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Bill Gates was not born middle class. His Father Bill Sr. was a partner in a very prestigious law firm and his Mother Mary was on the board of Regents at the University of Washington.

Despite his wealth, Bill's father reportedly ran the slide projector for Bill's talk in the early days of Comdex. In those pre-powerpoint days a draftsman created a paper version of the "viewgraphs" which were photographed and then displayed with a slide projector or on a overhead projector. The overhead projector used a "burned" transparency created by putting a special type of transparency film instead of paper in a xerox machine and copying the draftman's original.

It doesn't matter if he was the son of Warren Buffet. He flipping made Microsoft let him keep his billions he earned them. I guarantee, if 99% of the population were born under the same circumstances, they could not produce a Microsoft.

You forget how instrumental his lawyer father was in creating the first software license agreements and how his family financed the mainframe computing time he was given before any teenager had ever had access to these machines.

His biography is quite clear on how lucky he was and how much his parents contributed to his success. Denying it is perpetuating a myth of a self made billionaire that simply isn't true.

Being self made is irrelevant, all that matters is society benefited from the value that Microsoft produced, and he was enriched accordingly. It's not complicated. Who cares if he had a leg up. Should we think any less of SpaceX because Elon had rich parents. Progress is hard, we need to welcome it how ever it comes, and reward those who produce.

If Bill Gates was born to poor parents there's a >99% chance he could not produce a Microsoft.

His parents weren’t billionaires. There’s a big difference between being born poor lowering risk of success and 99.999% being born non-aristocracy preventing success.

I have no doubt that he earned some of what he has. But I have doubt that his work added enough value to the world that he should be so extraordinarily wealthy. The scientists who discovered, and started producing Insulin probably added more net value - yet I don't think any of them became a billionaire as a result.

Bill Gates's mother was on the board of IBM, which helped lead to IBM making a deal with Microsoft. This isn't very different from landed aristocracy marrying only other aristos to maintain power and wealth within their networks.

She was not on the IBM board.

She was on United Way's executive committee with the IBM CEO.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates

Fair point but Gates' parents actually helped create the computer club by financing it. They weren't middle class.

Sure.

But the IBM deal wasn't a corrupt insider affair either.

The same kind of deal making happens in the VC/PE world? Isn't it true that you not only get money investments from VC/PE firms but also get connections and deal-making with their portfolio companies. In that way it is quite similar. Either you are in the club or you are not.

> aristocracy was zero sum and rent seeking where billionaires aren’t necessarily

How can you look at companies like Google, Apple and Facebook and conclude they aren't rent-seeking? Google's entire business is essentially renting space on the most valuable real estate in the world. Apple routinely shuts down or replaces apps that compete with theirs. All of these companies seek to just barely toe the line of not being subject to anti-trust laws. Of course these are companies rather than individuals, but the nature of capitalism is such that rent-seeking happens via corporations controlled by the wealthy.

> But Bill Gates being born to a middle class lawyer and making billions

Other people can litigate the specifics of Bill Gates or others, but the US has poor income mobility compared to other wealthy countries, largely due to the capture of our political system by the billionaire class.

Rent seeking is defined as having a controlled, fixed size market and extracting as much as possible from it.

Google created its market and it is still expanding. Same for Apple, Facebook, etc.

Monopoly or market dominance != rent seeking.

Only the billionaire is allowed to walk on the billionaire's private beach (often in violaton of nominal law).

> If someone is king, then that means no one else can be.

Obiously not true. Each king is only king on the king's property. Much like Ellison and Gates and Walton have their own property.

> Theoretically we have estate taxes and laws against perpetuity that help some and could be prevented.

And maybe if they were practical and not purely theoretical, the democratic populace would be mollified.

> But Bill Gates being born to a middle class lawyer

Bill Gates was born to a multi-millionaire.

> different from Bill Gates being born to the Earl of Orkney and selling all the potatoes in Ireland to make billions.

Bill Gates signed deals with IBM and Dell to sell almost all the OSes in the US, to make billions. Even people who installed other OSes had to pay Bill Gates first.

> Bill Gates was born to a multi-millionaire.

Typical viewpoint on HN is that a $600k a year is average for someone in their early 30s, therefore there's nothing non-average about a multi-millionaire parent.