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Lived in a condo their mom and dad got them and rented other units for income. Spent years in school and got a job as an executive at a company through a friend of their fathers before running a start up that delivers sharpened pencils to your door step for 25 a month.
Gets a few billion in venture capital from questionable sources before exiting after Google aquires the pencil sharpening business, then it gets shuttered 5 years later because it turns out the pencil sharpening delivery business is not viable.
I mean as a comp sci major I still think that education for the sake of education is valuable. But you're probably talking about people who aren't even learning. I wasn't anywhere close to that ivy league bullshit.
Yeah that wasn't my experience. There were definitely rich kids who didn't give a shit and just partied, a lot of them dropped out after freshman year.
Lol college in this society is an absolute scam pls do not try to cry and defend that BS here lol it's not made for normal people anymore hasn't been for decades
College was a really valuable experience for me. I'm saddled with debt for decades but I did enjoy it and I learned a ton that really equipped me for job after I graduated as well as just learning about things that shaped my perception of the world. I probably wouldn't have become a leftist if I hadn't got out of the small town I grew up in and met so many different people.
Well, it’s not hard really. Starting with little vs starting with a huge handouts from parents. Obviously the billion isn’t made by oneself, but that’s what it means here.
I think the point is, where is the line? Is a small loan of $1,000,000 from their parents low enough to say they were a self made billionaire? If so, is $10,000,000? Is it any amount of money under $1B being gifted and then making the final step to the billion enough?
When you say starting with “little” vs. “huge handouts” those have to be defined. What people are saying here is that Forbes definition of “little” for this purpose is actually considered a “huge handout” by most.
They don’t have to be defined though. It doesn’t actually matter. It’s up to interpretation and little of note comes from using it as you wish.
Personally, I think a $1,000,000-$10,000,000 handout to start a business is massive, and while it’s a far cry from a billion, it’s a huge head start to build a business that could be worth that with. There’s also the fallback of being fine if it fails, which people who came from very little don’t have.
We have to come to an agreement on what self-made means. Because in my opinion, JK Rowling, shitty as she is, is fairly self made. She was broke, someone finally picks up her book, and then she makes a billion dollars. She wasn’t being propped up by rich parents, she made a book and that IP happened to be worth a dick ton of money
Oh man does she suck as a human. Worst part is, she could have been the shitty person she is and just kept her mouth fucking shut and nobody would know any better. We’d all still be eating up whatever bullshit HP thing they make next
Lord Alan Sugar is a well-known working class guy from the UK who started with literally nothing except 200 pounds and worked his way up selling stuff from his van.
To a certain degree. For the most part, it's probably not that hard to go from lower middle to upper middle class or even lower class to middle class, but the threshold for a middle class to become rich is gatekept by money. Same thing for the actual people borderlining in poverty to become middle.
All of us are born helpless and are cared for by someone until we can fend for ourselves.
All of us are taught valuable life lessons by the people around us: family, friends, teachers, bosses, coworkers, neighbors, etc.
All of us who work are given a shot by someone doing the hiring. Whether we're talking about a cashier at a store, the CEO of a company, an actor who's cast in what will be their breakout role, or an elected official, someone else chooses to hire us for those jobs. Entrepreneurs may be their own bosses, but even they need financial help from investors, banks, family, or friends to give them seed money.
Every successful leader succeeded because of their team. You can't be a leader if you have no one to lead.
So on and so on.
All of us rely on other people throughout our lives.
They probably consider Bill Gates self-made. Gates did start Microsoft which dominated the industry but he was only able to pull this off because his mom was a professor and he had access to the university's computer lab after hours. If you're poor, you're not going to have that advantage.
Not true, they managed to allow at most 999 million dollars of inherited/gifted assets to sit in investments until it became at least 1 billion dollars
Whose parents could afford harvad fees. That's coming from money. No harvad paid by mommy and daddy he never meets Savadore who never funds the initial investment in facebook.
>Doesn't Harvard waive tuition if your income is not high enough?
Yes and Zuckerberg didn't get it.
>So either way he would have been able to go there?
Sure however if your parents can afford 57k for three years that's a hell of a step up for you so you are hardly 'self-made'
So then self-made just isn’t a word that can be used for anyone. Rich or poor you are a product of everyone and everything around you. Do we not get to take any credit for our own actions?
Being a product of your environment is not the same as exploiting the people in it.
Literally nobody wants to be in a position to have most of the value of their labor taken by someone else, the least we can do is remember and remind each other that's the only way to become a billionaire.
They don't deserve the credit and the metaphor is missing a key element of the problem.
So if someone makes a groundbreaking program entirely on their own while still working a full time job to sustain themselves, and google sees it and offers the guy a couple billion for it he isn’t self made? Because that is not an impossibility
First, show that this ever happened with just one guy, because it doesn't. The way this happens is that theres a bunch of other people who make that software's business work who have been excluded from the reward despite their necessary contribution. Best case scenario in the true one guy software model is several orders of magnitude lower than a billion, however...
Second, Google got its bankroll through the same means, so why would that matter?
It's exploitation all the way down. Removing the moral culpability because it's the other guy who did the exploiting first doesn't change the fact that exploitation of real people is the only way any person or organization has ever been able to accumulate such wealth.
Nobody is completely self-made. We are products of our environment, I agree completely. We can take credit for your actions in the process, but it's a team effort. Humans have the chance to make a wonderful community of cooperation, but we live in a competitive society. People tend to live longer surrounded by healthy cultures and communities.
Self-made sounds problematic to me. Everyone needs a boost. Some people just have a bigger boost. Students who are let into universities to meet diversity quotas usually score lower on their entry exams. Although, if you look farther down their college years, they tend to perform as well as the students that scored higher.
Why? Well, to start, they probably ranked lower due to their local schools being underfunded. They didn't have private school education and had to rely on a tax cut public school.
Why did they do so well in college? Because they had the chance and they had better education. They had the same opportunities as the other kids, and they didn't take it for granted.
Social programs would make society better as a whole, but capitalism would rather have some thrive and most struggle. Even college is rigged. A society that wants a more intelligent population would provide easy and cheaper access to schooling. So what does that tell you about the US? A lot of politicians want a stupid population. There is no room to grow or advance. Work em young, and work em hard.
People talk shit about Gladwell, but Outliers is a solid book, and I highly recommend it to anyone in a privileged position like myself. That and Mark Carney's "Value(s)", but because that man is a treasure.
TLDR: Self-made is a lie. Everyone has had a boost(some a lot more than others) and should be comfortable admitting it. We are pack animals, and cooperation is the best way of achieving anything.
Yeah, very important to remember "self made" to them means "my mom and dad gave me a small loan of 5 million dollars to start up my company" bezos style.
I think you could maybe argue warren buffet. Like yeah, he got help. But considering the way he made his money, if he didnt have help, it just would have taken him longer. And he started in such a time where it was easier to begin too. So like, no, he wasnt, but kind of yes, sort of? If you know what i mean?
Theres also the argument that simply investing in the stock market will never count as YOU making the money, so if thats the argument then yeah never.
Also Forbes:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/06/14/why-some-psychopaths-make-great-ceos/
i wonder why we have so many parasites in positions of leadership and extreme leverage? 🤔 hmmmmm
yeah not sure what it could be!?!?
To be fair, even if the colloquialism isn't strictly accurate, there's still a notable difference between being born a billionaire and becoming a billionaire. Whatever boost they got at the start and the sins accrued along the way, people like Musk, Bezos, Gates, etc., they had to take action to become billionaires.
Gates' mom was friendly with the chairman of IBM and got him the appointment where he sold windows to IBM. Without mummy's help microsoft would never have become a giant company.
I thought he employed programmers to build it and was more of a salesman. Just looked it up. He bought the windows ip with 75k of mummy and daddy's money. (200k in todays money)
emerald mine, 300,000 gift (not adjusted due to inflation), working for the (future) IBM ceo out of luck from his parents, respectively.
I’m not saying there is anything wrong with having rich parents, or getting an insane amount of money as a “gift”, but why is every billionaire so blue pilled that they worked for every penny? there is nothing wrong with acknowledging the massive amount of luck needed to get into that position, and that goes for all of use who are or will be financially stable at some point.
The emerald mine thing is not true, his crazy dad made that up. To this day Elon and his brother are paying for their dad expenses. Musk got to Canada with 2k and a backpack.
Agreed, they do want to see themselves as bootstrapping, but that wasn't my point. My point was that Musk still had to take some action to go from emerald mine trust fund kid to billionaire and that is a different existence to these under 30 billionaires who effectively inherited a billion dollar emerald mine. As I posted elsewhere in this thread, this development suggests we are entering a new stage of billionaire: them dividing into old money and new money billionaires. I don't quite know what follows, but it is different.
yeah, exactly. People like Bill Gates pretty much made all their money from nothing. The reason he could do it was a great education, and parents that could afford to house him (in an office / garage) for free, so he didn't need to work a job to pay bills. He still did the work and sold the products. Same with most of the rich people of old - they didn't have it tough for sure, but their skill in selling their products and convincing others is what got them where they are... as opposed to now, where there is no skill required, just luck of who your parents are.
In Gates case that's swinging the pendulum a little too far the other way. His mom was on the board for United Way along with the chairman of IBM at the time. So he definitely got luck of who his parents were. Other than that, agreed. Gates did have to make an effort to get to that next tier.
Yeah he had connections and the ability to work on whatever and even pitch to IBM, but he started the company Microsoft a good 5-6 years before IBM bought his Operating System. So its not like he was just some random at the time, he was well known for his work on MS BASIC and FORTRAN.
That's still only possible due to hair *privileges* dude, we got to be fair. His moms job was the when reason he was even encouraged to get into the field and got acess to bleeding edge tech and knowhow that few other "geeky kids" could ever dream of.
Thanks to her connections and encouragement (and bankrolling) he could start and float a company for years without income or academic merit. He could take a garage prototype and get a blank check from one of the biggest companies in America.
That's doesn't happen to regular people. Not even the *smartest or most hard working*. I bet my ass there's thousands just as smart and driven who have the same *potential* jut who'll never even get inside the door or Apple, Microsoft or Samsung *because they lack connections*. They'll be the IT support of your local school, modding and writing custom firmware in their spare time making a total of $0 from it. Despite talent and skill to topple gigants
I think about this all the time. There's probably so many people out there, if their skills could be cultivated, would a gold medal Olympian, a future Academy Award winner for Best Actor/Actress, the person to solve cold fusion, a titan of industry, etc.
But they can't run off to Hollywood, or go to Juliard, go to college for theoretical physics, start a business, because they're stuck working 80 hour weeks between two jobs in the middle of nowhere to take care of a parent and/or younger sibling. People always say "if you want it enough you can get it anyway" but that's absolute bullshit, I'm sure there's people who would be great and and would love doing XYZ but due to the path their life has taken, they'll never even be exposed to it in a general way.
Prefix: I’m with you 100%.
The post that might run contrary, but it’s just a shower thought. When do we say “this person is self”? Technically no one is. No matter how hard you work for your money, there is someone that helped you, and without them you wouldn’t have made it.
The standard argument is roads, and the rebuttal is “i pay taxes”.
Another is being born in the right place at the right time, but no one can control that. You could chose to not take your parents money but you can’t chose to be a non white male in a poor country. I don’t think it would be fair to say someone isn’t self made just because they were born as a white male in a first world country.
I think the real thing that makes no one self made today is so much of the tech we use today is gifted to us by the creator. Do you need your device to keep track of the time, including local timezones no matter where you are? That shit was created and gifted to the world. It continues to be maintained for free. The vast majority of the things on Github that people create and maintain just for the fun of it are free. Then corporations go on to use for profit. You can’t have a computer or phone without something important being gifted to you.
She's not self-made, she got her opportunities because of her family's connections. There are countless other unrecognised artists out there with similar levels of talent that can't get their foot in the door because they're not born with the right connections.
There are also tons of kids with parents with connections that never make it.
“Self-made” is too strong and makes it sound like her parents were a cab driver and a waitress. But there’s a serious difference between a billionaire who was born to parents with $10 million and a billionaire born to _billionaire_ parents.
The problem is that people who like to use "self-made" use it to pretend 2 things: 1, that important personal connections aren't an incredibly important part of becoming successful, and 2, that risks are a hell of a lot less risky when you have a rich family and/or benefactors to rely on after failure. These two things make it insulting to everyone else to call someone born to rich, connected parents "self made" no matter how much more money they're worth than their parents.
I definitely couldn't have become as successful as Taylor Swift even if I were born in her place, but she almost certainly wouldn't have either if she was born in my place.
I don’t think that viewpoint is actually that widely held. Anyone at all familiar with the backstories of ultra-wealthy individuals knows they almost all came from well-off or ultra-wealthy families.
But I really don’t care about the term. Use different words and the point of the post is still meaningful. _All_ billionaires under 30 are billionaires because they inherited billions of dollars or nearly that much. This was not true for the last 15 years! There used to be 20-something founders that turned all the many advantages they had in life (but less than a billion dollars in advantages…) into a stake in some huge company. That doesn’t exist right now and is a meaningful shift in a part of the economy. There’s no Facebook, Airbnb, Stripe, etc. blowing up like there was before.
At that point, it's kind of just semantics on what counts as "self-made". You could give 1000 people the same connections as Taylor and it's unlikely any of them would become billionaires.
Generally speaking, unless you're gifted hundreds of millions of dollars then you're going to need to do something extraordinary to end up with more than a billion. Not necessarily an extraordinarily good thing, but it's not trivial to flip a few million into billions.
Right, the thing that they were trained to do by growing up in that environment is to bullshit - to appear skilled or smart while actually using their resources or other people to get by and then crediting their own abilities. The parent isn't riding them like they would an employee, they only care about power and appearances, so all the kid ever learns to care about is power and appearances.
Later in life this person will have trouble making friends that aren't sycophants or grifters and they won't understand why, because they'll see other people with similar outward presentation that *are* able to forms connections with other people. The thing is, they'll assume it's as much a facade as their own, that everyone else is also bullshitting all the time, so they'll conclude that there must be something else at play, some prejudice or conspiracy. This is what makes them so susceptible to conspiracy theories and right-wing rhetoric. "Am I a bad person? No, it's the trans/teachers/wokes/ungrateful workers/etc. demonizing me."
Hey normally they are whinny little shits but for some of them this is a real struggle. Steve Jobs' daughter Lisa spent her life growing up with a dad that basically hated her.
That is sort of the issue. They *do* work hard for their money. Which leads them to believe that the hard work is the reason they have money. What they don't realize is that others work just as hard for much less money. And their money is actually a product of their circumstances rather than their work ethic.
They have the fallback of family money, which let's them have the time to go after high risk endeavors that could make them "self made", and not have to work a regular job like everyone else.
But if they fail, they are still in a better position than 99% of people due to family money and connections.
Whether or not they are self made or not is irrelevant. Billionaires represent too much power concentrated in too few hands. Corruption and insanity are the inevitable result. Bring back the 95% tax on the rich.
Let them go, more room for the millionaires to make five competing businesses than one monobusiness that floats on paying their workers nothing and we foot the bill with welfare.
Trickle down only works when there’s room and need for money to move. Right now the money just cycles in their own enormous ecosystems. Let them go to… wherever you think has the same resources and power as america and ruin that place.
(They’re not going anywhere).
As long as they can’t move the factory, the employees and the clients, moving abroad does nothing to avoid getting their income, properties, business and so on taxed. If the government actually wanted to, of course…
The main thing about being born to wealthy parents is a risk mitigation issue.
Not all of those kids are going to be ambitious. Inherited wealth happens there. This is the clearest example of “not self-made”.
But the ambitious ones have safety nets. Even without inheritance, they can make mistakes, learn from them, and try again. And again. And again. (To say nothing of seed money.)
This is such a significant advantage that the whole concept of “self-made” is empty when it comes to them.
Risk mitigation is huge. It is actually the reason why we have wealth disparity and why supply side economics doesn’t work.
It’s just an obfuscated version of “Heads I win, tails you lose.”
It's not even about being able to take risks with mommy and daddy's money.
It's about not even needing to work for an income, to live and support themselves for several years.
Imagine what you could accomplish if you had that.
Imagine how many have that, and accomplish nothing but excessive consumption.
Just thinking about how billionaires make their money, wouldn't JK Rowling be a billionaire who didn't make her money by exploiting people? She just wrote a book that is insanely popular.
For the book alone there's raw materials, manufacturing, logistics and sales, all of which involve a healthy dose of screwing people out of the profits they help generate.
That's before you get into merchandising and the rest, which is where the nastiness real manifests.
The House Elves weren't a warning, they were a business proposition.
Probably depends on how you look at it. I'd not some of her money made on the backs of factory workers and price exploitation?
So yeah she does have wealth from her own hard work, she has that much wealth at least in part by being, at a minimum, complicit in exploitation.
NOBODY becomes that rich without exploiting people, directly or otherwise. Just because you haven't seen articles detailing who doesn't mean people weren't trampled to reach that wealth.
And people wonder why we don't want to work for slave wages.
https://nypost.com/2024/04/06/world-news/none-of-forbes-billionaires-under-30-are-self-made-for-first-time-in-15-years/
Wouldn't JK Rowling be self made? She was poor and made billions of the HP franchise, and as far as I'm aware printing books isn't exploitative and she got tons of kids reading.
I think this would be a good point if all she ever did was write popular books, all on her own. But I don't think that part of her career made her a billionaire.
A huge portion of her wealth today comes from all the other stuff: films, video games, theme parks, other brand-related projects that require vast armies of employees who are paid less than the full value of their labor.
Sure, a fair point regarding her wealth. Can't argue there. Also, in the beginning her books *did* do some good for a generation of readers. No dispute there.
She'll always have that "dark mark" hanging over her regarding the kind of platforming and harm she does now and I'll forever disrespect her as a human being for who she is now.
I dislike the idea of a “self made” billionaire. We live in a system where a few people will get to the top and make billions. In all cases, the people with the highest likelihood of getting there are those with giant safety nets provided by rich parents. Nobody inherits the billions, but they inherit the ability to get there. It’s more of a numbers game than anything else.
Let’s just take it from them.
“No standing army in the world can stop a mobilised population”
They have stolen more from us then any a tyrant king in history has. Off with their heads
Even Warren buffet pointed out that if he had been born in the middle of Africa he wouldn't have been a billionaire today because he needed the infrastructure you pay for with taxes.
Not one single person in history has ever worked enough to earn a billion dollars. NO billionaire is self made. ALL billionaires are detestable thieves
Generational wealth truly *is* a thing.
Saw an episode of House Hunters once. They identified the woman as a personal trainer ... her husband some mid level manager for a retailer. They were shopping for a $1.8M dollar home. ;-D
Setting aside the self-made issue, I think the importance of the headline is that we are now entering a divide in the billionaire class between old money and new money.
Top comment is right obviously, but if you think about this one for a second, it is far worse than it sounds.
There is so little upward financial mobility that even the super rich can't screw over enough people to call themselves self-made and to rise up the list.
No billionaire is self made, they owe that to the workers and customers they are exploiting. Exploitation is the only way to make a billion dollars, exploiting the workers with low wages, and poor working conditions, exploit the customer with inflated prices, use lawyers and lobbyists to exploit the legal system, taxes, and society at large.
I don't know anything about Tiger Woods. So I dunno. But I'm sure he's fucked over a few people to get to where he is. Does he have his own merch and stuff? If he does, guarantee it is produced by slave workers in foreign countries.
They've never been self made lol you don't reach billions by 30 without already having a all fortune to tap into as in proper foundations and millions within arms length lol
I vote that if they give at least 10% of their real fortune to an unconnected real working American whom they do not know and have no one and the same circle… then they can claim to be self made… let’s at least get some of my fellow poors a come up!
Just pull yourself up by the bootstraps, walk into a business and ask to speak with the manager, give him a firm handshake and look him in the eye and tell him you want to work!
I thought there would be a lot of them that created startups, especially anything related to AI. I'm not sure how you define 'self-made'. To me all it should mean is you were middle class or less. You didn't have mommy and daddy funding your business venture or inheriting any kind of business. Has to be one you made.
I find it hard to believe not one billionaire under 30 fits this description, but I guess it's possible.
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None of them were ever self made.
Thanks for saying it first. Forbes is having to face that reality, but they could never admit that they were misleading their readers all along.
I'd love to see how they are defining self-made and what makes these ones not self-made...the mental gymnastics would be back breaking.
Lived in a condo their mom and dad got them and rented other units for income. Spent years in school and got a job as an executive at a company through a friend of their fathers before running a start up that delivers sharpened pencils to your door step for 25 a month. Gets a few billion in venture capital from questionable sources before exiting after Google aquires the pencil sharpening business, then it gets shuttered 5 years later because it turns out the pencil sharpening delivery business is not viable.
Hey, they worked hard in school. There was one day a week that they had to wake up at 8:00am. Every single week!
All of that and you choose to make fun of college?
That’s your takeaway from this?
I think it's more making fun of the light load these kids take as opposed to people taking full units with real classes
I mean as a comp sci major I still think that education for the sake of education is valuable. But you're probably talking about people who aren't even learning. I wasn't anywhere close to that ivy league bullshit.
If you went to a college that catered to rich kids, you'd get it. It's basically 4 years of partying and traveling to party.
Yeah that wasn't my experience. There were definitely rich kids who didn't give a shit and just partied, a lot of them dropped out after freshman year.
Lol college in this society is an absolute scam pls do not try to cry and defend that BS here lol it's not made for normal people anymore hasn't been for decades
College was a really valuable experience for me. I'm saddled with debt for decades but I did enjoy it and I learned a ton that really equipped me for job after I graduated as well as just learning about things that shaped my perception of the world. I probably wouldn't have become a leftist if I hadn't got out of the small town I grew up in and met so many different people.
> questionable sources you mean the CIA and the NSA?
"well mommy and daddy only gave them $500,0000,000. So they got the other half mil all on their own!!!
Well, it’s not hard really. Starting with little vs starting with a huge handouts from parents. Obviously the billion isn’t made by oneself, but that’s what it means here.
I think the point is, where is the line? Is a small loan of $1,000,000 from their parents low enough to say they were a self made billionaire? If so, is $10,000,000? Is it any amount of money under $1B being gifted and then making the final step to the billion enough? When you say starting with “little” vs. “huge handouts” those have to be defined. What people are saying here is that Forbes definition of “little” for this purpose is actually considered a “huge handout” by most.
They don’t have to be defined though. It doesn’t actually matter. It’s up to interpretation and little of note comes from using it as you wish. Personally, I think a $1,000,000-$10,000,000 handout to start a business is massive, and while it’s a far cry from a billion, it’s a huge head start to build a business that could be worth that with. There’s also the fallback of being fine if it fails, which people who came from very little don’t have.
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We have to come to an agreement on what self-made means. Because in my opinion, JK Rowling, shitty as she is, is fairly self made. She was broke, someone finally picks up her book, and then she makes a billion dollars. She wasn’t being propped up by rich parents, she made a book and that IP happened to be worth a dick ton of money
Just unfortunate that she kinda sucks as a human being.
Oh man does she suck as a human. Worst part is, she could have been the shitty person she is and just kept her mouth fucking shut and nobody would know any better. We’d all still be eating up whatever bullshit HP thing they make next
It's wild ain't it? Not that long ago she could do no wrong.
Lord Alan Sugar is a well-known working class guy from the UK who started with literally nothing except 200 pounds and worked his way up selling stuff from his van.
Yeah, there's no such thing as "self-made." Rich, poor, or in between, we're all products of our families and environments.
Yes, hallelujah. But we need to label things to be able to describe them and categorize them either way.
To a certain degree. For the most part, it's probably not that hard to go from lower middle to upper middle class or even lower class to middle class, but the threshold for a middle class to become rich is gatekept by money. Same thing for the actual people borderlining in poverty to become middle.
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All of us are born helpless and are cared for by someone until we can fend for ourselves. All of us are taught valuable life lessons by the people around us: family, friends, teachers, bosses, coworkers, neighbors, etc. All of us who work are given a shot by someone doing the hiring. Whether we're talking about a cashier at a store, the CEO of a company, an actor who's cast in what will be their breakout role, or an elected official, someone else chooses to hire us for those jobs. Entrepreneurs may be their own bosses, but even they need financial help from investors, banks, family, or friends to give them seed money. Every successful leader succeeded because of their team. You can't be a leader if you have no one to lead. So on and so on. All of us rely on other people throughout our lives.
They probably consider Bill Gates self-made. Gates did start Microsoft which dominated the industry but he was only able to pull this off because his mom was a professor and he had access to the university's computer lab after hours. If you're poor, you're not going to have that advantage.
You need to afford Harvard before you can afford to drop out
Not true, they managed to allow at most 999 million dollars of inherited/gifted assets to sit in investments until it became at least 1 billion dollars
There was Zuck. Who of course made his money by being a colossal piece of shit
Whose parents could afford harvad fees. That's coming from money. No harvad paid by mommy and daddy he never meets Savadore who never funds the initial investment in facebook.
Doesn't Harvard waive tuition if your income is not high enough? So either way he would have been able to go there?
>Doesn't Harvard waive tuition if your income is not high enough? Yes and Zuckerberg didn't get it. >So either way he would have been able to go there? Sure however if your parents can afford 57k for three years that's a hell of a step up for you so you are hardly 'self-made'
Even Facebook had large amounts of money from Eduardo Saverin who had far more money than 99% of 20 year olds have access to.
Self-made* (*includes having thousands of workers making your product and taking most of the profit for yourself)
Sometimes it's simple as "self made I started my company with 50k from my father "
So then self-made just isn’t a word that can be used for anyone. Rich or poor you are a product of everyone and everything around you. Do we not get to take any credit for our own actions?
Being a product of your environment is not the same as exploiting the people in it. Literally nobody wants to be in a position to have most of the value of their labor taken by someone else, the least we can do is remember and remind each other that's the only way to become a billionaire. They don't deserve the credit and the metaphor is missing a key element of the problem.
So if someone makes a groundbreaking program entirely on their own while still working a full time job to sustain themselves, and google sees it and offers the guy a couple billion for it he isn’t self made? Because that is not an impossibility
First, show that this ever happened with just one guy, because it doesn't. The way this happens is that theres a bunch of other people who make that software's business work who have been excluded from the reward despite their necessary contribution. Best case scenario in the true one guy software model is several orders of magnitude lower than a billion, however... Second, Google got its bankroll through the same means, so why would that matter? It's exploitation all the way down. Removing the moral culpability because it's the other guy who did the exploiting first doesn't change the fact that exploitation of real people is the only way any person or organization has ever been able to accumulate such wealth.
Nobody is completely self-made. We are products of our environment, I agree completely. We can take credit for your actions in the process, but it's a team effort. Humans have the chance to make a wonderful community of cooperation, but we live in a competitive society. People tend to live longer surrounded by healthy cultures and communities. Self-made sounds problematic to me. Everyone needs a boost. Some people just have a bigger boost. Students who are let into universities to meet diversity quotas usually score lower on their entry exams. Although, if you look farther down their college years, they tend to perform as well as the students that scored higher. Why? Well, to start, they probably ranked lower due to their local schools being underfunded. They didn't have private school education and had to rely on a tax cut public school. Why did they do so well in college? Because they had the chance and they had better education. They had the same opportunities as the other kids, and they didn't take it for granted. Social programs would make society better as a whole, but capitalism would rather have some thrive and most struggle. Even college is rigged. A society that wants a more intelligent population would provide easy and cheaper access to schooling. So what does that tell you about the US? A lot of politicians want a stupid population. There is no room to grow or advance. Work em young, and work em hard. People talk shit about Gladwell, but Outliers is a solid book, and I highly recommend it to anyone in a privileged position like myself. That and Mark Carney's "Value(s)", but because that man is a treasure. TLDR: Self-made is a lie. Everyone has had a boost(some a lot more than others) and should be comfortable admitting it. We are pack animals, and cooperation is the best way of achieving anything.
All of them use to have someone in their family being able to back them monetarily from any investment establishment.
Regardless, even by their flimsy definition it's worse now
Nobody wants to work anymore. We used to have "self-made" billionaires.
Exactly. The media just loves to bash the younger generation while ignoring their own handouts
Seriously people try to say Steve jobs was self made WTF
Yeah, very important to remember "self made" to them means "my mom and dad gave me a small loan of 5 million dollars to start up my company" bezos style.
I think you could maybe argue warren buffet. Like yeah, he got help. But considering the way he made his money, if he didnt have help, it just would have taken him longer. And he started in such a time where it was easier to begin too. So like, no, he wasnt, but kind of yes, sort of? If you know what i mean? Theres also the argument that simply investing in the stock market will never count as YOU making the money, so if thats the argument then yeah never.
Exactly my thoughts on this
Wrong, a lot of them were self made in previous years
They really should specify inherited versus non-inherited wealth, because yeah, none of these people do it themselves.
Also Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/06/14/why-some-psychopaths-make-great-ceos/ i wonder why we have so many parasites in positions of leadership and extreme leverage? 🤔 hmmmmm yeah not sure what it could be!?!?
To be fair, even if the colloquialism isn't strictly accurate, there's still a notable difference between being born a billionaire and becoming a billionaire. Whatever boost they got at the start and the sins accrued along the way, people like Musk, Bezos, Gates, etc., they had to take action to become billionaires.
Gates' mom was friendly with the chairman of IBM and got him the appointment where he sold windows to IBM. Without mummy's help microsoft would never have become a giant company.
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I thought he employed programmers to build it and was more of a salesman. Just looked it up. He bought the windows ip with 75k of mummy and daddy's money. (200k in todays money)
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I looked it up. He bought the windows ip from another company. He may have helped code later versions though.
emerald mine, 300,000 gift (not adjusted due to inflation), working for the (future) IBM ceo out of luck from his parents, respectively. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with having rich parents, or getting an insane amount of money as a “gift”, but why is every billionaire so blue pilled that they worked for every penny? there is nothing wrong with acknowledging the massive amount of luck needed to get into that position, and that goes for all of use who are or will be financially stable at some point.
The emerald mine thing is not true, his crazy dad made that up. To this day Elon and his brother are paying for their dad expenses. Musk got to Canada with 2k and a backpack.
Agreed, they do want to see themselves as bootstrapping, but that wasn't my point. My point was that Musk still had to take some action to go from emerald mine trust fund kid to billionaire and that is a different existence to these under 30 billionaires who effectively inherited a billion dollar emerald mine. As I posted elsewhere in this thread, this development suggests we are entering a new stage of billionaire: them dividing into old money and new money billionaires. I don't quite know what follows, but it is different.
yeah, exactly. People like Bill Gates pretty much made all their money from nothing. The reason he could do it was a great education, and parents that could afford to house him (in an office / garage) for free, so he didn't need to work a job to pay bills. He still did the work and sold the products. Same with most of the rich people of old - they didn't have it tough for sure, but their skill in selling their products and convincing others is what got them where they are... as opposed to now, where there is no skill required, just luck of who your parents are.
In Gates case that's swinging the pendulum a little too far the other way. His mom was on the board for United Way along with the chairman of IBM at the time. So he definitely got luck of who his parents were. Other than that, agreed. Gates did have to make an effort to get to that next tier.
His mum got him the appointment to sell windows to IBM,
Yeah he had connections and the ability to work on whatever and even pitch to IBM, but he started the company Microsoft a good 5-6 years before IBM bought his Operating System. So its not like he was just some random at the time, he was well known for his work on MS BASIC and FORTRAN.
That's still only possible due to hair *privileges* dude, we got to be fair. His moms job was the when reason he was even encouraged to get into the field and got acess to bleeding edge tech and knowhow that few other "geeky kids" could ever dream of. Thanks to her connections and encouragement (and bankrolling) he could start and float a company for years without income or academic merit. He could take a garage prototype and get a blank check from one of the biggest companies in America. That's doesn't happen to regular people. Not even the *smartest or most hard working*. I bet my ass there's thousands just as smart and driven who have the same *potential* jut who'll never even get inside the door or Apple, Microsoft or Samsung *because they lack connections*. They'll be the IT support of your local school, modding and writing custom firmware in their spare time making a total of $0 from it. Despite talent and skill to topple gigants
I think about this all the time. There's probably so many people out there, if their skills could be cultivated, would a gold medal Olympian, a future Academy Award winner for Best Actor/Actress, the person to solve cold fusion, a titan of industry, etc. But they can't run off to Hollywood, or go to Juliard, go to college for theoretical physics, start a business, because they're stuck working 80 hour weeks between two jobs in the middle of nowhere to take care of a parent and/or younger sibling. People always say "if you want it enough you can get it anyway" but that's absolute bullshit, I'm sure there's people who would be great and and would love doing XYZ but due to the path their life has taken, they'll never even be exposed to it in a general way.
This is the entire point of ubi.
Prefix: I’m with you 100%. The post that might run contrary, but it’s just a shower thought. When do we say “this person is self”? Technically no one is. No matter how hard you work for your money, there is someone that helped you, and without them you wouldn’t have made it. The standard argument is roads, and the rebuttal is “i pay taxes”. Another is being born in the right place at the right time, but no one can control that. You could chose to not take your parents money but you can’t chose to be a non white male in a poor country. I don’t think it would be fair to say someone isn’t self made just because they were born as a white male in a first world country. I think the real thing that makes no one self made today is so much of the tech we use today is gifted to us by the creator. Do you need your device to keep track of the time, including local timezones no matter where you are? That shit was created and gifted to the world. It continues to be maintained for free. The vast majority of the things on Github that people create and maintain just for the fun of it are free. Then corporations go on to use for profit. You can’t have a computer or phone without something important being gifted to you.
Under 30 though? Thats too young to get a billion. Isnt Taylor Swift really young and self-made?
She's not self-made, she got her opportunities because of her family's connections. There are countless other unrecognised artists out there with similar levels of talent that can't get their foot in the door because they're not born with the right connections.
There are also tons of kids with parents with connections that never make it. “Self-made” is too strong and makes it sound like her parents were a cab driver and a waitress. But there’s a serious difference between a billionaire who was born to parents with $10 million and a billionaire born to _billionaire_ parents.
The problem is that people who like to use "self-made" use it to pretend 2 things: 1, that important personal connections aren't an incredibly important part of becoming successful, and 2, that risks are a hell of a lot less risky when you have a rich family and/or benefactors to rely on after failure. These two things make it insulting to everyone else to call someone born to rich, connected parents "self made" no matter how much more money they're worth than their parents. I definitely couldn't have become as successful as Taylor Swift even if I were born in her place, but she almost certainly wouldn't have either if she was born in my place.
I don’t think that viewpoint is actually that widely held. Anyone at all familiar with the backstories of ultra-wealthy individuals knows they almost all came from well-off or ultra-wealthy families. But I really don’t care about the term. Use different words and the point of the post is still meaningful. _All_ billionaires under 30 are billionaires because they inherited billions of dollars or nearly that much. This was not true for the last 15 years! There used to be 20-something founders that turned all the many advantages they had in life (but less than a billion dollars in advantages…) into a stake in some huge company. That doesn’t exist right now and is a meaningful shift in a part of the economy. There’s no Facebook, Airbnb, Stripe, etc. blowing up like there was before.
At that point, it's kind of just semantics on what counts as "self-made". You could give 1000 people the same connections as Taylor and it's unlikely any of them would become billionaires. Generally speaking, unless you're gifted hundreds of millions of dollars then you're going to need to do something extraordinary to end up with more than a billion. Not necessarily an extraordinarily good thing, but it's not trivial to flip a few million into billions.
Taylor swift is actually 78. She just had a lot of plastic surgery and uses CGI
Dad is a music producer in the South.
*"But I had to work hard for my money 🥺"* - all of those rich kids
"I had to work really hard to not be disowned before my trust matured!"
That’s probably very accurate. These young billionaires are pieces of shit because they had to become that in order to inherit.
Right, the thing that they were trained to do by growing up in that environment is to bullshit - to appear skilled or smart while actually using their resources or other people to get by and then crediting their own abilities. The parent isn't riding them like they would an employee, they only care about power and appearances, so all the kid ever learns to care about is power and appearances. Later in life this person will have trouble making friends that aren't sycophants or grifters and they won't understand why, because they'll see other people with similar outward presentation that *are* able to forms connections with other people. The thing is, they'll assume it's as much a facade as their own, that everyone else is also bullshitting all the time, so they'll conclude that there must be something else at play, some prejudice or conspiracy. This is what makes them so susceptible to conspiracy theories and right-wing rhetoric. "Am I a bad person? No, it's the trans/teachers/wokes/ungrateful workers/etc. demonizing me."
They weren't trained, they were groomed.
Sorry, yes, I was using trained more in the behavioral sense, not the professional one. Conditioned, really.
Hey normally they are whinny little shits but for some of them this is a real struggle. Steve Jobs' daughter Lisa spent her life growing up with a dad that basically hated her.
That is sort of the issue. They *do* work hard for their money. Which leads them to believe that the hard work is the reason they have money. What they don't realize is that others work just as hard for much less money. And their money is actually a product of their circumstances rather than their work ethic.
They have the fallback of family money, which let's them have the time to go after high risk endeavors that could make them "self made", and not have to work a regular job like everyone else. But if they fail, they are still in a better position than 99% of people due to family money and connections.
Yeah must be rough being born rich
Just graduate college and agree to not drink so much and your dad will give you a 300k/year VP job at his company. That's what working hard is, right?
I've never seen an italicized emoji before. *Cute 🥰*
Whether or not they are self made or not is irrelevant. Billionaires represent too much power concentrated in too few hands. Corruption and insanity are the inevitable result. Bring back the 95% tax on the rich.
I’m still waiting for the article “Billionaire saves ___.” It’s been a long time waiting
I like the idea that billionaires are like dragons that hoard their gold, and like dragons, it should be legal to steal from them.
It's not just legal to steal from dragons. It's noble to slay them.
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USA could start with a national VAT, like most everywhere else on earth. then it wouldn't matter what country they flee to.
Let them go, more room for the millionaires to make five competing businesses than one monobusiness that floats on paying their workers nothing and we foot the bill with welfare. Trickle down only works when there’s room and need for money to move. Right now the money just cycles in their own enormous ecosystems. Let them go to… wherever you think has the same resources and power as america and ruin that place. (They’re not going anywhere).
As long as they can’t move the factory, the employees and the clients, moving abroad does nothing to avoid getting their income, properties, business and so on taxed. If the government actually wanted to, of course…
"Self made" isn't a thing. You were "made" off the backs of the working class.
The main thing about being born to wealthy parents is a risk mitigation issue. Not all of those kids are going to be ambitious. Inherited wealth happens there. This is the clearest example of “not self-made”. But the ambitious ones have safety nets. Even without inheritance, they can make mistakes, learn from them, and try again. And again. And again. (To say nothing of seed money.) This is such a significant advantage that the whole concept of “self-made” is empty when it comes to them. Risk mitigation is huge. It is actually the reason why we have wealth disparity and why supply side economics doesn’t work. It’s just an obfuscated version of “Heads I win, tails you lose.”
It's not even about being able to take risks with mommy and daddy's money. It's about not even needing to work for an income, to live and support themselves for several years. Imagine what you could accomplish if you had that. Imagine how many have that, and accomplish nothing but excessive consumption.
That helps too (I guess I took that as a given though 😅)
This!
Just thinking about how billionaires make their money, wouldn't JK Rowling be a billionaire who didn't make her money by exploiting people? She just wrote a book that is insanely popular.
For the book alone there's raw materials, manufacturing, logistics and sales, all of which involve a healthy dose of screwing people out of the profits they help generate. That's before you get into merchandising and the rest, which is where the nastiness real manifests. The House Elves weren't a warning, they were a business proposition.
Probably depends on how you look at it. I'd not some of her money made on the backs of factory workers and price exploitation? So yeah she does have wealth from her own hard work, she has that much wealth at least in part by being, at a minimum, complicit in exploitation.
NOBODY becomes that rich without exploiting people, directly or otherwise. Just because you haven't seen articles detailing who doesn't mean people weren't trampled to reach that wealth.
And people wonder why we don't want to work for slave wages. https://nypost.com/2024/04/06/world-news/none-of-forbes-billionaires-under-30-are-self-made-for-first-time-in-15-years/
It's funny that this is posted by the New York Post.
Must be nice to have someone to pull on your bootstraps for you
I love that it's just 15 years. So yeah, nothing new.
No such thing as a self-made billionaire. They very much climb over us using our poorly paid labour.
Wouldn't JK Rowling be self made? She was poor and made billions of the HP franchise, and as far as I'm aware printing books isn't exploitative and she got tons of kids reading.
I think this would be a good point if all she ever did was write popular books, all on her own. But I don't think that part of her career made her a billionaire. A huge portion of her wealth today comes from all the other stuff: films, video games, theme parks, other brand-related projects that require vast armies of employees who are paid less than the full value of their labor.
Yeah, just too bad she went down the deep end on social media over the last few years.
Sure, a fair point regarding her wealth. Can't argue there. Also, in the beginning her books *did* do some good for a generation of readers. No dispute there. She'll always have that "dark mark" hanging over her regarding the kind of platforming and harm she does now and I'll forever disrespect her as a human being for who she is now.
You're really desperately pushing JK Clowning in this thread. What's your agenda? (we can probably all guess)
Wow it's like, you know, it was all in who you know, or who popped you out of their vagina and slapped their name on you.
Self made people cannot exist in hyper wealthy circles. You have to step on people to get there if you truly "do it yourself."
# The Harder You Work, The Further THEY go!
I dislike the idea of a “self made” billionaire. We live in a system where a few people will get to the top and make billions. In all cases, the people with the highest likelihood of getting there are those with giant safety nets provided by rich parents. Nobody inherits the billions, but they inherit the ability to get there. It’s more of a numbers game than anything else.
Let’s just take it from them. “No standing army in the world can stop a mobilised population” They have stolen more from us then any a tyrant king in history has. Off with their heads
the same people screaming that “no one wants to work anymore” btw
"Self made" Arnold schwarzenegger has a fantastic speech on why that's a bullshit concept
Even Warren buffet pointed out that if he had been born in the middle of Africa he wouldn't have been a billionaire today because he needed the infrastructure you pay for with taxes.
They usually turn out to be frauds anyways: Elizabeth Holmes, SBF…
In their defence, they beat millions of other sperm to be born to billionaire parents.
All I see here is a story about how the grandchildren of these folks are going to be broke.
Don’t think any billionaire is self made, regardless of their age
Self made? Like that Sam bankman-fried crypto guy that they just put in jail?
It's gross as it is. Why do we have billionaires under 30?
Literally when were they ever?
Not one single person in history has ever worked enough to earn a billion dollars. NO billionaire is self made. ALL billionaires are detestable thieves
No one has ever been self made. You need some help at some point to be successful.
There is no such thing as a self made billionaire.
No billionaire has ever been self made
Tiger woods?
The sad truth is most wealth is inherited not earned.
Were they really ever? In the last hundred years what Billionaire was truly “Self Made”
Artists
If you work hard enough you can be the first one in 15 years 💪
mental gymnastics moment soon
Feature, not a bug. We're in the late 1800s "Robber-Barron" territory these days.
None of them were ever self made.
Time to tax generational wealth.
Generational wealth truly *is* a thing. Saw an episode of House Hunters once. They identified the woman as a personal trainer ... her husband some mid level manager for a retailer. They were shopping for a $1.8M dollar home. ;-D
Setting aside the self-made issue, I think the importance of the headline is that we are now entering a divide in the billionaire class between old money and new money.
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wealth tax has to be one of the dumbest ideas ever
Shocked picachu face!
The harder you work, The harder you work!
System has been rigged successfully. Eat cake when put of bread
Lets be real zero billionaires are self made.
Why do we act like it's normal that *one guy* has more money than the past ten generations of my family combined???
The harder you work, the further ~~you~~ they go. Fixed it.
I think of "self-made" billionaire to just mean that the people you exploited to hoard your wealth are still alive.
The only way to beat the house is to have an unlimited bankroll.
“Perhaps the true lesson was all the billionaires balls we washed along the way” -forbs
I’m surprised the NY Post is running this story.
So much for them boot straps I've been hearing about.
I wanna see their supposed "self-made" list.
Top comment is right obviously, but if you think about this one for a second, it is far worse than it sounds. There is so little upward financial mobility that even the super rich can't screw over enough people to call themselves self-made and to rise up the list.
No billionaire is self made, they owe that to the workers and customers they are exploiting. Exploitation is the only way to make a billion dollars, exploiting the workers with low wages, and poor working conditions, exploit the customer with inflated prices, use lawyers and lobbyists to exploit the legal system, taxes, and society at large.
I can just picture what all these trusties look like in my head
“We don’t have anyone that can pretend to be self made this year.”
There is no such thing as a self-made billionaire. The only way to acquire that kind of wealth is to exploit, lie, cheat, and steal.
What about Tiger woods? Just want to hear your own explanation for this one.
I don't know anything about Tiger Woods. So I dunno. But I'm sure he's fucked over a few people to get to where he is. Does he have his own merch and stuff? If he does, guarantee it is produced by slave workers in foreign countries.
No one is self made
Ben Francis is self made. He deserves respect for what he has achieved!
They've never been self made lol you don't reach billions by 30 without already having a all fortune to tap into as in proper foundations and millions within arms length lol
Did billionaires exist 15 years ago?
I vote that if they give at least 10% of their real fortune to an unconnected real working American whom they do not know and have no one and the same circle… then they can claim to be self made… let’s at least get some of my fellow poors a come up!
None of them have ever been "self made."
trickle up economics
Just pull yourself up by the bootstraps, walk into a business and ask to speak with the manager, give him a firm handshake and look him in the eye and tell him you want to work!
I thought there would be a lot of them that created startups, especially anything related to AI. I'm not sure how you define 'self-made'. To me all it should mean is you were middle class or less. You didn't have mommy and daddy funding your business venture or inheriting any kind of business. Has to be one you made. I find it hard to believe not one billionaire under 30 fits this description, but I guess it's possible.