You can have a middle class salary, save well, and become a millionaire in time for retirement. In fact, at retirement age you really need millions nowadays. Not that most people have that. And most of those retirement age millionaires wouldn't have hundreds of thousands to lend.

I'm talking about billionaires, and what I contend is most billionaires had parents or family members who were rich which helped them.

- Elon Musk's parents owned an emerald mine in S. Africa

- Bill Gates not only got seed money from his millionaire parents but one of his parents was on the board of IBM and helped him land early Microsoft deals

- Bezos got 300k seed money from his parents

- Zuckerberg, is maybe an exception? His parents were only upper middle class. Enough money for good schools and private CS tutors. Seems plausible that if he was lower middle class he wouldn't have made it to Harvard.