He sold gum, he sold Coke bottles, he sold magazines, he worked in a grocery store, he delivered newspapers, he sold golf balls, he sold stamps, he detailed cars, he invested in stock, he invested in land, he went to business school, he worked as an investment salesman, he worked as a stock analyst, he worked as a general partner, then chairman, then CEO at a company.
The lucky opportunity was 82 years to compound returns.
The question is why he wouldn't quit at 50 with a few hundred million and live off of the money instead of spending the next 42 years making more money which he will then give away to someone else to decide what to do with after he dies.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power:_A_New_Social_Analysis
It reminds me of how people shit on today's college students without realizing how much college costs have risen. I get the initial "kids these days" reaction, but holy moly, fellow olds, please use Google to update your priors a bit.
There was a time when you could just work a minimum wage part time over the summer and it would pay for college the rest of the year.
Now, you can work minimum wage full time year-round and if you're lucky, you MIGHT cover tuition at a community college if you're still living with your parents and they don't charge rent.
Average community college tuition cost[0]: $3,400/yr.
$3400/yr is $70/week in order to pay your tuition without a loan. Your argument is only lucky people making minimum wage for 40 hours/week, who have their rent paid for, can save $70/week?
[0] https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-community-college
Setting aside quickly Googled statistics and the risks of using averages to understand individual situations, plus the wide state-by-state variation in support to community college, let's just take the minimum wage and your $70/week number. Let's also set aside how it's quite hard to get 40 hours per week these days in a lot of jobs because of corporate schedule fuckery that was much less severe when I was punching a McDonald's clock.
That's circa 10 hours per week of pay or 25% of their time. Is that number a lot? I would say yes. I don't know many people who can save 25% of their gross pay. If that's you, congrats.
We admit they're in the 0th percentile of earners, but then pretend like their expenses should be the median or mean expenses.
Why would somebody earning essentially the zeroth percentile wages be paying for 50th percentile car ownership?
The other common example is how minimum wage earners can't afford an average 2br rental in any state.
If minimum wage earners are paying for the 50th percentile apartments, who exactly is living in 30th percentile apartments?
In 1987 I was making about 25/hour doing programming as a senior in high school.
There are always opportunities and those opportunities are not the same in every era.
Kids today are making 100K being influencers opening toys on youtube
Kids today are making 100K playing online poker
Kids today are making $$ writing apps
Kids today are making $$ selling pot
The point is not paper delivery, the point is there is a mindset. I will never be a billionaire because I will stop trying to make money once I have "enough"
This is not 3k a month. This is less than 1/3 of that.
Also maybe nothing.
Also, the 15 year old is going to wait 82 years, happily becoming a billionaire or whatever at 97 years young?
Nobody was "lucky" to have a paper delivery route.