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Comment by arilotter | Hacker News Reader

> One of the many qualities that separate self-made billionaires from the rest of us is their ability to ask the right questions.

I posit that there is no such thing as a self-made billionaire. I believe that every single billionaire has had massive amounts of financial assistance. I'd love to see a single counter-example to this statement.

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I'll go a step further and say there is no self made anything. Just by being born in America you have a huge advantage over someone born in say, Ethiopia. When I hear someone call themselves "self-made", I immediately assume that person does not value the support and love given by those close to them. It also means they very likely don't value how much society in general contributes to the life they live. In other words, if someone tells me they are "self-made" - I'd say there's a very strong chance they are either out of touch, ungrateful, or even narcissistic.

This seems like an unnecessarily uncharitable view. Plenty of people are given support and love by those close to them. The overwhelming majority of such people do not become billionaires, or even millionaires. And at least in America, people who became wealthy generally did so by providing goods or services to others who voluntarily purchased those goods and services.

I think "self-made" is a shorthand for: the person didn't inherit the money, and engaged in entrepreneurial activity from which the majority of their wealth is derived. Of course there is an element of luck and being in the right place at the right time, and we certainly don't need to deify those people, but to say that "there is no self made anything" seems, I dunno, fatalistic.

Wealth isn't created by accident.

I’d argue wealth is often created by accident. How much wealth did the creation of penicillin create?

If anything, we aren’t being cynical enough towards the concept of “self-made”. Every single genius recognizes that they are standing on the shoulder of giants; would Einstein be possible if he had to invent Newton or the concept of 0 from scratch?

It also helps to remember that many people are working towards the same main ideas at any one time. If the Wright brothers didn’t invent the first plane, many other groups were right behind. Facebook could have failed and a dozen social networks taken its place. There were dozens of competitors to the Apple I and Apple II. We’d still have Windows-like operating systems if Microsoft failed. There were many scrapped covid vaccines that could have stepped up if Pzfier and Moderna failed.

For the person who captures the market and the wealth generated, it doesn’t mean they didn’t put in any work- but they certainly owe their success more to luck and their environment than their own effort. Again, none of the above could have happened in Ethiopia.

Literally the only example of a (maybe) self-made billionaire I can think of is Rihanna. Possibly confounded by the fact that she was a successful musician long before she was a billionaire, which obviously brings a lot of leverage with it, although IIRC she did get into her music career fair and square (grew up in Barbados with no special connections, no rich family to buy her a spot on a label, etc.).

So that's... one. Maybe. Struggling to think of even a single additional example.

Debatable, but a good answer. "Umbrella" I think is considered the song that elevated her, but that was written by another group of artists that had originally considered it for Britney Spears. Interesting history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umbrella_(song)

Ah, that is super interesting! Also:

> In the studio, Stewart was "messing around with a walloping hi-hat sound", which he found in the free music software GarageBand, which is included in all Mac computers.

Your statement is true, for some definitions of "massive" and "financial assistance". We all Live In A Society, after all, and nobody exists in a vacuum, let alone build a billion-dollar enterprise in a vacuum. The first step is having other people pay you for products and services!

So, if we can agree that merely having gone to public school and driven on public highways is not "massive financial assistance", whereas having received a billion-dollar inheritance is definitely "massive financial assistance", where does the line fall, under which you can be considered self-made?

Taking a stab at a reasonable definition for me, if you receive resources X or less as financial or in-kind assistance, and you go from X to 100X through regular market transactions, you can say you're a self-made 100Xaire. 10X seems too liberal (after all, someone could have just invested the X at birth in an index fund and waited 40 years and be at 10X), while 1000x seems too restrictive (if you start out with $10k and end up with $5M, I think it's still fair to say you're a self made millionaire). It's probably not a truly linear relationship, though (it's easier to go from $10M to $100M than $10k to $100k).

This is probably a broader definition than the original comment's. I suspect there the core issue is questioning whether it makes sense to even differentiate a billionaire who's self-made vs one who's not. I find that a useful distinction to make in many contexts, though.

What counts as massive financial assistance?

Howard Schultz, Larry Ellison, Oprah, George Soros all have reasonable claims to being self-made, though of course they all received support at times.

Jimmy Buffet

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