You left out the part where he and his wife were each working 18 hours a day and saving every penny of earnings to the point where his kids were so hungry they were stealing other children’s lunches.
But let's be real: You can't save money you didn't make to start with. The above poster is clearly calling out the gift as the reason for his success.
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.
I wish we keep survivor bias in mind when reading success stories; we should ask "out of those who work hard and gritty, how many are successful and how many are actually not?" And not "out of those who are successful, how many are hardworking?"
Most of the time, hardwork is just the minimum prerequisite to success that every aspirants have, de-emphasizing the role of luck in life is simply unwise.
If you're talking about cases of extraordinary success like this person, then hard work can vastly increase the amount of opportunity you're exposed to. Nobody says luck isn't involved, but you can improve your odds of getting lucky.
The "luck theory" is the one that is damaging. Because the biggest real problem is people don't know about opportunities. This is one big advantage certain immigrant groups have over even locals. They have networks of people from their country telling them where to go, what skills to get, what jobs to get, how to deal with every detail of every hurdle. It's practically a mentoring system for how to succeed in the US.
In Lansing Biggby's Coffee got started. Right now they're in a dozen states. I've met the two founders, one of their first employees who was a recent immigrant now owns over 100 stores.
Many of them would love to be gifted a franchise that brings into their wallet, inflation-adjusted, ~200,000K in profit a year.
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.