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Comment by spatley | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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