making the exact opposite point because these are the five CEOs she can name off the top of her head (that's an exaggeration, but that's how it came across).

I'm not saying her argument can be objectively proven or disproven. At best she can only show a correlation based on her definition of what constitutes a 'boring' life. But she should at least have tried to make the case she had chosen as best as she could (given a limited timeframe and a modicum of research). If this is the best she could come up with, I am not impressed.

Granted I made a generalization to journalists in general out of it, but that's just based on a handful of articles that have made dubious claims that I've bothered to take the time to read fully, and being disappointed in how weak the arguments seem to be (because I'd like to see a good argument for why I should consider those claims to be true, and accept those arguments, or at least think critically and thoughtfully about it, rather than being able to quickly dismiss what they say because they said almost nothing at all).

There was another one recently that claimed that Online Dating leads to Depression, and the text supports the assertion because A) Match.com did a user survey and found people thought online dating was addicting, and B) 'studies show' that addictive behavior can lead to depression. Therefore 'studies show' Online Dating leads to Depression, for the headline. Such a weak defense of their point, and they might as well have also said just about everything that can be addicting leads to depression at that point.

Just about everything that is an opinion can be deconstructed into a correlation.

If you don't want to agree with it, don't.

Yeah. I see it as part of the decline of journalism in general. This article is appropriate for some random person's blog, basically. There a few people might read it but they probably wouldn't reshare it, and the giant link filtering machine of the internet would ensure it dropped to the bottom of the barrel pretty quickly.

Because, as you say, she spends a lot of words to argue nothing at all (some nouveau riche had ordinary backgrounds and others didn't, tech nerds are boring men except they're interesting enough to write a whole article about them, this is sorta bad but actually sorta good, the non-boring histories I'm referring to are mostly imagined anyway, etc).

The only reason we're discussing such a nothing-burger of an article is that Bloomberg published it (the only article on Bloomberg by this person). This leads to the question of why? Apparently it's triggered by Zuckerberg overtaking Buffet's wealth - an news event worthy of maybe a paragraph of text. Should Bloomberg really be investing their resources here? Surely there are topics that deserve this level of effort more?

The difference between old school billionaires/big industrialists is PR.

In the old days, it was less of a science and was all about "big". Milk Bone dog biscuit ads 100 years ago featured a big picture of the factory.

Now, it's all about a carefully crafted image. There's a team of people making sure that only that crafted image, which is boring, appears in public. Some people like Elon Musk or Richard Branson are all about the personal brand show/cult of personality. Most people wouldn't recognize Sergey Brin.

The author acknowledges a raising standard of living in the piece. Could that not provide part of the explanation as to why the rags to riches stories aren't as common?

>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

And growing up where news could take weeks to travel, no internet, a lot of 1-car households, a lot of 1-income households, diseases we've all but eradicated were still common place, a world war etc. Even if you aren't directly involved with those things, that makes a difference on your mindset.