Actaally if you look at those lists, the largest number made it by choosing their parents correctly.
And actually it's a stupid point to begin with; making a point by choosing the absolute top percentage as if there is nothing other than 'really' rich (forget whether that is even a good thing I'd argue it's not a plus to have that much money and notoriety). There is of course 'lots of money' or 'comfortable'.
Irony also that Paul is probably not on that list but even if he was it's not because he 'built a google' but rather he decided to be an investor and incubator spreading bets over many potential winners.
Also ironic that Paul had decided rather than making more money he'd rather spend time with his family.
He then goes on to exploit young techies to put himself in a very prime position in the relations of production. Nowadays he tweets minimally veiled racist tweets about the supposed biological superiority of his brain compared to the rest of us, especially other races. Talk about privilege.
I’m curious, what are you referring to?
The $ offered by YC wouldn't even cover a typical salary for a single coder or an adverting budget, although being chosen by YC does help to some degree in the latter though. Same for Thiel Fellowship: Not much $ either. You need a lot more than being offered by these incubators, which is a pittance. Back in the '90s it was easier to get decent funding, plus costs were way lower even adjusted for inflation. Now it's huge competition for bread crumbs, plus huge expenses.
On Reddit investing and 'FIRE' subs, way more young and middle-aged people getting rich (as in 7-8 figures) with lucrative white collar jobs or being early in a start-up, plus investing in stock market and real estate, than creating actual companies.
You can do well in computer science classes without ever really learning to program. In fact you can graduate with a degree in computer science from a top university and still not be any good at programming. That's why tech companies all make you take a coding test before they'll hire you, regardless of where you went to university or how well you did there. They know grades and exam results prove nothing.
Yeah, theoretical computer science is not the same as coding. The guys who did theoretical AI work seem to do okay though.
Would Gates have made it if Mum wasn’t on the board of IBM? Would Bezos have made it without 200k from mum&dad ?
It's impossible to draw any firm conclusions from those lists because they aren't representative samples of wealthy people. They're a sample of wealthy people with public assets, and of course that's going to skew heavily towards people who founded large publically traded companies who live in countries with high degrees of financial transparency.
Bezos was already the youngest Senior Vice President at DE Shaw before he started Amazon, so he wouldn't have any problem finding other investors. His mom had Bezos as a teenager, and his adoptive dad was a young Cuban refugee. His grandfather was rich though.
That’s a fair point to make in the abstract, but it’s absolutely, breath-takingly extraordinary to turn moderately well-off parents into a top-twenty global wealth position. I went to high school and university with many people considerably more privileged than either of those, and the challenge is generally in not mismanaging the assets too poorly so there’s enough to pass on to the next generation.
Isn’t this also mostly inherited: do most get into the good universities because of their grades or their connections? Can most get good grades without an “inherited” support system?
https://www.ubs.com/global/en/media/display-page-ndp/en-2023...
https://fortune.com/europe/2023/11/30/billionaire-heirs-over...
If I look here, top 20 are 17 founders and 3 heirs (2 Waltons - Walmart, and one Bettencourt - L’Oreal)
Arnault whose father owned Ferret-Savinel is not an heir.
Gates father was a prominent lawyer, his mother was an heiress who was on a board with the chairman of IBM.
Even looking at those who are not classified as heirs - Zuckerberg's high school currently costs over $50,000 a year. Buffett's father was a congressman and his family owned grocery stores. Not billionaires, but people with more wealth and connections then even our minority of upper middle class people.