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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Most of the billionaires are assholes and/or criminals with a couple of noteworthy exceptions. So maybe not being an asshole will get you ahead in the middle but it won't get you all the way to the top of the foodchain.

So this is solid advice, but unfortunately the role models are exactly those people that didn't follow this sort of advice. Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, Apple, Google and Facebook all would not have been as large and would not generate as much money for their founders if the founders had been nice guys. Fortunately we also have Woz and a couple of others like him to balance things out a bit.

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Can anything actually realiably get you to that top though? Even though a lot of asshole are there, I would doubt that being an asshole is a pre-req, and that in fact it's extreme luck - these people are > 6 sigma outliers when it comes to a lot of things. And it could very well be a learned behaviour of being that rich. Either way, it's pointless to aim to be one of those people - you just can't without the stars aligning in so many ways you can't control. Instead you're just an asshole who wants to be a billionaire, which probably makes you more of an asshole.

6 out of the top 15 American billionaires inherited their wealth, that is the secret to wealth, have rich parents.

And 9 out of the top 10 American billionaires are self-made.

It's amazing how you can use the same data to argue the opposite point, just on how you frame it.

Define "self-made", that's the real difference of opinion. How many first generation immigrants from truly impoverished nations become billionaires?

A group doesn't have to be the majority to be significant.

I wouldn't count Bill Gates entirely self made and so would himself. His parents, his colleagues, and every one around him played a major role in success. If anything, I'd say luck and timing are more important than being nice.

I don't think that is true

Warren Buffet' father was a congressman

Larry Page's father was a professor of computer science at University

Sergey Brin's father was professor of mathematics at University and his mother worked at NASA

these are the first three I looked up and they don't look like low or middle class

Your model breaks down. 99.9999999...% of children of congresspeople, professors and NASA workers are not billionaires.

It's a "necessary but not sufficient" type of condition.

I think you made some mistakes in your math.

There are 535 Congressmen in USA, 99.99999999% of them is well... 535.

If I find the son of a Congressman that made billions your model will prove wrong

Warren Buffet is one.

>>99.9999999...% of children of

Still one in a billion

How are professors not middle class, financially? Academia doesn't pay particularly well.

I wish my father was professor at University.

How is it not upper class?

Financially - it's possible they're middle class. I've seen plenty of professors making $150k+/yr though... That's 3x the median household income.

But, I think middle class is more than just raw finance. Educational background of the parents is very important too. If you grow up with two professors - don't you think you'll do better than two high school dropouts? (On average)

I hate that word, self-made. I think of Bezos, Buffet, Gates and all three of them had investment from their parents or had a business relationship made possible by their parents. Of the billionaires I know of, all them came from at least an upper middle class family. Certainly they are a special kind of talent and a big part of their own success, but they were raised by nurturing families with significant resources.

> And 9 out of the top 10 American billionaires are self-made.

Is there really such a thing as self-made? I honestly don't believe so. Otherwise, I think more people would do it.

Disagreed. Simply said, not everyone has the chops to do it, not even mentioning luck. If that wasn't the case, we wouldn't have a demand/supply graph for software engineers in the US so screwed up, given how much pay one can get and how few credentials are required for it, especially compared to other similarly paying jobs.

Not saying that those situations are perfectly comparable at all, just trying to make a point that "if it was so good and easy, why isn't everyone successfully doing it" isn't really a solid argument for this.

Well, to be fair, I said "more" not "everyone".

Also, if it were true that people could be "self-made", we'd see a more diverse selection of "self-made" people. Instead, we see races and genders that aren't doing anywhere near as well as other races and genders.

If you think about diversity in terms of "races and genders", then I agree with you, there could be more of that.

If you think in terms of financial upbringing, we got a lot of diversity going. US has an insane turnover in terms of wealth, with a really high number of first gen millionaires and billionaires. Also note the fact that 70% of families losing wealth just a generation or two down the road[0]. Which is imo a very good thing, as it brings more evidence and support for the "self-made" theory.

In terms of social upbringing, just look at the numbers of top-tier CEOs and founders who are children of immigrants or immigrants themselves[1].

0. https://money.com/rich-families-lose-wealth/

1. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/30/us-tech-companies-founded-by...

Majority isn't so much what matters.

The percentage of people with significant inherited wealth who becomes billionaires far exceeds the percentage of people with significant inherited wealth in the general population.

Thus, inheriting wealth has an enormous impact on the likelihood of becoming a billionaire in America.

Are they self made? They might have made billions, but did they come from wealthy well connected families that or were they self made? Turning a million into a billion is significantly easier than turning a hundred into a billion because it buys you the ability to try without risking your future.

Every time someone brings up people being self-made the discussion turns into post hoc justification. It seems that we can't simply accept someone's immense success and we must find some excuse for why they made it. Yes, luck and the people around them play a role in any success (and equally, in any failure) and that must be accounted for, but that's not nearly enough to automatically discount the actual person.

I guarantee if a the son of a middle class innkeeper with an absentee father from Greenbow, Alabama became a billionaire people would say he had an advantage because he got to experience a diverse group of people as a kid and had a loving mother who supported him. An orphan living on the streets in an impoverished town in Italy and we'd say not everyone has the opportunity to make their own way when they're only 9 years old.

Shrug.

Ok, we've got:

Jeff Bezos

Bill Gates

Warren Buffett

Mark Zuckerberg

Larry Ellison

Larry Page

Sergey Brin

Michael Bloomberg

Steve Ballmer

Jim Walton

I'll start: Here's my list of the "self-made":

Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Michael Bloomberg (although I don't know how he made partner at Bloomberg at 30). Maybe Steve Ballmer. Page and Brin are special cases; they're the children of university professors.

That means that 9 out of 15 didn't inherit their wealth. So, maybe that's not so much the secret after all.

Connections are still useful. Consider Zuckerberg, he didn't inherit his wealth from his parents, but the connections he inherited from his father, a prominent dentist in Westchester County, certainly helped.

That's what bothers me about all the adoration "billionaires" are getting lately. These guys got where they are by taking advantage of whatever they could, not by being generous or nice.

It's not even that - people venerate the results of luck. For every "self-made" billionaire, there's untold legions of people who had nearly the extra same formula, but were just a little off. Sure, a lot of them worked hard and had good ideas, but so do tons of people. Somehow it's more acceptable to think these people earned their success more than a simple lottery winner, whose long hours and hard work at their janitorial job gave them enough free cash to buy a ticket.

I think it’s also wrong to attribute everything to luck. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Zuckerberg or Gates are certainly very capable people who would have done well under most circumstances. But they were also lucky to be at the right place at the right time and meeting the right people.

I would say it leans HEAVILY towards luck. Given their background and abilities, they certainly would have done well regardless, we have to remember that "done well" can be measured in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. To increase that by another 4 orders of magnitude isn't going to be simply due to being capable.

They are getting this adoration because they invest heavily in building it. They now have hordes of PR people creating their reputations in newspapers, tvs, social networks and blogs.

It's better than lobbying because you don't need to convince people to do things your way if they like you.

I've noticed such activity in places as unexpected as imgur, reddit or HN. Posts boosted out of nowhere, waves of comments for a specific trend in their favor, accounts that are very quick to react to critics, etc.

It feels off, but on the other hand it's impossible to prove. You could always argue it's genuine and it would be impossible to be sure.

I think a lot of people confuse "being an asshole" and "playing the game." If you ever play poker with people who don't know they're doing, they'll often accuse you for "being an asshole" for making an optimal decision. The point of the game is to make as much money as possible, so it's a bit silly to be upset when someone is leveraging every advantage they have as long as they aren't cheating.

I'd guess that most people would be ok with not getting to the top. Most would be happy to have a few million dollars in the bank by the time they retire.

America seems to have an absolutist mindset. Being a billionaire != success/happiness in life. There's a lot of grey between the black and white.

The leaders behind those companies did not exhibit asshole behavior consistently.

They cultivated strategic partnerships with the right people at the right time, and once they got enough of what they wanted, sometimes they behaved like assholes.

They probably behaved like assholes with some employees but not their key employees.

> Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, Apple, Google and Facebook all would not have been as large and would not generate as much money for their founders if the founders had been nice guys.

Possibly. How can we know for sure? Isn't this survivorship bias? Wouldn't more feasible companies, with more friendly leaders, have become leaders then? Or how about multiple companies ie. healthy competition?

I think most people would agree that Google founders were nice guys before (and even for some time after) they became ultra rich.

As much bad rap as Google gets, they actually provide a lot of resources for someone looking for work. With Internet access, you can get email, a phone number, document editor, 15GB of storage with file sync, and probably many many more. However, unless you are savvy enough to go into your account and disable a bunch of stuff, they're going to use that data to track you.

As an ex-googler, Google was mostly nice and virtuous till Larry/Sergey/Eric were at helm. Things started changing when Ruth joined Alphabet, there was deeper focus on investor returns etc. Soon after that CEO role was transferred to Sundar.

However, I have to qualify this by saying that I didn't ever work in Ads. And this is a common day-to-day googler's view who didn't know anything that went on in the executive land (e.x. Andy Rubin)

> So maybe not being an asshole will get you ahead in the middle but it won't get you all the way to the top of the foodchain.

On the other hand, you're much more likely to get to the upper-middle than the top, so it's reasonable to optimize for that more-readily-achievable goal.

> Most of the billionaires are assholes and/or criminals with a couple of noteworthy exceptions. So maybe not being an asshole will get you ahead in the middle but it won't get you all the way to the top of the foodchain.

Or did they become assholes along the way/once they got there?

Wait.. are you saying bill gates is an asshole?

Say it ain't so!

I wouldn't classify him as an asshole, but he definitely wasn't always the nicest guy:

https://www.gq.com/story/young-bill-gates-was-an-angry-offic...

Oh you sweet child

> Fortunately we also have Woz and a couple of others like him to balance things out a bit.

Except Woz ended up a low digit millionaire, and Jobs a multi-billionaire. Hard work simply doesn't pay off the way being a sociopath does in our society.

Yep, Rockefeller, Ford, etc were notorious assholes. So was Jobs, Gates, Ellison, Zuckerburg, etc. By all accounts, Trump is also an asshole and he is a billionaire and POTUS.

> So maybe not being an asshole will get you ahead in the middle

Not convinced of this either. You can't get away with being the type of assholes the billionaires are, but you still have to be a bit of an asshole to move up in the middle.

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