Comment by Context_free | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Context_free | Hacker News Reader

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Also if we look at the so-called "self-made" billionaires, Bill Gates went to a fancy prep school where grammar school students had access to a computer in the late 1960s. His great grandfather was a bank president, and he was born with a million dollar trust fund. His mother was on an executive committee with the CEO of IBM.

Zuckerberg went to a high school, current tuition cost of which is over $57000 a year.

Warren Buffett's father was a congressman, his grandparents owned a retail business. Buffet was sent to an Ivy League school.

Beyond this, Kleiner Perkins did not give Jeff Bezos millions in VC back in 1996 because they liked him. He was around then, but they were too. As well as the employees shipping out books then. As well as the employees shipping books out now. Kleiner Perkins gave money then, anticipating the exploitation of Amazon factory (and non-factory) workers now. The company was not built with Bezos as some Atlas figure. It was built by millions from Kleiner Perkins in 1996, and by the exploited people doing the work there every day.

Bezos was given billions for successfully doing this. It does not waive away the expropriation of surplus labor time of those who work there.

I think Bill Gates makes an excellent counterpoint for this article. He was known for treating business as a competitive game, trying to win at all costs. Look at the way he acquired MS-DOS for next to nothing from Seattle Computer Products. Yes, he got his start by being genuinely hard working and smart, but from that point on he exploited every way he could get away with.

Criticizing the level of "self-made"-ness of billionaires seems like a waste of time. These are extreme outliers. Of course they had to start with every advantage and have everything go just right and also work their asses off. You're talking about a 1 in a billion chance to get to that level.

It's like looking at an Olympic gold medal winner and saying "Oh yeah, well of course they broke the world record in the 100-meter dash. They were born with genetic predisposition for the sport and they had the best coaches and their parents got up at 4am to drive them to practice and..." Well, yeah. But a lot of people might have those advantages and not achieve anything with them.

Sure, Zuckerberg went to some fancy prep school. So did all of his classmates. None of them started Facebook. There's lots of other Congressmen who have kids. None of them are Warren Buffet.

But claiming that being "self-made" is something that doesn't exist because the extremest outliers had unusual circumstances (this is surprising for some reason?) ignores all the people who make more modest success largely by their hard work and ingenuity.

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