If "having a rich father" is the only thing that matters, why isn't everyone with a rich father a billionaire?
That matters personally because you want to set realistic expectations: if you can’t afford to write off a couple of year’s work, launching a startup probably isn’t the best call for you compared to a more staid job which means you don’t need to worry about rent money or health insurance.
It also matters societally because these guys really want to influence our laws, educational system, tax code, etc. and that context is critical. If a billionaire says we should cut taxes on startups to help people climb the ladder, the first question should be how much of the money will go to rich kids from Ivy League schools versus the ones featured in the ad. Similarly, if they’re pushing kids to drop out of college for startups or turning public schools into coding camp, we should be asking how that’ll work out for everyone: the prospects for a kid with affluent high-status parents and a robust social network are quite different from kids who are poor, brown, in the wrong part of the country, etc. and such a policy might be especially dubious if it meant that they have lower negotiating power to get better jobs at the companies run by people making such suggestions.
If you look at software of that era, he wasn't doing something nobody else could do. They had a BASIC interpreter, but it wasn't the first or notably better. MS-DOS certainly worked, but it was at least heavily inspired by CP/M even if the plagiarism accusations were wrong. Being a capable programmer was necessary to his success but it was far from the reason: there were many others around, and they did well but the legendary wealth came to the person whose mother was on IBM's board when he made that company-defining sale. He subsequently executed well but again not uniquely so — anyone who used Microsoft software of that era could tell you that it wasn't the quality of that software which kept people using it. He executed well, and certainly wasn’t shy about an … aggressive … legal strategy but there was also a substantial portion of nepotism and luck.
The world has many people who were smart and hardworking but will never be close to that level of success because they didn’t have the family connections, startups capitol, friends they made at the right school, or the freedom to make a big gamble.
If so, what you're missing is that Gates knew how to play "the game." He knew how to close sales, how to navigate the muddy waters of business, and how to leverage success into more success.
> If "having a rich father" is the only thing that matters, why isn't everyone with a rich father a billionaire?
My position is that there are multiple factors and neither is sufficient on their own.
I think Bill Gates, Elon Musk are all examples of great success. It doesn't mean they are vastly different from the similar hard working people in their fields. It just means that they did a "little" more combined with lots of other factors that put them where they are.
Lots of stuff is different. I know lots of people with very very wealthy parents. They don't want to run businesses... so they don't. The number of people who have the will and means is probably quite a lot smaller than the people who have the means.
Anyway you've just dodged the question by implying "surely there must be something" but I'm asking what it is. To clarify further, I would consider the marks of a genius to be someone who is either a prodigy (ie: exhibits mastery of a subject at a very early age or with little experience) or who has made significant and particularly novel contributions to a field or multiple fields.
Maybe that's Elon, I don't know.
He wrote and sold a computer game at 12 years old after teaching himself to program at 10.
> significant and particularly novel contributions to a field or multiple fields.
Made eletric cars a viable economic prospect, pioneered reusable rockets. Obviously not making every single technical contribution himself, but leading the process.
I don't know, I guess if you're just predisoposed to follow journalists who want to push him as nothing as a cringy nerd, you might not consider that significant, but clearly the market does.
I literally said I don't follow anything about him and was genuinely asking why people call him a genius. He's obviously a cringy nerd but that's not what I'm looking for.
Anyway I guess the game thing seems somewhat impressive, I'm not sure I'd qualify it as "genius" but that's something.
Business accomplishments are impressive but I don't think they make someone a genius.
Tesla (the company) didn't invent electric cars, but they were the first to make electric cars that people actually wanted to buy.
Pre-Tesla, the public perception of elecric cars was something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2HX5wsQVEA (this did not age well)
They were expensive, small, underpowered, and had poor range. Musk took a weakness (expensive) and turned it into a strength (luxury status symbol) by just embracing that making a high-performance electric car was going to be really expensive and marketing it as a toy for rich people to show off how rich they are. Then, he used the profits from that to scale production and bring down the price for future models.
I don't know if he invented this business strategy, but it's a least a pretty brilliant application of it, along with the admirable goal of reducing fossil fuel emissions by putting more electric cars on the road. He also open-sourced all patents developed by Tesla, so other manufacturers could benefit from whatever they discovered along the way.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
"Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.
He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.
He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years."
Kevin Watson - chief of avionics at Launcher
Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so.
John Carmack
When I met Elon it was apparent to me that although he had a scientific mind and he understood scientific principles, he did not know anything about rockets. Nothing. That was in 2001. By 2007 he knew everything about rockets - he really knew everything, in detail. You have to put some serious study in to know as much about rockets as he knows now. This doesn't come just from hanging out with people.
Robert Zubrin - Aerospace engineer