Ask HN: Why do some rich parents want their children to make it own their own? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do some rich parents want their children to make it own their own?

6 pointsamichail11 comments

Don't they realize that having money early in life is important for starting a successful company?

Those that genuinely want their kids to make it on their own probably believe that having things handed to them will limit character and resiliency.

Why does anyone do anything? It's not like there's a playbook to life that you can study and use to guarantee the supremacy of your genes throughout the ages, everyone has to make their own decisions. Some of those decisions won't make sense to other people, but other people have their own decisions to make that won't make sense to their observers either.

Your hypothesis is that they want to start a company, most kids I know from rich families just want to "enjoy life"

There is what they say (help them be independent) and what they do (help them be successful), see

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/buffett-kin...

Some of the reason the very rich say that is to encourage others to invest less in their own kids.

> Don't they realize that having money early in life is important for starting a successful company?

- this isn't necessarily something they want to optimize for

- there's a lot more to growing up wealthy than just the balance of your bank account (opportunities, education, connections, name recognition, not having to work from very young age)

- their children do have money early in life, lots of it too. People like Buffet or Gates have left their children multiple millions of dollars just not all the billions they have.

> this isn't necessarily something they want to optimize for

Exactly. Maybe they want to optimize for character. Or happiness. "Starting a successful company" is not most parents' top priority for their children.

If you start at 100M do you really need to turn it into 1B?. Better to start at 1-10m and then lean how to use that. Then daddy can bail you out for another 10 if things go wrong

People don't feel velocity, only acceleration, starting from a point of wealth the children might get bored or just party all the time (see "Born Rich" documentary). I think its a great question: how to raise children from money, but not spoil them?

Depends on who and how rich: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0342143/

Most of the ones saying that hardly care about their families. Elon Musk clearly is more interested in breeding than being a father. Bill Gates clearly doesn't care much about his family.

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