Past a certain point, skill doesn't contribute to the magnitude of success and it becomes all luck. There are plenty of smart people on earth, but there can only be 1 founder of facebook.
There are far, far more external factors on a business's success than internal ones, especially early on.
Dude makes a website in his dorm room and I guess eventually accepts free money he is not obligated to pay back.
What risk?
People from wealthy backgrounds often have less fear of failure, which is a big reason why success disproportionately favors that clique. But frankly, most people in that position are more likely to abuse it or ignore it than to take advantage of it. For people like Zuckerberg and Dell and Gates, the easiest thing to do would have been to slack off, chill out, play their expected role and coast through life... just like most of their peers did.
If any of these is 0, you fail, regardless of how high the other two are. Extraordinary success needs all three to be extremely high.
Microsoft, Facebook, Uber, google and many others all had strong doses of ruthlessness
There is luck (and skill) involved when new industries form, with one or a very small handful of companies surviving the many dozens of hopefuls. The ones who do survive, however, are usually the most ruthlessness and know how to leverage skill, business, markets.
It does not mean that they can repeat their success when their industry changes or new opportunities come up.
This is now my favorite way of describing fleeting hype-tech.
Another key component is knowing the right people or the network you're in. I've known a few people that lacked 2 of those 3 things and yet somehow succeeded. Simply because of the people they knew.
Succeeded in making something comparable to facebook? Who are those?