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Comment by fasterik | Hacker News Reader

I don't think history bears this out. If you look at the most successful entrepreneurs of the computer age, none of them started out as owners of capital. Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs: yes, they had some level of privilege and opportunity, but they didn't start out as billionaires. Their success came from their ideas.

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The fact that you had to separate them into an age should tell you something.

Something happened in the 80s, and it wasn't "the dawn of a new technology". It happened specifically in the US, and was done by their government.

Does it surprise you that wealth takes time to accumulate? None of those people had a get rich quick scheme that made them billionaires in their 20's.

Those were mostly the same billionaires 20 years ago.

In 2006? No, there have been lots of changes since then. Lots of new billionaires.

Are you referring to the antitrust breakup of AT&T in 1982?

In the case of Gates at least, it definitely came in part from having access to the right people.

Gates famously came from a rich family, but Bezos did too - he used hundreds of thousands of dollars in investments from his immediate family members to get Amazon off the ground. Maybe 1 to 2% of Americans would be able draw that much from their family members if they were to launch a startup. If we define "bootstrapped" wealth as starting from an economic background within one standard deviation of the national average, then he doesn't count.

If the labor -> wealth pipeline is weakening, then the present won't behave like the past, i.e. you would need assets to success since you won't be able to work your way up.

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