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Comment by supermatt | Hacker News Reader

And theres even more less privileged who cant take a risk because they dont have anything to catch them when they fail.

Of course. As someone who ticks most boxes on the privilege checklist I can witness first hand how much easier that has made my life compared to several of my friends and colleagues who ticked far fewer boxes. At the same time I've known people from even more privileged backgrounds than me completely fuck their lives.

So while coming from a 'privileged' background is important, and perhaps even necessary, in becoming the next Elon Musk, it is far from the determining factor.

As Bourdieu presents it, there are the economic, social and cultural capitals from your parents. I believe more and more that the social and cultural capitals can vary wildly even among seemingly privileged families. We can only gauge the economic capital from the outside after all. I saw it firsthand where rich parents educated their children way too softly, which made their children unable to cope with challenges of real life. Maybe Elon got the luck to be born in a family with very good capitals on all axes. It does not mean that he has no talent, just that his initialization may have been particularly good.

> and perhaps even necessary

> is far from the determining factor.

Pick one. There is a reason why low class kids are heavily underrepresented and high class privileged kids are highly overrepresented among VC-backed founders.

You must be at least 'this' privileged to succeed. However there are a lot of people that are at least that privileged and most don't "succeed" either. And among that cohort predicting their chance of success cannot be done by simply looking at their relative level of privilege.

Also I feel like you just moved the goal for success. Getting 1 round of VC funding for your startup and getting your startup into the Fortune 500 or two wildly different levels of success.

If we're defining success as "1 round of VC funding for your startup" then, yes, I will happily concede the 'privilege' plays a much larger role.

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