The Donut King who went from rags to riches, twice

Winchell was (and is) a business, not a charity.

The article lacks details but Ockham's Razor dictates that the most plausible was that Winchell and he entered into a business arrangement where he was running their donut shop for a share of profits. They provided the capital, he did all the work and Winchell got a cut of his profits.

He then saved aggressively and started buying more donut shops.

Notice that Winchell had similar arrangement with many other people and presumably they didn't become millionaires.

As to luck: he trained 100+ other immigrants to successfully operate a donut shop so if an immigrant that most likely doesn't even speak English can profitably operate a donut shop, maybe luck is not such a big factor.

As for why he became a millionaire and not others - I don't see any luck there either. He followed the same formula a hundred times: open one more donut shop. He was just more ambitious, worked harder, saved more aggressively and took a bit more risk.

https://www.encyclopedia.com/books/politics-and-business-mag...

Even as teenagers those are massive red flags.

There’s plenty of people in the USA presented with much more opportunity than this man received. Few have achieved anywhere near as much.

I’d wager that if he got his first job as a janitor he’d be running a cleaning empire rather than a donut chain.

The article is loosely worded but what happened was that first he invested 3 months of his time (while holding other jobs to support himself) into Winchell's training program.

Winchell is a franchise of donut shops. I don't know what the deal was back then, but today "Winchell's has a franchise fee of up to $0, with a total initial investment range of $3,400 to $44,700"

https://www.franchisegrade.com/franchises/winchell-s

His first donut shop was a Winchell franchise. A franchise is not a gift. He had to work hard, make the business profitable and pay back portion of the profits back to Winchell.

He became rich by extremely hard work, saving all his profits and re-investing them into opening more donut shops.

And if you ever worked in Silicon Valley as a programmer, you must have noticed how people from India and China are over-represented in that profession.

Not to mention plenty of white males that are not rich and successful.

Being white male is neither sufficient nor necessary for success.

This is actually an interesting study in internal contradictions of the woke ideology. East Asians face a lot of racism when they move to Europe / America. Racial slurs, distrust from authorities, unwillingness to rent premises etc. No doubt about that, I was a kid in the early 90s and Vietnamese in Czechoslovakia were obvious targets, unfortunately. You could see it on a daily basis back then.

But that does not prevent them from growing very rich and successful. The so-called "systemic racism" somehow fails to prevent them from reaching elite status in large numbers.

Which business environment? The competitiveness is absolutely not universal across all markets in the US. There are plenty of markets that aren't competitive at all.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/popu...

It’s also my opinion that the internet and use of computers and high speed communications have led to more market efficiency and less arbitrage opportunities. In decades past, an individual might have been more likely than now to notice and take advantage of an inefficiency, whereas now the bigger players have access to much more data about the market, satellite imagery, pricing and sales information, etc so that they are competing on all levels.

That's why we put the regulations in place. We can argue there are too many, but just smashing the current system is no way to restore anything. And it hasn't - we're back to worse than we were during the gilded age.

Could have stopped there. Looks to me like the big chains drove out the ma & pa businesses. Now the online giants are driving out them.

Being well off is positive, but if you're well off in a less-developed country, you'll actually be less well off in the US because of the higher cost of living here. So immigrating made that worse.

As someone who found themselves in a similar situation as mmaunder, but who emigrated to Europe instead of the US, I thought I would take a stab at your questions:

1 - In theory, my education was free. In practice, I have to thank my parents for supporting me until I was in my 30s. Otherwise, I would have had to get a job - I still got part-time jobs, but I'm not sure I would have gotten my degree if I had had to work full time.

2 - See 1.

3 - I saved from my part-time jobs enough for the one-way flight plus 3 months, which I spent almost entirely in my first month (I didn't account for the 3 months rent deposit). My parents helped me until my PhD student paperwork was done, at which point I made enough to sustain myself.

4. I think you are reading mmaunder's comment as "the US is the best country in the world", which is not the case (that would be, I don't know, Sweden maybe?). What they are arguing, instead, is that being "okay" in the US is miles ahead of being "okay" in half the world. Could the US do better? Sure, for all the reasons that you mention (plus medical debt). But you may be so used to what people consider normal in the US (drinking water, money that doesn't lose its value week to week, not being shot by someone trying to steal your cell phone) that you don't see the good parts anymore.

Hopefully his faith will keep him honest now.