Is there any truly rags to riches story? In modern times, at least?
I remember stories about rich individuals who began with absolutely nothing. Many of wealthy today began with seed money, better liquidity, and a network of supporters. Jeff Bezos wasn't rich but he raised a sizable amount of money from friends and family.
Steve Jobs was adopted into a lower middle income family.
There’s kind of a no true Scotsman thing going on where people will point out some advantage anybody who became very successful had and therefore they weren’t poor enough to count.
Depends on your definition of rags and riches I suppose.
By my definition, I know plenty of folks who grew up lower middle class or below, had no exceptional support from parents (many from single parent homes), zero assistance going to college (if they did at all), and otherwise lived lives ranging from unremarkable to living in poverty growing up.
I can point to about a 3 or 4 of those types in my personal network who now are multi-millionaires. This is my definition of "made it" - but not many others.
If your definition is billionaire, I imagine the list gets a lot smaller.
Depends on riches and modern Times. There are many People in their 40-60s, who started by nothing, and worked themselves to the wealth of single or even ten millions. Which is by definition quite rich, just not super rich, which would be hundred millions or billions.
And it seems for becoming super rich you, usually need a good seed you can grow even more. For which I don't remember any real example. Maybe some gangster, or politician how earned their wealth through some other means, like Putin.
I went searching years ago and noticed that at the very least, most of these people were from, at least, upper middle-class families. They probably a very stable home life.
The title claims "behind every self-made millionaire", then the article subtitle claims "behind most self-made millionaires", then the article body just points at a grand total of 4 human beings that are millionaires that had rich fathers, as proof that most/every self-made millionaire had a rich father. The article is nothing but class-warfare propaganda.
The children of millionaire lawyers and doctors also make a lot of noise on social media about "millionaires being the new middle class" and why we should only eat Zuckerberg and Bezos but leave out their wealthy parents.
You can find a list of billionaires and then just find their associated Wikipedia articles. From a glance at the top 10, only Gautam Adani seemed to have been somewhat middle class instead of upper class starting out. But feel free to continue going down the list, maybe you'll see a trend that's good enough for you.
Most people born with family whealth waste the money and loose it in a few generations. Very few manage to turn their resources into facebook, tesla or amazon.
While that's true, people who do end up being millionaires or even billionaires almost never come from any other background. Rich parents seem to be a prerequisite for starting successful businesses - and in several of these cases, having the extra spare funds to turn an initally stagnant business into a success.
Not really. Being a millionaire is hard but simple: study your ass off to get into a good uni, study there all the time to get a great job at an international company, work all the time to get the company to sponsor your visa to the US, and work there to get a few promotions, you'll get to be a millionaire.
Don't party, don't have fun, make lots of sacrifices. Most people are not prepared to do this 1 thing.
Now being a billionaire is a very different story of course.
Having a wealthy family helps you in a few different ways:
- Fallback scenario. Wordt case they can go home, or they have a heritage at one point.
- Environment. Probably a more stable environment / background.
- Network. Network to customers, capital, pr.
- Access to capital. Easier today.
Especially the fallback scenario is almost always overlooked. Most people who claim to have risked it all and were "living on the streets", always had some fallback in forms of well off parents (or simply stable parents).
It's just like the starving artist syndrome, where most of these "starving artists" actually have a huge fallback, but they simply don't want to use it. But just by being there it helps a lot.
Free climbing is a lot different than climbing with ropes. Even if you didn't need to use them.
Don’t think of it as a Boolean requirement but rather changing the difficulty factor, with key thresholds for going to the next level: it’s much harder for a poor kid to reach middle class stability than for a kid from a $1M-ish family to hit $10M. Having a high-status education, access to their parents’ social network, familiarity with banking and finance, and the ability to know that taking a chance and failing means that you get a “boring” upper middle class life rather than being on the streets all make it much easier for someone to even try something ambitious.
Look, I don't disagree with the premise, but this needs a hell of a lot of proofreading. What even is this sentence?
> This other tweet, emerged in the thread of the aforementioned, illustrates it perfectly: if Bezos was able to get to where he is today, it is due, in part, to the fact that his parents gave him more than $ 240,000 dollars to prevent his idea, Amazon, will fail.
Click through the site, it's fucking bizarre, like a showcase for "here's the kinds of blogspam I can write for your needs!"
It suffers from overuse of commas which tends to be because the author uses them to communicate how they read it in their head (particularly how they paused on beats whilst reading for effect). Obviously there's an error at the end ("will fail" should be "from failing"). It suggests to me an author who is not experienced at writing, quote possibly due to having English as a second language.
A few thoughts, none of which are specifically intended to support or refute this article's thesis:
- "Every" is a big word. What about Jobs and Woz (I actually legitimately don't know)? I'm sure there's lots of "actual" self-made millionaires. But I bet you they all have the same kind of story: somewhere along the way, someone, whether family or not, showed up with a lot of money.
- It is kind of intuitive that having money, a very versatile tool, can help increase the success rate of your business. Sometimes it means a longer runway, sometimes it means being able to even try.
- There's a survivorship bias, I think, given the above point. What's the success rate of startups built by people with money vs. people without money?
- To me, this relates loosely, perhaps analogously, to the tremendous value of having a social safety net. People with money are usually in a position to take risks. Those who are thinking about where their next meal or rent payment comes from usually aren't.
It is not just the money that enabled their business. They were also able to tap into a significant social network of people. That was probably more important than a check for $250K.
Facebook is a great example of that: family money helped but the big win was convincing Harvard students that they could get laid by joining and bringing their high-status friends into the network. I forget the name and Google’s search degradation is making it hard to discover but there was a dispute years back by a woman who was an early hire alleging that she wasn’t fairly compensated for her work promoting Facebook to sororities, which seems like the kind of thing which is easy to undervalue (“it’s just marketing”) but key to having a network-heavy business hit critical mass.
Uh right, but you can infer from annual household income so low that there's no way "millionaire is middle class" is true.
"Millionaire is a low bar for one of the highest paid professional groups in the world" is a very different statement from "millionaire is basically middle class." The latter really distorts people's understanding of the state of our society and their position in it.
I would suggest that you learn how to accept fair criticism and learn from it. That’ll get you much further in life than resorting to insults when you get something wrong.
Oh I'm totally aware you're hyperbolizing. Nonetheless, most Americans have a very poor understanding of wealth distribution and some of that comes from the 95th percentile claiming to be middle class. This is bad for pretty much everyone: the rich get to masquerade as the middle class, and the middle/lower classes get to feel as if they're further behind than they ever could've imagined.
So it's worth pointing out the facts: median household income is $65k and more than half the country couldn't sustain a $1000 emergency expense.
I don’t know what kind of bubble you live in but tech workers are one of the highest paid professions and even there millionaires are relatively uncommon unless you’re cherry-picking that to only the Silicon Valley subset.
Having a median net worth of $1M puts you right around the 90th percentile currently.
It’s also worth mentioning that this is heavily biased by the real estate bubble. That’s important because classic usage of “millionaire” implied more liquid assets than the average boomer has when they’re sitting on a house in a nice location with limited options for safely tapping into that value.
> Working in US tech puts you in the 90th percentile.
I’ve given you a link to the actual data. Why don’t you look at that and decide whether your hyperbole is doing anything, either to inform or improve your reputation.
Articles like this try to make people think the reverse correlation is true. That people with well-to-do parents will automatically become millionaires. The reality is that there are ten's of millions of parents of similar means and circumstances, and that very, very few of their children will end up millionaires.
The real conclusion of this article and many like it; is that success is not just blind luck and not purely egalitarian, but the combination of the two. There is no useful information to glean from so a large generalization.
We search for universal, objective, pithy summaries of messy, complicated situations. Both of the following seem to be true:
1. It would be effectively impossible for someone from a disadvantaged background to start Amazon, Microsoft, or Facebook.
2. Bezos, Gates, Zuck are extraordinary business people who achieved what 99.9% of their peers would be unable to achieve from the same starting point.
I'm not sure why we keep debating whether these guys are good or bad, impressive or not, as some sort of universal truth.
There seems to be an important distinction here. This is not inter-generational wealth in the traditional sense. For instance, Bill Gates did not inherit his fortune, but rather he had some advantages when it came to funding of school, help getting started, and other resources. I see a lot of people mention inheritance taxes when this sort of topic comes up, but of course an inheritance tax would do nothing here.
In fact, I'm not sure what could or even should be done to prevent this sort of situation. Does anyone expect parents not to invest in the success of their children? Imagine if you're lucky enough to be well off. Will you move to the worst school district you can find for your child to "even the odds?" An idea like this would simply never get any real adoption.
One big one is dropping the “self-made” mythology and being more realistic about what we tell kids to aspire to. Our society has a lot of attempts to subsidize the ultra-wealthy or remove protections for lower-income people which are sold as some kind of fairness based on meritocracy rhetoric with a hefty dose of blaming poor outcomes on the people suffering them and simply recognizing that would make things healthier.
The other big one would be earlier enforcement of white-collar crime laws. We don’t need to prevent hugely successful outliers nearly as much as their negative outcomes and not waiting until you have, say, peak 90s Microsoft or 2015 Trump to enforce existing laws would have helped even things out for competitors or stiffed contractors, and generated plenty of tax revenue to do things like help poorer people avoid the worst outcomes. We get a lot more out of, say, sending a thousand Appalachian kids to good schools and colleges than the marginal benefit of Bill Gates measuring his net worth in tens of billions rather than, say, hundreds of millions.
There are many successful businesses where the founders were backed by a substantial sum of money from family and/or friends.
There are also many successful businesses where the founders had to scratch and claw for every dime needed to get it off the ground.
I guess you just pick the narrative you want to promote and run with it. There are plenty of examples you can use to support your viewpoint. This article is typical of so many these days.
I find these kinds of articles so tedious. There are many millionaires that came from nothing. Self made if you will. But they choose to highlight 3 of the most successful people in the modern world (not “just” millionaires but multi-billionaires) and say “see, their parents were not poor, that means self-made millionaires all come from families with money!”. Such lazy thinking.
I don't see why an already rich person who became much wealthier than their parents cannot be praised for their ventures. Also, many people become rich by working for these companies, and they create new companies which provide more jobs. Some of these people become rich and have children as well...
Any business founder who has taken funding, VC or otherwise is automatically disqualified from the title of "self-made" million/billionaire regardless should they choose to sell. Period.
I think those who have bootstrapped their company with their own money are fine being called self-made.
> “We were fortunate enough to have lived in other countries and saved some money, so we were able to become an angel investor. The rest is history,” explained his adoptive father, Mike Bezos, a Cuban immigrant who worked as an engineer. at Exxon, one of the world’s leading oil companies, in 2015.
I think all that these stories mean is that “self-made” applies to a few generations rising up from poverty to great wealth, rather than a single person. Rather than denigrate these successful people we should applaud their predecessors for helping the next generation get ahead, and encourage society as a whole to adopt this mindset. Too often it seems like generations have a “I got mine” drawbridge mentality and refuse to sacrifice if it means future generations will have a chance to get ahead.
I point at climate change, public debt, private debt, gutted social programs, etc.
I’m shocked when people think they are rich when they make 150k/year. While that would be comfortable for most areas, the scale of capitalism favors my family and our ability to take on risk. We can fail so many times we look like we are business geniuses when in reality you don’t see the failures. Other people fail and they are out of the market, our family just keeps trying. People just are not good at understanding big numbers. Can you really imagine infinity? That’s the amount of money we seem to have. Can’t spend it faster than it comes in.
The word "millionaire" in the title isn't reflected in the article, and it seems poorly chosen. There are tens of millions of millionaires in the US alone. It's still a lot of money, but it's no longer a ridiculous sum accrued only by plutocrats. It's a comfortable middle-class retirement fund.
That was already a joke in 1997, when Dr. Evil demanded "one million dollars" in Austin Powers, and was laughed at.
That may just have been a poor choice of title (often written by editors and not the original writer, though this is just a blog). The rest of the article doesn't mention "millionaires" in that sense.
The thesis may well apply if you change "millionaire" to "billionaire", but it's a weird mistake to make in the title.
61 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 67.6 ms ] threadExcellent article.
And...
"Fred Trump, had actually lent his son at least $60.7 million.
The Times reports that the amount would be worth $140 million in today's dollars and that much of it was never repaid."
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/02/trumps-small-loan-from-his-f...
I remember stories about rich individuals who began with absolutely nothing. Many of wealthy today began with seed money, better liquidity, and a network of supporters. Jeff Bezos wasn't rich but he raised a sizable amount of money from friends and family.
Notch?
There’s kind of a no true Scotsman thing going on where people will point out some advantage anybody who became very successful had and therefore they weren’t poor enough to count.
By my definition, I know plenty of folks who grew up lower middle class or below, had no exceptional support from parents (many from single parent homes), zero assistance going to college (if they did at all), and otherwise lived lives ranging from unremarkable to living in poverty growing up.
I can point to about a 3 or 4 of those types in my personal network who now are multi-millionaires. This is my definition of "made it" - but not many others.
If your definition is billionaire, I imagine the list gets a lot smaller.
And it seems for becoming super rich you, usually need a good seed you can grow even more. For which I don't remember any real example. Maybe some gangster, or politician how earned their wealth through some other means, like Putin.
Musk - father owned diamond mines
Bezos - alluded to in article - big loan from parents
Arnault - father owned Ferret-Savinel
Gates - born with million dollar trust fund, grandfather ran bank, mother on board with IBM's Opel etc.
Buffett - grandfather owned chain of stores, father a congressman
Don't party, don't have fun, make lots of sacrifices. Most people are not prepared to do this 1 thing.
Now being a billionaire is a very different story of course.
- Fallback scenario. Wordt case they can go home, or they have a heritage at one point.
- Environment. Probably a more stable environment / background.
- Network. Network to customers, capital, pr.
- Access to capital. Easier today.
Especially the fallback scenario is almost always overlooked. Most people who claim to have risked it all and were "living on the streets", always had some fallback in forms of well off parents (or simply stable parents).
It's just like the starving artist syndrome, where most of these "starving artists" actually have a huge fallback, but they simply don't want to use it. But just by being there it helps a lot.
Free climbing is a lot different than climbing with ropes. Even if you didn't need to use them.
Most successful Phillips Exeter graduate doesn't quite have that ring for the Horatio Alger idea that is being pushed.
> This other tweet, emerged in the thread of the aforementioned, illustrates it perfectly: if Bezos was able to get to where he is today, it is due, in part, to the fact that his parents gave him more than $ 240,000 dollars to prevent his idea, Amazon, will fail.
Click through the site, it's fucking bizarre, like a showcase for "here's the kinds of blogspam I can write for your needs!"
- "Every" is a big word. What about Jobs and Woz (I actually legitimately don't know)? I'm sure there's lots of "actual" self-made millionaires. But I bet you they all have the same kind of story: somewhere along the way, someone, whether family or not, showed up with a lot of money.
- It is kind of intuitive that having money, a very versatile tool, can help increase the success rate of your business. Sometimes it means a longer runway, sometimes it means being able to even try.
- There's a survivorship bias, I think, given the above point. What's the success rate of startups built by people with money vs. people without money?
- To me, this relates loosely, perhaps analogously, to the tremendous value of having a social safety net. People with money are usually in a position to take risks. Those who are thinking about where their next meal or rent payment comes from usually aren't.
Example: "hot or not before:2004-01-01"
I don't think Google purges their crawled pages ever so it should turn up?
"Millionaire is a low bar for one of the highest paid professional groups in the world" is a very different statement from "millionaire is basically middle class." The latter really distorts people's understanding of the state of our society and their position in it.
So it's worth pointing out the facts: median household income is $65k and more than half the country couldn't sustain a $1000 emergency expense.
Having a median net worth of $1M puts you right around the 90th percentile currently.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2020-bulletin-ch...
It’s also worth mentioning that this is heavily biased by the real estate bubble. That’s important because classic usage of “millionaire” implied more liquid assets than the average boomer has when they’re sitting on a house in a nice location with limited options for safely tapping into that value.
You may have been hyperbolizing but in addition to that, you don't know what you're talking about.
I’ve given you a link to the actual data. Why don’t you look at that and decide whether your hyperbole is doing anything, either to inform or improve your reputation.
The real conclusion of this article and many like it; is that success is not just blind luck and not purely egalitarian, but the combination of the two. There is no useful information to glean from so a large generalization.
1. It would be effectively impossible for someone from a disadvantaged background to start Amazon, Microsoft, or Facebook.
2. Bezos, Gates, Zuck are extraordinary business people who achieved what 99.9% of their peers would be unable to achieve from the same starting point.
I'm not sure why we keep debating whether these guys are good or bad, impressive or not, as some sort of universal truth.
In fact, I'm not sure what could or even should be done to prevent this sort of situation. Does anyone expect parents not to invest in the success of their children? Imagine if you're lucky enough to be well off. Will you move to the worst school district you can find for your child to "even the odds?" An idea like this would simply never get any real adoption.
The other big one would be earlier enforcement of white-collar crime laws. We don’t need to prevent hugely successful outliers nearly as much as their negative outcomes and not waiting until you have, say, peak 90s Microsoft or 2015 Trump to enforce existing laws would have helped even things out for competitors or stiffed contractors, and generated plenty of tax revenue to do things like help poorer people avoid the worst outcomes. We get a lot more out of, say, sending a thousand Appalachian kids to good schools and colleges than the marginal benefit of Bill Gates measuring his net worth in tens of billions rather than, say, hundreds of millions.
There are also many successful businesses where the founders had to scratch and claw for every dime needed to get it off the ground.
I guess you just pick the narrative you want to promote and run with it. There are plenty of examples you can use to support your viewpoint. This article is typical of so many these days.
Any business founder who has taken funding, VC or otherwise is automatically disqualified from the title of "self-made" million/billionaire regardless should they choose to sell. Period.
I think those who have bootstrapped their company with their own money are fine being called self-made.
I think all that these stories mean is that “self-made” applies to a few generations rising up from poverty to great wealth, rather than a single person. Rather than denigrate these successful people we should applaud their predecessors for helping the next generation get ahead, and encourage society as a whole to adopt this mindset. Too often it seems like generations have a “I got mine” drawbridge mentality and refuse to sacrifice if it means future generations will have a chance to get ahead.
I point at climate change, public debt, private debt, gutted social programs, etc.
Yes, they came from wealthy families. They could have easily coasted on that money like tons of kids do.
It made it _easier_ for them to build successful businesses, but success isn't guaranteed!
That was already a joke in 1997, when Dr. Evil demanded "one million dollars" in Austin Powers, and was laughed at.
That may just have been a poor choice of title (often written by editors and not the original writer, though this is just a blog). The rest of the article doesn't mention "millionaires" in that sense.
The thesis may well apply if you change "millionaire" to "billionaire", but it's a weird mistake to make in the title.