"cut the daily latte habit, cancel your Netflix is the key to prosperity"
Favoritism, luck (which includes having rich and generous parents), and connections plays such a huge, largely uncredited role for success, especially in businesses. Even Bill Gates, as smart as he is, benefited from lots of luck.
The business racket is not much different from the pundit racket. It's the same insularity and being out of tough with reality.
Luck ... read as rich parents.
Bill Gates had parents who had connections with extremely important people in multi-national companies.
Bill Gates had access to a computer as a child (via his expensive private academy) back when computers were ferociously expensive.
Bill Gates had parents who could cut a check for $50,000 (in the 1970s) on the whim of their child.
Bill Gates had the ability to drop out of Harvard knowing that he could always go back or to somewhere else because his parents could pay for it.
The child of a steelworker, for example, has no ability to take any of these chances because if they fail there is no recovery. If you get into Harvard, you will go the full four years. Even if your business idea is great, your parents will not cut a $50K check as that would pay for your college (and a house and a car and college for your siblings and still have about $25K left over) at the time. Even including the adults around you, none of the people around you have access to those expensive "computers". And your parents certainly don't have access to the senior executives of US Steel, for example.
The "leeway to fail" is a big deal in allowing you to roll the dice to make "luck".
[1] https://www.biography.com/video/bill-gates-help-from-mom-208...
I think to your point: all the luck in the world won't fix a bad execution. It could still be commendable when a person who gets lucky is able to turn that luck into success.
Knowing how to keep yourself out of situations where unlucky events may happen is just as important a skill in racing as driving fast.
Not everyone will have the opportunity to slay a dragon. But in my opinion those who have the opportunity, and succeed, are deserving of recognition.
But almost every person with even greater levels of privilege manages to do so much less than them. Which proves that one can't rightly attribute their great success to privilege alone. If one wants to be correct (and not just feel good) one has to admit that they did some amazing things based in large part on merit.
And that's the rub. Merit alone is often not enough. Privilege alone is often not enough. And luck always plays a role in determining the magnitude of anyone's success.
It takes extraordinary merit to be a John Carmack, Palmer Luckey, Larry Ellison, or Steve Jobs. People who had no privilege (in the traditional sense) and yet their merit (and luck) was so great that they did big things despite the fact.
Many people use the privilege argument to try to dismiss what people like Elon Musk have done. As if they could have done just as well had they been privileged. Envy is clearly clouding their thinking and confusing them. It's totally understandable for people to feel this way but ultimately and obviously incorrect in most cases.
A goal for modern societies should be to give everyone the kinds of opportunities that only the privileged historically had. But this won't prevent some people from doing much more with new opportunities than others. Merit will come to dominate outcomes instead of privilege. This will make the world much richer but won't solve everything.
https://www.rd.com/list/13-things-lottery-winners/#:~:text=W....
It's true that wealth begets wealth. Zuckerberg's kids are billionaires without having to do anything. Bill Gates would've been rich even if he had not started Microsoft, just through inheritance.
But Steve Jobs led the creation of the most valuable company on the planet. There was no blocker to him being richer than Bill Gates or Elon Musk. Larry Ellison is among the richest people on the planet. John Carmack and Palmer Luckey have generational wealth.
Creating a massive company is what makes someone as rich as an Elon Musk or Bill Gates. They had more opportunity to create a massive company than a person from a lower class, but it's got nothing to do with network effects. The main driver of these people's massive fortunes is technology that scales globally.