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Comment by irishcoffee | Hacker News Reader

You ever see Good Will Hunting? The scene where he talks about where he can “just play” and then describes the most talented people in history at what they do. That’s Buffett in his chosen life’s work.

Buffett didn’t get, for example, a small loan of a million dollars to start. He’s been working at this longer than probably anyone what will ever read this comment has been alive.

He doesn’t care about the money in the sense I feel you’re implying.

Nobody is perfect, and holding anyone to that standard sets an impossible threshold.

I don’t know how familiar you are with Warren Buffett, but I would encourage you to dig into his Wikipedia page at least, however accurate we think that is these days.

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Yes he did start with a "small loan of a million dollars"!

Buffett started with 1.2 million dollars (105K in 1956) in investments from his family, i.e. his aunt, sister, and father in law.

It is very nearly impossible to get rich without starting with a huge chunk of money, Buffett is no exception.

You should read his whole bio.

Don't get me wrong, I like him, he's a quick wit, it's just not true that he started with nothing, he started with a lot.

Better late than never, I don’t know if you’ll see this. He started investing well before people started giving him money. Like, decades.

Wikipedia page on Buffett:

At 11, he bought three shares of Cities Service Preferred for himself, and three for his sister Doris Buffett (who also became a philanthropist).[20][21][22] At 15, Warren made more than $175 monthly (equivalent to $3,057 in 2024) delivering Washington Post newspapers. In high school, he invested in a business owned by his father and bought a 40-acre farm worked by a tenant farmer.[23] He bought the land when he was 14 years old with $1,200 (equivalent to $21,434 in 2024) of his savings.[23] By the time he graduated from college, Buffett had amassed $9,800 in savings (equivalent to $129,511 in 2024).[18]

Gates/Allen started Microsoft with $5000. Jobs started Apple by selling his VW bug.

Jobs is probably a good example here, and obviously there aren't many Jobses in the world. As far as I know, he started with nothing really.

Bill Gates however was born rich and had powerful, well-connected parents and grandparents.

Obviously Bill did better with those tools than most people would, but would it have been possible if he started as an average kid with an average amount of money? He wouldn't have gone to a prestigious school with nice computers (or any computers), or have been able to fail at traf-o-data and keep going, for example.

His mom was on the board of a charity which included the CEO of IBM, which is how IBM got involved with Microsoft. Microsoft wouldn't be Microsoft without that deal, or without Mary Gates, or the money that facilitates all these kinds of things.

The older I get, the more I believe that "you can start with nothing and make it" is essentially a lie told to the working class to keep them from cannibalizing the rich (via taxation).

> Obviously Bill did better with those tools than most people would, but would it have been possible if he started as an average kid with an average amount of money?

Yes. Remember Woz had no money and no computer and still wrote Apple Basic. He wrote it in a notebook and hand-assembled it. An 8 bit Basic can be written in about 2K bytes.

I designed and built a 6800 computer in 1978, and wrote the software for it all in asm (the result was a VT-100 terminal workalike). I did have an assembler available which certainly made me more productive, but it was still small enough to do by hand. There were only 40 instructions or so in the 6800, and after a while one inadvertently had them memorized. You could hand assemble them as fast as you could write. In those days I wrote code asm in pencil in a spiral notebook.

What made Gates & Allen special was not their families, but their ability to see the opportunity that everyone else missed. When the MITS computer was the front page on Popular Science magazine, Allen saw it and ran to Gates exclaiming that this was the opportunity they were looking for, and they needed to get to work on it immediately.

> His mom was on the board of a charity which included the CEO of IBM, which is how IBM got involved with Microsoft. Microsoft wouldn't be Microsoft without that deal, or without Mary Gates, or the money that facilitates all these kinds of things.

IBM gave Gary Kildall the opportunity first. Gary whiffed the deal, and then IBM went to Gates. Gary Kildall did not have a wealthy background, and he became quite wealthy off of CP/M.

His retirement was sad and his death tragic. I wish his family would release the second half of his autobiography.

I agree and would also like to read it, but I understand his family's decision. I'd probably do the same.

In retrospect, I wish I had pressed my dad to write an account of his wartime experiences. Fortunately, his letters were saved, but unfortunately, the letters were censored and so were kinda cardboard.

Have you ever read Elon's wiki? Or any other individual rich enough to curate whatever views they choose?

Warren buffet did good and he came up with a winning strategy. Momentum was ultimately his friend and what drove his success. When ETFs are great today and their popularity largely because of Warren, I think a lot of what's increasingly becoming obviously wrong with the markets ties back to the original strategy behind ETFs.

There's no more self selection or focus on fundamentals. All pensions are now exposed and regular contributors to the markets, so winner and losing picking doesn't really exist in the same way and performance is no longer tied to reality. I dread what that means as populations stagnant since it puts some risk on future pensions and their somewhat ponzi-esque structure.

All the pessimistic rants aside - it's insane to refer me to a billionaire's wiki as an attempt to get to know them. I largely look at people based on how they might treat family, friends, strangers, etc. In that regard, I'm mixed.

Elon and Buffet are polar opposites.

Musk at one point was one explosion away from bankruptcy.

I wasn't talking about tech, but about their character.

Risk tolerance is a component of character. Musk has put his entire fortune on the line more than once, and more than once was a whisker from bankruptcy.

I'm far less of a risk taker than he is, and have consequently not made big scores like Musk.

You're also not an asshole, but Musk is.

> You're also not an asshole

Some disagree with your assessment(!)

> but Musk is

I'm going to reserve judgement on that because the media lens is pretty distorting. He's not afraid to stand up to bullies, and I've seen that interpreted as assholishness.

Steve Jobs also had a reputation as an asshole. A couple of my friends had encounters with him, and I asked is he really an asshole? Both confidently said yes. !!

But can you infer this from their Wikipedias?

Why do I need to go to a website when I'm fairly well informed about the lives of both?

Because the prior OP tried to direct me to wiki to learn about them. This chain has context.

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