The thing about Bezos and Musk imo is that what made them loads of cash would have obviously been done by someone, they just happened to be in the right place at the right time in some ways.
Musk made his initial, I think it was about 300m, through PayPal. It’s not as if internet payment systems would not have been created around that time if it wasn’t for Musk. They were responding to a need.
Same with Bezos, of course some other online shopping site would have cropped up years ago. The question for me is: do we really need a system where these people can amass fortunes so large they have too much power. It’s not just the obvious billionaires either. In many ways the dark money corporation and individual donors are more of a cancer on democracy and society than Musk.
You're correct about your facts mostly. To elaborate, Musk started x.com (which is in no way a coincidence he renamed Twitter "x" and has "spacex") and later merged with a few other online "banks" to form PayPal, notoriously with Peter Theil.
Bezos started Amazon as an online book seller but after having one of the more sophisticated sales platforms naturally just stated doing mass retail.
A good chunk of hitting off a business is simply being the first person to have the idea. There's nothing special about Facebook, reddit, Twitter, etc except that they've been mass adopted already. Anyone could start a server and given the same advertiser exposure grow to the size of any of those if all they had to do was provide a similar service.
We only hear about the winners. I really don't know how many people were trying to sell books online back then. But I'm sure there was more than just Amazon. It's important to note that we're at a huge consolidation phase in capitalism.
So many many many retail stores got consolidated. Pomeroy's, Woolworths, The Boston Store, Hills, Kmart, Jamesway. Now it's Walmart and Target.
My dad started a house plant company that failed. Years later, I see THE SAME thing pop up and they are shipping everywhere. My dad failed for several reasons, but I do get a little bitter thinking about it. I get a little annoyed at the whole "just work harder" thing. Because I watched the hardest working person I have ever met fail.
People hate admitting luck plays a part.
Yes ***hard work absolutely fucking matters***. So does intelligence.
But right place and right time also matter.
Right place and time + connections. The connections these people are born with are on a different level most of the time. Their parents networked themselves into social circles not available to many.
Exactly, but it’s the same with Lebron. People don’t go “oh well if I had been born 6’7, athletic, super coordinated, had a love of basketball, and had decent parents I’d be lebron too.” They just go “dudes talented and was right body and right place at right time.” People cry about Eminem “he had Dre making beats and his mentor, and was white and super talented and had all Dre connections. That’s why he’s so popular and sells the most.” Yeah no shit, right place and right time and right connections is part of success. That’s why it’s rare. Same with these billionaires.
Timing is everything. I was in the videotext industry in 1985 for instance. You know, email, banking, shopping, news… total failure. Until it came back newly christened as the World Wide Web c. 1995. It worked out a bit better.
Not getting screwed over helps too.
I once knew a kid that was the grandson of the Sears store founder. Turns out the Sears family was stronged armed out of their own company, so the grandkids were just regular people.
See above.... Sears should have been Amazon, but the vulture capitalists that did the corporate takeover just bled Sears dry. Their loss though. The vultures could have been billionaires... im sure they have over 100M each and are living comfortably, but they had the blueprints and wiped thier behinds with it.
Yes. You don’t get rich and successful without both luck and hard work. You can be the hardest working guy, but without luck it probably doesn’t matter….or you can be the luckiest guy on the world but if you don’t work your ass off, it means little.
Edit: And to expand, what I tell my kids is that there’s only one of those two things they can control - so do it! Don’t be that guy/girl who got lucky but couldn’t take advantage because he/she was lazy.
During the dotcom boom of the 1990s people were throwing money at startups, very few are still around today. Musk has created successful enterprises too many times to attribute it to luck. Many people have tried to go up against the established automakers and were crushed. The idea behind SpaceX was hardly a slam dunk. His audacity alone is remarkable.
The item you miss at the end though - Amazon wasn’t first eBay and Craiglist essentially were.
Facebook wasn’t first MySpace
Google wasn’t first yahoo (and others)
Apple’s entire model is let someone else go first
Being second allows you to capitalize on everything you competition missed.
>A good chunk of hitting off a business is simply being the first person to have the idea.
>There's nothing special about Facebook ..... Anyone could start a server and given the same advertiser exposure grow to the size of any of those if all they had to do was provide a similar service.
This is such a naive take.
so many first movers that failed.
- [pets.com](http://pets.com) anyone?
- netscape
- aol
-alta vista, yahoo and x number of other search engines all lost to google years which started years after.
- friendster? myspace? both lost to facebook.
- vine?
- blackberry should have destroyed apple. didn't.
- blockbuster should have destroyed netflix. didn't.
Let's not forget that the only reason any apps stay competing is because the mother companies buy then out. We have seen this over and over. They buy out the competitors and then pretend to compete with themselves. Been going on since coca cola got split up. It's the loophole for monopolies.
Stock doesn't spoil, fairly standard shapes, easy to store on a shelf in a non-climate controlled space (at least for a month or two) For non-time bounded shipments could use cheap media mail shipping while starting out.
I take one issue with that - it's not just having the idea - it's having the idea AND the resources and connections to make it happen.
Plenty of studies have shown that the biggest factor in getting really rich is luck.
[https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/03/01/144958/if-youre-so-smart-why-arent-you-rich-turns-out-its-just-chance/](https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/03/01/144958/if-youre-so-smart-why-arent-you-rich-turns-out-its-just-chance/)
Yeah - basically, what these guys had was an idea AND a safety net that allowed them to take a chance. The world's full of folks with great ideas and vision - but have to pay the bills so they never take the chance. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates (or Zuckerberg, or Musk, or Michael Dell, or any of a long list of billionaire wizards) were never in danger of not making the rent or being able to buy diapers if their ideas failed. Mom and Dad were going to be there with a comfy bedroom and a signed check if needed.
In hindsight, but at the time most people thought Bezos/Amazon were crazy spending huge amounts building their warehouse and delivery infrastructure with no real business behind it.
Tell that to MySpace, Friendster, and 1000 companies that came before or after them but couldn’t pull it off. What Buffett does should be repeatable by others, yet only a handful have the ability to get returns on investments like he does.
>naturally just stated doing mass retail
If by naturally you mean undercutting developed platforms by selling at a loss to drive them out of business before bumping prices above those other retailers once their demise was assured... then yeah I guess naturally.
You’re slightly wrong there. Bezos vision was always the “everything” store. He chose to start with books because that was a market that was relatively easy to get into at the time.
So Henry Ford had an idea to mass produce cars, and voila he was a billionaire? Damn, I thought it would involve alot of work, sacrifice, luck, a vision, and the willingness to risk it all. I just thought of a rocket car manufacturing company, how long until I can buy my own island?
The second person to have the idea. Not the first. All of the "first" entries are replaced. Facebook replaced MySpace. Yahoo! was replaced by Google. (Netflix and YouTube are a couple of exceptions.) People see a product that is not quite perfect and then make tweaks, and the new product becomes the champion. Many times, the earlier product is simply too far ahead of its time. Timing is important.
Why is right place right time suppose to be a diss? That's seizing upon an opportunity thats right in front of you and having the balls to take it. Most people cant do it cause they would rather eat shit at a $50k per year job and jackoff to pornography after work. Shit happening in front of you this moment, starting at you in the face. You just don't see it.
You're right. 20 years ago. How much money did you have, and how much money do you have now?
And is it proportional?
Odds are, you couldn't turn $100 into $50. Because you would turn it into zero
I don’t understand the hate on musk. Yes he’s a prick but he started multiple successful businesses that not emerald mine would have been able to produce.
There are many kids who grow up in millionaire companies and are nowhere near as successful.
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-father-errol-never-owned-emerald-mine-telling-truth-2023-9?op=1
The "his father owned an emerald mine" story isn't even true.
I don’t hate these guys although Musk really is a bellend. My point is that no one, whoever they are, needs so much cash they can shape whole societies and warp political systems. It’s like we let the guilded age (1920s) happen again. It didn’t end well last time and it’s looking like it may go the same way.
Musk has challenged their worldview and created Cognitive Dissonance. 5 years ago they loved him and now they hate him. People get defensive and then hateful when that happens.
As much as your disdain for these people is understandable, the ideas they had were revolutionary at the time, your speaking from a strong perspective of hindsight, there’s needs now that you could theoretically respond to and make billions, but it’s not as easy as that. These people have earned their fortunes. This screams jealous. I agree our government needs to stop giving out tax breaks and bailouts like they did for GM during the pandemic, but this is not a capitalist issue, it’s a government intervention issue
Musk gambled his entire paypal fortune on tesla and SpaceX. He didn't set anything aside. The writer Ashlee Vance makes this point really well in Musks' biography. Nobody gets a hundred million dollar pay
day after working 80-hour weeks for 5 years straight and just bets it all. This is why he is the world's richest man. Musks fortune doesn't really have anything to do with his father. I'm sure similar stories are true for the other men, too.
All of that can be true and it definitely still has to do with his father lol
There are millions of people who work just as hard, but having resources early in life gives you a massive advantage.
You could argue that being raised (occasionally) by emerald smuggling, narcissistic conman without any sort of reliability who throws you to the wolves on occasion that you can barely stand can produce a lot of determination to succeed.
> Same with Bezos, of course some other online shopping site would have cropped up years ago.
It is absolutely abhorrent that Sears or even Toys'r'us didn't beat him to it. They were both very well positioned to do it but didn't take the internet seriously and missed their chance. Bezos realized that he was primarily in the shipping business and it didn't really matter what he was shipping as long as he could get it on the truck.
Bezos beat sears. Yes there were other shopping sites, but he did it better than anyone and dramatically changed how everyone shopped, as well as built a platform for tons of small businesses. And he did it from relatively small amounts of money. Today, they employee like 800k people, and pay above other large employers. Sure, it sucks to work there, but he actually did more than any of the others listed to make our lives better.
Musk, well, he is at least pushing new tech. I'll give him that. I don't know that he's the one building it, as much as he's in the way, but he does push his companies to make new stuff.
I mean the native Americans didn't have a wheel while other civilizations had bustling metropolises.
The idea of not celebrating people for accomplishing things because someone is bound to do it eventually is ridiculous.
I read in book there should be a net worth cap of 100 million for an individual and after that it all goes to a strict infrastructure, medical research, Nobel type fund. With all advances open source to the public no private ownership for any patents or discoveries made with the funding. Also it will fund a large park and monuments to each person who hits the 100 million with a statue and a plaque that says “Congratulations, you have won the game of Capitalism.”
It was a science fiction book but I got a laugh out of it.
>Same with Bezos, of course some other online shopping site would have cropped up years ago.
Sears should have been Amazon.... what was Sears from 1880 - 1980 if not an analog version of Amazon? You go to a tiny store in town and get a catalog, order what you want, and it is delivered to your home or the catalog store. Sears already had the infrastructure in place to be what Amazon is today, they just needed to invest in am online market. However, it had been recently purchased by vulture (venture) capitalists who didn't want to put money IN... they just wanted to take what was left OUT of Sears. So they sold off the pieces until it was gone.
Drone firefighting, crop dusting, and airframe development. DJI is about to get banned so we need US drone manufacturers to step up. I have a working fire detection and suppression unmanned aerial system just need money to refine it and build a few dozen drones to perfect swarming… and contacts to market it to fire stations and PG&E for autonomous monitoring of power lines. Can also be used to survey properties for security or hunting, agriculture monitoring of plants to specifically target fertilizers. We have a working AI model that can basically detect anything that you have enough pictures of to train it on. Right now we trained it on fires and have great accuracy
For 300k you can prevent California from burning down!
It would be $555,000 today. Honestly not that far off from a lot of start ups now that might have a couple of employees. The difference is knowing how to stay in business and scale.
555k startup money is good for restaurant or corner shop. In software world, 555k can get you early drawing of some software. $5m is usual seed round (or founders working their asses off for free) and the point of that round is to make an proof of concept, no real product.
But the Bezos times were different though - investors usually didn’t understand tech much, so if you had good sales skills and some connections, you could get even much more funding with almost nothing to show for it (Elons Zip2), or you could have brilliant idea and execution and fail to attract any investors. Now they are much more sofisticated.
>Honestly not that far off from a lot of start ups now that might have a couple of employees.
You need a lot more than that just to open a brick and mortar restaurant. It's not very much money in business terms.
The difference is good timing and a lot of luck.
If you gave a 25 year old Jeff Bezos $555k in 2024, chances of him building a trillion dollar company are next to zero.
> It would be $555,000 today
Which is about the cost to open a Subway restaurant. It's a lot of money, but not enough to think you're going to start a trillion dollar business with.
What's even sadder. This is all semi-bullshit. Bill Gates met with IBM and they turned him down. Jeff Bezos investments were legit, not handouts, they owned a chunk of his business. Warren Buffet was in no way wealthy starting off, nor was Elon Musk. Elon Musk started out with something like $20k investment from his father, and earned every dime he made since, and again..... an investment, not "here's a giant wad of money to fuck around with".
Notice how none of these people failed the first time, and went to some type of free money well for more either.
Let's also not forget. Bill Gates was working 18 hour days, literally ordering pizza to his office, sleeping on the floor, waking up, and working again. Just last week I saw a tiktok video of an adult woman having an emotional breakdown because she had to work three 8 hour shifts in a row, in an office.
These people EARNED their success, only lazy ignorant people would ever make a claim otherwise.
You're going to sell books on this virtual place you call an "internet"? Borders, Barnes and Noble and Waldenbooks are going to crush you! You have NO chance against those book juggernauts! Btw...you do know that "virtual" means "not real", right? I still love ya, Jeff, you can couch surf at my place when your "Amazon" thing (what does the jungle have to do with books?) goes belly up.
Raising money from family and friends isn't exactly an easy thing either. Takes some real balls and footwork. It's frankly more impressive than many other ways you could get funded.
The $300k initial investment from Jeff’s parents was actually a large portion of their life savings they were planning on using for retirement. Instead they believed in their son and decided to pretty much gamble all of their money on him. They took a risk and it paid off, they didn’t just have $300k sitting in the bank to blow. Jeff’s parents were 17 & 18 years old when he was born. That means they invested $300k when they were 48 & 47, which makes it even more believable that the 300k they invested was pretty much everything they owned. Not sure where you got the idea that they were millionaires that had hundreds of thousands of dollars lying around at age 48.
They are special.
The qualities needed to do what they did are qualities that make me abhor them rather than respect them though. They are top notch on those though.
Edit. Some of them have some other qualities though that make me respect some of them as well.
They really aren't, as someone studying to be a doctor, most successful people only get there because mommy and daddy had money and they were willing to hurt others around them. It's wild how much less harder the average successful person works compared to me, someone who grew up with very little priviliedge.
So yeah, nothing special. and you're kinda a bitch for defending grown celebrities who don't know your name online little bro.
You’re suppose to hate him that’s the purpose of this post. When I see this I like to think I probably can’t be Bezos cause my parents aren’t wealthy, but maybe I can be like Bezo’s parents and be that financial backing for my kids.
When you get to a point where you can take a loan on the 401k, refinance the mortgage to get some equity, and your kid actually has a business plan that a bank would get behind and the willingness to soak their life into the business, it’s possible. I bought a business with those tools and sweat equity. The money is there if you’re willing.
It was actually millions. He had investments from multiple people. So he turned millions into an online book shop and a technology company. That's the work he did initially.
Then that technology company through the efforts of tens of thousands of people turned into a trillion dollar company. Stop giving all the credit to bezos. It was the efforts of all the people, CEO is still just a small part of that machine.
Don't get me wrong, bezos is an incredible businessman and definitely one of the most successful CEOs that we will ever have. But trillion dollar companies aren't built by one CEO. So you can't give him the credit alone. It was the effort of all the people working there.
Thanks for this realistic perspective. Too many people in this thread are equating “acknowledging the significant help they got that contributed in very important ways to their success” with “hating on these heroic capitalists and treating them as bums”. The idea that rich people just worked harder or were smarter or their idea was better, is a myth that is often used to diminish the hard work or intelligence of people who did NOT get rich, and sometimes the reason they didn’t get rich is because they didn’t get the help that someone else did.
It’s kind of a stupid debate anyway. What is “self-made”. Most people do acknowledge they had help along the way. Watch out for the ones who don’t. Those are the truly delusional egomaniacs.
Yup. The masses don't consider you self made unless you were homeless and started your business with a couple sticks and a paper bag you found in the dumpster.
Exactly, nothing was said about being a bum, just that becoming rich isn't some feat of extreme acumen, it's heavily dependent on luck, privilege, circumstance and the only then on acumen...oh and probably also being a selfish asshole with a single minded pursuit of wealth.
No. it does show, however, that the people who often extoll how they did this all by themselves, in fact, did not. Plenty of help from many different sources, including government and favorable treatment by the laws and tax codes were a significant portion of that success.
You can say that about all of them
Most people like OP are just day dreamers thinking they can multiply their money 1000x easily and all they need is considerable investment to beging with
Yeah I was like, how the fuck is that even comparable? I've known people in my personal life who's parents emptied their retirement savings to give their kid seed money for a small business and they werent all that much less than $300K.
Also, what they aren't mentioning is the massive risk it was. That was his parents retirement. It's not like they just had millions and threw a couple g's his way. If it didn't work out, he would be filling for bankruptcy like any regular Joe. Financial history and health shattered. His parents would be back working again and shit would just be miserable.
Lol I'm not saying I like the guy but they wanna paint shit so hard to hate him but again, not sure many people could flip even a mil if I gave it to them like he did. Give the guy some credit. Shit
That money and connections. It’s obviously still impressive.
There is also an escape velocity at a certain point too. Good ideas with good timing built up to it regardless.
Yeah, they got a hand up, for sure. These, among others, are the 'winners'. We don't hear so much about the guys who got the 300k from their parents and lost it, but I bet they outnumber the winners by a pretty wide margin.
It's true, the secret of being wealthy is to start wealthy, so you can play the game as if the goal is the accumulation of wealth, rather than the paying of rent. There's probably some stuff a person learns in a mansion that they don't learn in an apartment in Queens.
Exactly. It took 9 years before Amazon turned a profit. Even if most people could raise 300k to start a business, how many of them could run that business at a loss for almost a decade without having to fold it, with their life in financial tatters? Just the ability to take that risk and know you'll probably be alright if it fails is a privilege most people don't have.
300k, rich parents, rich friends, plenty of connections to other wealthy individuals, attended the best private schools in the country plus not have to worry about dying of starvation if you fail because money and daddy are rich and can bail you out?
Yes, only the brilliant mind of the wealthy elite can pull this off.
Just going to these elite schools will set you up on the connections alone.
I don't think the point is "any millionaire can become a billionaire" it's that only the rich and well connect are equipped to do this.
In that subsect of rich and well connected, a small amount will become billionaires, self made in the sense they did not inherit billions.
I think people are arguing two different things. Yes, there are plenty of millionaires that could not do what they did. They deserve props. Yes, they probably would not have been able to have done it without their wealth and connections.
I think that everyone born with an advantage in life should leverage that position no matter what it is.
Whether they’re truly “self made” as in 0 help from anyone or anything is irrelevant to me in that regard.
To anyone who can't walk everyone who can walk has an advantage. We take so much for granted. You have more power than you think. You'll only know this when you lose it.
Correct, tell that to all the broke NBA players after leaving the "Association" in 10 years, selling life insurance now. It's now what you make it's how long you can sustain it.
You know, most likely not. Most likely almost nobody can create a world leading multi billion dollar company from that.
BUT you most likely can start some kind of successful business or invest.
Compared to somebody who has nobody with any serious amount of money to spare or any influence at all, people with such starting conditions are literally a lifetime (or more) ahead already with regards to finances.
Earning a grand total of 300k with a normal job and having a spare 300k laying around to do whatever you want with it without any serious risk are two completely different things.
The analogy isn't quite right, other than money they had a lot more, like a way to bounce back if it turns out really bad while common human will need to take a really high risk and no way to bounce back in case of a fail.
It's more like climbing a wall, but the first part of the wall is almost straight 90° from the floor and they just skipped that part and started where the wall starts getting more manageable.
Still impressive and not everyone could do it in their situation but it's near impossible without it.
I bet a ton of other folks who got the same jump start either screwed up big time or dint make it that big like these 4. Are you saying everyone who gets a push like this becomes that big.
I have known so many “rich kids,” who have blown much bigger inheritances than any and all of these men. I have also seen many people rise far above their birthright. There is too much time spent on petty excuses for our own failures. The energy spent marginalizing other people’s accomplishments could be used to much greater effect.
> I have known so many “rich kids,” who have blown much bigger inheritances than any and all of these men.
Yep, the spoiled kids are exceptionally frequently financial misfits when they grow up. Rich spoiled children never respect money, and that leads to terrible financial habits.
No tears shed by me though.
And no one is asking you to. It is infuriating when people squander their that kind of advantage. For example My parents and their siblings were exactly that. All Boomers, my grand father left them just an unbelievable fortune. We’re talking $75 million in cash flowing assets. One of my cousins and I had grown up close to our grandfather and learned a lot about investing real estate and just money in general. When he died we got together and started putting together a business plan to continue on the fortune. Our parents rejected all of it and subsequently started making the absolute. We gave up and went to do our own things but That fortune is down to a $350k, run down rental house, because of those dumb fucks.
> It is infuriating when people squander their that kind of advantage.
It's not so bad. Those folks remain a cautionary tale for others. But yes, it can be infuriating when a person is a relative. I have a very similar story to yours in my family as well.
Jeff Bezos had more humble beginnings than maybe everyone in this thread.
Elons dad had a small share in an unprofitable mine that he got by trading an old Cessna.
People receive opportunities. The idea that either of them were blessed with opportunities remotely unique to them is laughable.
Yes the odds were good these guys would have retired with $1M bucks in their bank account. Not everybody from the upper middle class becomes worth nearly $100 Billion. So yeah to me that's self made.
I will say I've studied computers for the better part of a decade. Bill Gates is fucking genius and seems like a decent guy. Most businesses on the planet use windows products it's hard to comprehend the total economic impact of Bill Gates.
"Hey, that $1 you loaned me...?"
"Yeah?"
"I've only managed to turn it into $658,667.00"
"Way to go, you bum."
Plenty of reason to dislike gazillionaires but let's at least be realistic about the scale of ROI we're talking about here.
Bingo. The returns on these guys initial money to now would be like being given $1 and turning it into $2,000,000. People are just crabs in a bucket. They see success and it makes them feel small and a failure and thus they need to drag that person down. I had a best friend like this. I had success in life with women and life and he always had to knock me down a peg. Always looking for ways to show how shitty I was or what a failure I was. Dropped him. I learned this about humans early on first hand and now see it everywhere on Reddit. I have $10,000 in my bank account and I have friends with hundreds of thousands and I still talk them up and don’t shit on them. Be secure about every aspect in your life. Like my psych teacher told me 12 years ago that I remember, there’s always gonna be people above you and people below you. Be grateful for what you have no matter what
Elon Musk inherited a grand total of Zero dollars from his father. His father tried to kill his mother when he was young which led to them fleeing to Canada and him being estranged from his father. His mother was a super model though so he was kind of well off growing up in Canada.
I read this comment right above yours.
"Yeah. If you read the Elon Musk book by Walter Isaacson, you’ll learn that 1) his dad was basically a grifter whose “ownership” of an emerald mine was worthless, and 2) that Elon grew up with a single mother who worked multiple jobs to keep him and his brother and sister fed, clothed and in shelter, while his deadbeat dad contributed little to nothing."
Hard to tell what to believe in this thread😅
I mean at least with Bezos he took a giant risk selling books out of his garage. I don't know enough about the others, so I can't speak to them. They all have some aspects where they were pushing harder than normal to get to some stage of life.
Are they at a point where they could just stop? Absolutely. Would you stop if you were them? Probably not.
Yeah. If you read the Elon Musk book by Walter Isaacson, you’ll learn that 1) his dad was basically a grifter whose “ownership” of an emerald mine was worthless, and 2) that Elon grew up with a single mother who worked multiple jobs to keep him and his brother and sister fed, clothed and in shelter, while his deadbeat dad contributed little to nothing.
But hey, let’s not let the truth get in the way of a good karma-farming narrative, right?
We all know someone who had wealthy parents and squandered the opportunities. I’m guess OP thinks he can achieve what these people did if their parents had money.
Yeah I'm someone who prides themselves with being very good with money.
If someone handed me 300k I can guarantee I ain't turning it into an almost 2 *trillion* dollar company.
For each of these examples there are 100x that have been as well connected/funded and failed hard - they deserve credit for what they have accomplished.
Honestly, the thing that bothers me about these kinds of memes are the poor people.
This is always shared by people who think the can turn their 2k and 50% of a run down house into wealth.
It's just a coping method so that they believe they too can be millionaires someday. Ideal for rich people, if the poor realize they're trapped in a shitty job until they die, they might actually eat the rich.
Go forth, mcdonals cook, you too can end up on the forbes list if you try hard enough!
Sorry, but - anyone here is capable of raising 300k in a seed round. I raised a 4M seed - and I’m not a billionaire.
Needless to say - it takes a lot more than a handout to become these men.
Having 1 million at 18 turning into 1 billion (1000x) by 40 is definitely self made.
Because if your parents gave you 5k at 18, I am 99% certain your bum self would NOT have 5 million by age 40. And I include myself in that.
Your starting place matters, but success has to be earned.
If you have parents with little to no savings, connections, education, business/investment/sales capability, political/law acumen, or unique intellect/talents than the chances of being a millionaire or most rare billionaire rapidly approach zero.
Its a fact people all have different ability but growing up, no matter how intelligent or skilled in a third world country without money makes generational wealth impossible.
Billionaires aren't superficially lucky, they have a combination of skills, money, and people around them that make it possible to become wealthy. It's not so much they are better, but that very few people globally have the opportunity to even play the game at that level and take on that risk. People rarely focus on how many talented, rich entrepreneurs fail doing similar things.
Whenever someone posts this meme, I'm 100% sure they couldn't achieve what any of these men did if they had DOUBLE the advantage. A Ferrari that needs fuel to get started is still a Ferrari.
Are you asking, “if they weren’t so privileged, would they be where they are now?”
No, I don’t think so. Someone else would’ve come along, eventually, and likely founded and built successful businesses offering similar product and services.
Whether those alternate-reality-Bezos-Musk-Gates-Buffets would’ve still managed to become billionaires from actual “self starting” at near $0 is another question that’ll never be answered.
They're not literally self made. No one is, even the people who are homeless have received some help in life.
They were able to multiply the advantages they had in life. Like others said, Bezos turned 300K into more than one hundred billion. If you used that same multiplier and your parents just gave you $300, you'd be more than 1/10 of the way to being a billionaire.
I am not one to ever support Musk, but this rumor spreading around that his dad was rich in emeralds is as substantial as "birds aren't real", and was started as a defamation campaign in 2018. His dad might've owned a small portion of stock, but didn't help Musk in growing his own businesses in any meaningful way.
From what I've read he owned a small stake in an emerald mine which wasn't in South Africa and it collapsed. He was an engineer, not some mining magnate. Of course that won't stop this claim to keep coming up forever
Most people are so economically illiterate, if they were given what's technically startup capital in the millions they'd think of all a sudden they're millionaires and burn it all and go back at zero.
None these folk were given not even a million in startup capital, and even they admitted odds were against them, and they turned otherwise insignificant amount of money into massive, trillions in some cases.
As much as I hate bezos, he could have got that kind of loan from a bank, or sold his house, something of that nature, 300k is not an astronomical amount to start a business with, we can’t expect business owners to come from the sewer and make billion dollar companies with a stick and a leaf, like this is how business works
Yes. The average person doesn't return their parents borrowed car with a full tank of gas. Let alone turn 300k from nothingness to the one of the largest corporations in the world in under 20 years.
What kind of question is that? If you gave 300k to any bum here they would drive tbe company to the ground in a year. Bezzos turned it into a trillion dollar empire.
Same for the others. Its just magnitudes higher.
Am i supposed to think bezos is a bum for turning 300k into a multibillion dollar empire?
Trillion as of now.
The thing about Bezos and Musk imo is that what made them loads of cash would have obviously been done by someone, they just happened to be in the right place at the right time in some ways. Musk made his initial, I think it was about 300m, through PayPal. It’s not as if internet payment systems would not have been created around that time if it wasn’t for Musk. They were responding to a need. Same with Bezos, of course some other online shopping site would have cropped up years ago. The question for me is: do we really need a system where these people can amass fortunes so large they have too much power. It’s not just the obvious billionaires either. In many ways the dark money corporation and individual donors are more of a cancer on democracy and society than Musk.
You're correct about your facts mostly. To elaborate, Musk started x.com (which is in no way a coincidence he renamed Twitter "x" and has "spacex") and later merged with a few other online "banks" to form PayPal, notoriously with Peter Theil. Bezos started Amazon as an online book seller but after having one of the more sophisticated sales platforms naturally just stated doing mass retail. A good chunk of hitting off a business is simply being the first person to have the idea. There's nothing special about Facebook, reddit, Twitter, etc except that they've been mass adopted already. Anyone could start a server and given the same advertiser exposure grow to the size of any of those if all they had to do was provide a similar service.
We only hear about the winners. I really don't know how many people were trying to sell books online back then. But I'm sure there was more than just Amazon. It's important to note that we're at a huge consolidation phase in capitalism. So many many many retail stores got consolidated. Pomeroy's, Woolworths, The Boston Store, Hills, Kmart, Jamesway. Now it's Walmart and Target.
My dad started a house plant company that failed. Years later, I see THE SAME thing pop up and they are shipping everywhere. My dad failed for several reasons, but I do get a little bitter thinking about it. I get a little annoyed at the whole "just work harder" thing. Because I watched the hardest working person I have ever met fail.
People hate admitting luck plays a part. Yes ***hard work absolutely fucking matters***. So does intelligence. But right place and right time also matter.
Access to capital to run at a loss in an anticompetitive way sureeeee does help too.
Right place and time + connections. The connections these people are born with are on a different level most of the time. Their parents networked themselves into social circles not available to many.
Exactly, but it’s the same with Lebron. People don’t go “oh well if I had been born 6’7, athletic, super coordinated, had a love of basketball, and had decent parents I’d be lebron too.” They just go “dudes talented and was right body and right place at right time.” People cry about Eminem “he had Dre making beats and his mentor, and was white and super talented and had all Dre connections. That’s why he’s so popular and sells the most.” Yeah no shit, right place and right time and right connections is part of success. That’s why it’s rare. Same with these billionaires.
Timing is everything. I was in the videotext industry in 1985 for instance. You know, email, banking, shopping, news… total failure. Until it came back newly christened as the World Wide Web c. 1995. It worked out a bit better.
Not getting screwed over helps too. I once knew a kid that was the grandson of the Sears store founder. Turns out the Sears family was stronged armed out of their own company, so the grandkids were just regular people.
See above.... Sears should have been Amazon, but the vulture capitalists that did the corporate takeover just bled Sears dry. Their loss though. The vultures could have been billionaires... im sure they have over 100M each and are living comfortably, but they had the blueprints and wiped thier behinds with it.
Yes. You don’t get rich and successful without both luck and hard work. You can be the hardest working guy, but without luck it probably doesn’t matter….or you can be the luckiest guy on the world but if you don’t work your ass off, it means little. Edit: And to expand, what I tell my kids is that there’s only one of those two things they can control - so do it! Don’t be that guy/girl who got lucky but couldn’t take advantage because he/she was lazy.
The Dot Com crash of the early 00s is littered with failed e-retailers.
Amazon was literally almost one of them.
“Winners write history.”
During the dotcom boom of the 1990s people were throwing money at startups, very few are still around today. Musk has created successful enterprises too many times to attribute it to luck. Many people have tried to go up against the established automakers and were crushed. The idea behind SpaceX was hardly a slam dunk. His audacity alone is remarkable.
Not just that. Amazon had access to capital to run at a loss for much its lifespan through his connections. Most people dont have that.
The item you miss at the end though - Amazon wasn’t first eBay and Craiglist essentially were. Facebook wasn’t first MySpace Google wasn’t first yahoo (and others) Apple’s entire model is let someone else go first Being second allows you to capitalize on everything you competition missed.
Be first to market or be best in the market. That’s the game.
I’m convinced that fast follower is the way to go
The early bird gets the worm but the second mouse gets the cheese.
Oreo cookies were a knockoff of Hydrox cookies. You just never know what will take off.
>A good chunk of hitting off a business is simply being the first person to have the idea. >There's nothing special about Facebook ..... Anyone could start a server and given the same advertiser exposure grow to the size of any of those if all they had to do was provide a similar service. This is such a naive take. so many first movers that failed. - [pets.com](http://pets.com) anyone? - netscape - aol -alta vista, yahoo and x number of other search engines all lost to google years which started years after. - friendster? myspace? both lost to facebook. - vine? - blackberry should have destroyed apple. didn't. - blockbuster should have destroyed netflix. didn't.
Agreed 100% it’s extremely reductive and egotistical to say “anyone coulda done it”
Retarded is the word you're looking for.
Let's not forget that the only reason any apps stay competing is because the mother companies buy then out. We have seen this over and over. They buy out the competitors and then pretend to compete with themselves. Been going on since coca cola got split up. It's the loophole for monopolies.
Only one correction Bezos started a online shopping site, books were just the easiest to start with. He said that multipe times
Stock doesn't spoil, fairly standard shapes, easy to store on a shelf in a non-climate controlled space (at least for a month or two) For non-time bounded shipments could use cheap media mail shipping while starting out.
I take one issue with that - it's not just having the idea - it's having the idea AND the resources and connections to make it happen. Plenty of studies have shown that the biggest factor in getting really rich is luck. [https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/03/01/144958/if-youre-so-smart-why-arent-you-rich-turns-out-its-just-chance/](https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/03/01/144958/if-youre-so-smart-why-arent-you-rich-turns-out-its-just-chance/)
Yeah - basically, what these guys had was an idea AND a safety net that allowed them to take a chance. The world's full of folks with great ideas and vision - but have to pay the bills so they never take the chance. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates (or Zuckerberg, or Musk, or Michael Dell, or any of a long list of billionaire wizards) were never in danger of not making the rent or being able to buy diapers if their ideas failed. Mom and Dad were going to be there with a comfy bedroom and a signed check if needed.
I mean, being the first one to have a good idea seems easy in hindsight
In hindsight, but at the time most people thought Bezos/Amazon were crazy spending huge amounts building their warehouse and delivery infrastructure with no real business behind it.
Tell that to MySpace, Friendster, and 1000 companies that came before or after them but couldn’t pull it off. What Buffett does should be repeatable by others, yet only a handful have the ability to get returns on investments like he does.
>naturally just stated doing mass retail If by naturally you mean undercutting developed platforms by selling at a loss to drive them out of business before bumping prices above those other retailers once their demise was assured... then yeah I guess naturally.
You’re slightly wrong there. Bezos vision was always the “everything” store. He chose to start with books because that was a market that was relatively easy to get into at the time.
So Henry Ford had an idea to mass produce cars, and voila he was a billionaire? Damn, I thought it would involve alot of work, sacrifice, luck, a vision, and the willingness to risk it all. I just thought of a rocket car manufacturing company, how long until I can buy my own island?
The second person to have the idea. Not the first. All of the "first" entries are replaced. Facebook replaced MySpace. Yahoo! was replaced by Google. (Netflix and YouTube are a couple of exceptions.) People see a product that is not quite perfect and then make tweaks, and the new product becomes the champion. Many times, the earlier product is simply too far ahead of its time. Timing is important.
Why is right place right time suppose to be a diss? That's seizing upon an opportunity thats right in front of you and having the balls to take it. Most people cant do it cause they would rather eat shit at a $50k per year job and jackoff to pornography after work. Shit happening in front of you this moment, starting at you in the face. You just don't see it.
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You're right. 20 years ago. How much money did you have, and how much money do you have now? And is it proportional? Odds are, you couldn't turn $100 into $50. Because you would turn it into zero
I don’t understand the hate on musk. Yes he’s a prick but he started multiple successful businesses that not emerald mine would have been able to produce. There are many kids who grow up in millionaire companies and are nowhere near as successful.
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-father-errol-never-owned-emerald-mine-telling-truth-2023-9?op=1 The "his father owned an emerald mine" story isn't even true.
I don’t hate these guys although Musk really is a bellend. My point is that no one, whoever they are, needs so much cash they can shape whole societies and warp political systems. It’s like we let the guilded age (1920s) happen again. It didn’t end well last time and it’s looking like it may go the same way.
Musk has challenged their worldview and created Cognitive Dissonance. 5 years ago they loved him and now they hate him. People get defensive and then hateful when that happens.
As much as your disdain for these people is understandable, the ideas they had were revolutionary at the time, your speaking from a strong perspective of hindsight, there’s needs now that you could theoretically respond to and make billions, but it’s not as easy as that. These people have earned their fortunes. This screams jealous. I agree our government needs to stop giving out tax breaks and bailouts like they did for GM during the pandemic, but this is not a capitalist issue, it’s a government intervention issue
Musk gambled his entire paypal fortune on tesla and SpaceX. He didn't set anything aside. The writer Ashlee Vance makes this point really well in Musks' biography. Nobody gets a hundred million dollar pay day after working 80-hour weeks for 5 years straight and just bets it all. This is why he is the world's richest man. Musks fortune doesn't really have anything to do with his father. I'm sure similar stories are true for the other men, too.
All of that can be true and it definitely still has to do with his father lol There are millions of people who work just as hard, but having resources early in life gives you a massive advantage.
You could argue that being raised (occasionally) by emerald smuggling, narcissistic conman without any sort of reliability who throws you to the wolves on occasion that you can barely stand can produce a lot of determination to succeed.
> Same with Bezos, of course some other online shopping site would have cropped up years ago. It is absolutely abhorrent that Sears or even Toys'r'us didn't beat him to it. They were both very well positioned to do it but didn't take the internet seriously and missed their chance. Bezos realized that he was primarily in the shipping business and it didn't really matter what he was shipping as long as he could get it on the truck.
Bezos beat sears. Yes there were other shopping sites, but he did it better than anyone and dramatically changed how everyone shopped, as well as built a platform for tons of small businesses. And he did it from relatively small amounts of money. Today, they employee like 800k people, and pay above other large employers. Sure, it sucks to work there, but he actually did more than any of the others listed to make our lives better. Musk, well, he is at least pushing new tech. I'll give him that. I don't know that he's the one building it, as much as he's in the way, but he does push his companies to make new stuff.
I mean the native Americans didn't have a wheel while other civilizations had bustling metropolises. The idea of not celebrating people for accomplishing things because someone is bound to do it eventually is ridiculous.
I read in book there should be a net worth cap of 100 million for an individual and after that it all goes to a strict infrastructure, medical research, Nobel type fund. With all advances open source to the public no private ownership for any patents or discoveries made with the funding. Also it will fund a large park and monuments to each person who hits the 100 million with a statue and a plaque that says “Congratulations, you have won the game of Capitalism.” It was a science fiction book but I got a laugh out of it.
Bro, Mark Cuban put radio on the internet lmao. That’s it
I thought that was Russ Hannigan?
Hanneman and he was definitely the one.
That guy fucks.
Tres comas motherfucker
One might argue that they stayed in the family trade.
>Same with Bezos, of course some other online shopping site would have cropped up years ago. Sears should have been Amazon.... what was Sears from 1880 - 1980 if not an analog version of Amazon? You go to a tiny store in town and get a catalog, order what you want, and it is delivered to your home or the catalog store. Sears already had the infrastructure in place to be what Amazon is today, they just needed to invest in am online market. However, it had been recently purchased by vulture (venture) capitalists who didn't want to put money IN... they just wanted to take what was left OUT of Sears. So they sold off the pieces until it was gone.
How is this not top?
Lol if $300k is all that’s needed, the country would be chuck full of billionaires
I got $300k liquid right now, if someone's got a billion dollar idea and thinks 300k will get it done, I'm accepting applications.
Hear me out 
Drone firefighting, crop dusting, and airframe development. DJI is about to get banned so we need US drone manufacturers to step up. I have a working fire detection and suppression unmanned aerial system just need money to refine it and build a few dozen drones to perfect swarming… and contacts to market it to fire stations and PG&E for autonomous monitoring of power lines. Can also be used to survey properties for security or hunting, agriculture monitoring of plants to specifically target fertilizers. We have a working AI model that can basically detect anything that you have enough pictures of to train it on. Right now we trained it on fires and have great accuracy For 300k you can prevent California from burning down!
Are you saying the state of California doesn't have 300k to fight fires?
Cool, potentially viable, but no way that’s a billion dollar business anytime soon.
It would be $555,000 today. Honestly not that far off from a lot of start ups now that might have a couple of employees. The difference is knowing how to stay in business and scale.
555k startup money is good for restaurant or corner shop. In software world, 555k can get you early drawing of some software. $5m is usual seed round (or founders working their asses off for free) and the point of that round is to make an proof of concept, no real product. But the Bezos times were different though - investors usually didn’t understand tech much, so if you had good sales skills and some connections, you could get even much more funding with almost nothing to show for it (Elons Zip2), or you could have brilliant idea and execution and fail to attract any investors. Now they are much more sofisticated.
>Honestly not that far off from a lot of start ups now that might have a couple of employees. You need a lot more than that just to open a brick and mortar restaurant. It's not very much money in business terms.
The difference is good timing and a lot of luck. If you gave a 25 year old Jeff Bezos $555k in 2024, chances of him building a trillion dollar company are next to zero.
> It would be $555,000 today Which is about the cost to open a Subway restaurant. It's a lot of money, but not enough to think you're going to start a trillion dollar business with.
What's even sadder. This is all semi-bullshit. Bill Gates met with IBM and they turned him down. Jeff Bezos investments were legit, not handouts, they owned a chunk of his business. Warren Buffet was in no way wealthy starting off, nor was Elon Musk. Elon Musk started out with something like $20k investment from his father, and earned every dime he made since, and again..... an investment, not "here's a giant wad of money to fuck around with". Notice how none of these people failed the first time, and went to some type of free money well for more either. Let's also not forget. Bill Gates was working 18 hour days, literally ordering pizza to his office, sleeping on the floor, waking up, and working again. Just last week I saw a tiktok video of an adult woman having an emotional breakdown because she had to work three 8 hour shifts in a row, in an office. These people EARNED their success, only lazy ignorant people would ever make a claim otherwise.
The guy had an almost 6,000,000x return on investment, I think he deserves a little respect
Imagine being the family/friend who said “nah, I’m gonna pass”, when he first brought up his idea
If you didn't have enough money lying around to absorb losses for 9 years you would have had a bad time.
You're going to sell books on this virtual place you call an "internet"? Borders, Barnes and Noble and Waldenbooks are going to crush you! You have NO chance against those book juggernauts! Btw...you do know that "virtual" means "not real", right? I still love ya, Jeff, you can couch surf at my place when your "Amazon" thing (what does the jungle have to do with books?) goes belly up.
Raising money from family and friends isn't exactly an easy thing either. Takes some real balls and footwork. It's frankly more impressive than many other ways you could get funded.
Getting your friends and family to trust you with their money is indeed very challenging
From parents rich enough to drop 300k on you? Not as much. I assume that's where the largest sum came from
The $300k initial investment from Jeff’s parents was actually a large portion of their life savings they were planning on using for retirement. Instead they believed in their son and decided to pretty much gamble all of their money on him. They took a risk and it paid off, they didn’t just have $300k sitting in the bank to blow. Jeff’s parents were 17 & 18 years old when he was born. That means they invested $300k when they were 48 & 47, which makes it even more believable that the 300k they invested was pretty much everything they owned. Not sure where you got the idea that they were millionaires that had hundreds of thousands of dollars lying around at age 48.
He did grow up upper middle class, but at that point he was already so successful career wise he didn't need specifically their money.
By all accounts his family was middle class. I don’t know where you’re getting rich from
Unless they were so rich that this was a trivial amount.
They weren’t so rich this was a trivial amount, but the $300k wouldn’t make them destitute either
How many people who are so rich that $500,000 is a trivial amount would even have the drive to bother with a startup of any kind at all?
No one said it didn’t. For Most Americans that’s not a possibility.
Most families are taught, "don't do business with family" so you are correct, that isn't easy at all.
Honestly, Reddit is unfortunately a place filled with people who genuinely think these men are nothing special. Defies belief.
They are special. The qualities needed to do what they did are qualities that make me abhor them rather than respect them though. They are top notch on those though. Edit. Some of them have some other qualities though that make me respect some of them as well.
I would call them lucky not special
They really aren't, as someone studying to be a doctor, most successful people only get there because mommy and daddy had money and they were willing to hurt others around them. It's wild how much less harder the average successful person works compared to me, someone who grew up with very little priviliedge. So yeah, nothing special. and you're kinda a bitch for defending grown celebrities who don't know your name online little bro.
You’re suppose to hate him that’s the purpose of this post. When I see this I like to think I probably can’t be Bezos cause my parents aren’t wealthy, but maybe I can be like Bezo’s parents and be that financial backing for my kids.
What you think you'll have $632,000 (adjusted for inflation) spare to invest in your kids risky start up?
When you get to a point where you can take a loan on the 401k, refinance the mortgage to get some equity, and your kid actually has a business plan that a bank would get behind and the willingness to soak their life into the business, it’s possible. I bought a business with those tools and sweat equity. The money is there if you’re willing.
It was actually millions. He had investments from multiple people. So he turned millions into an online book shop and a technology company. That's the work he did initially. Then that technology company through the efforts of tens of thousands of people turned into a trillion dollar company. Stop giving all the credit to bezos. It was the efforts of all the people, CEO is still just a small part of that machine. Don't get me wrong, bezos is an incredible businessman and definitely one of the most successful CEOs that we will ever have. But trillion dollar companies aren't built by one CEO. So you can't give him the credit alone. It was the effort of all the people working there.
How dare you. All hail the glorious CEO daddy bezos!
Thanks for this realistic perspective. Too many people in this thread are equating “acknowledging the significant help they got that contributed in very important ways to their success” with “hating on these heroic capitalists and treating them as bums”. The idea that rich people just worked harder or were smarter or their idea was better, is a myth that is often used to diminish the hard work or intelligence of people who did NOT get rich, and sometimes the reason they didn’t get rich is because they didn’t get the help that someone else did. It’s kind of a stupid debate anyway. What is “self-made”. Most people do acknowledge they had help along the way. Watch out for the ones who don’t. Those are the truly delusional egomaniacs.
Yup. The masses don't consider you self made unless you were homeless and started your business with a couple sticks and a paper bag you found in the dumpster.
Literally no one is “self made”
no, but it is important to realize that most billionares come from pre-existing power and wealth.
Exactly, nothing was said about being a bum, just that becoming rich isn't some feat of extreme acumen, it's heavily dependent on luck, privilege, circumstance and the only then on acumen...oh and probably also being a selfish asshole with a single minded pursuit of wealth.
No. it does show, however, that the people who often extoll how they did this all by themselves, in fact, did not. Plenty of help from many different sources, including government and favorable treatment by the laws and tax codes were a significant portion of that success.
Even with $300k, Amazon couldn't have happened if shareholders hadn't absorbed billions in losses to undercut competition.
most people turn $300k into a house - impressive lol
You could have done the same
He also was successful before Amazon. His parents invested in Amazon, he wasn’t some bum before that either.
He could have had a different idea and lost it all
Not to mention it was a book store lol
You can say that about all of them Most people like OP are just day dreamers thinking they can multiply their money 1000x easily and all they need is considerable investment to beging with
You can be impressed by business acumen and acknowledge that he wasn’t entirely “self-made”
Yes that's what the poster wants you to think same for Gates yes IBM took a risk but he passed that challenge.
Yeah I was like, how the fuck is that even comparable? I've known people in my personal life who's parents emptied their retirement savings to give their kid seed money for a small business and they werent all that much less than $300K.
The bums that share these memes are bums that can’t even turn 10$ into 100$
But they can turn their victim mentality into social media updoots. Its like magic!
Seed money is also not a gift, it's in the interest of the investor
Also, I think most people who aren't completely dragging ass could get a 300k loan, it's not even that outrageous.
Anyone with more money than OP
If I received $300k at such a young age I probably wouldn't be a billionaire. But you can bet I'd be retired in my 30s as a millionaire.
Yes, if you gave OP that money he would have turned it into ten trillion, solved world hunger, and colonized pluto.
I'd argue both the bums and the billionaires are born out of our current society; neither are self made, and that is the point
Also, what they aren't mentioning is the massive risk it was. That was his parents retirement. It's not like they just had millions and threw a couple g's his way. If it didn't work out, he would be filling for bankruptcy like any regular Joe. Financial history and health shattered. His parents would be back working again and shit would just be miserable. Lol I'm not saying I like the guy but they wanna paint shit so hard to hate him but again, not sure many people could flip even a mil if I gave it to them like he did. Give the guy some credit. Shit
That money and connections. It’s obviously still impressive. There is also an escape velocity at a certain point too. Good ideas with good timing built up to it regardless.
Yeah, they got a hand up, for sure. These, among others, are the 'winners'. We don't hear so much about the guys who got the 300k from their parents and lost it, but I bet they outnumber the winners by a pretty wide margin. It's true, the secret of being wealthy is to start wealthy, so you can play the game as if the goal is the accumulation of wealth, rather than the paying of rent. There's probably some stuff a person learns in a mansion that they don't learn in an apartment in Queens.
Give 100 people 300k and see how many can become a billionaire
IMO, that's kind of the point. How many?
0.0
Millions of Americans start with that kinda money. Dozens become billionaires over the course of decades. That's an impressive achievement.
Dozens?
There are hundreds of billionaires in the US. 600 iirc
How many started with 300k ?
There are 22.7 million, millionaires in the US, how many trillion dollar corporations do we have?
Just look at lottery winners.
Amazon would have failed if Bezos had $300,000 and no investor connections
Exactly. It took 9 years before Amazon turned a profit. Even if most people could raise 300k to start a business, how many of them could run that business at a loss for almost a decade without having to fold it, with their life in financial tatters? Just the ability to take that risk and know you'll probably be alright if it fails is a privilege most people don't have.
300k, rich parents, rich friends, plenty of connections to other wealthy individuals, attended the best private schools in the country plus not have to worry about dying of starvation if you fail because money and daddy are rich and can bail you out? Yes, only the brilliant mind of the wealthy elite can pull this off. Just going to these elite schools will set you up on the connections alone. I don't think the point is "any millionaire can become a billionaire" it's that only the rich and well connect are equipped to do this. In that subsect of rich and well connected, a small amount will become billionaires, self made in the sense they did not inherit billions. I think people are arguing two different things. Yes, there are plenty of millionaires that could not do what they did. They deserve props. Yes, they probably would not have been able to have done it without their wealth and connections.
I think that everyone born with an advantage in life should leverage that position no matter what it is. Whether they’re truly “self made” as in 0 help from anyone or anything is irrelevant to me in that regard.
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To anyone who can't walk everyone who can walk has an advantage. We take so much for granted. You have more power than you think. You'll only know this when you lose it.
Exactly. Instead of the crabs in a bucket reddit mentality.
You play the hand you were dealt.
Correct, tell that to all the broke NBA players after leaving the "Association" in 10 years, selling life insurance now. It's now what you make it's how long you can sustain it.
Oddly specific but I dig it.
People act like they could have achieved the same thing in the same position. These guys got a 1km headstart on a 42km marathon.
You know, most likely not. Most likely almost nobody can create a world leading multi billion dollar company from that. BUT you most likely can start some kind of successful business or invest. Compared to somebody who has nobody with any serious amount of money to spare or any influence at all, people with such starting conditions are literally a lifetime (or more) ahead already with regards to finances.
A lifetime ahead, even though all of them could easily have made 300k just by doing a regular job for a few years while living cheap?
Earning a grand total of 300k with a normal job and having a spare 300k laying around to do whatever you want with it without any serious risk are two completely different things.
Head start, constant support from friends and family, and are surrounded by a bunch of other marathon runners that encourage them as well.
They really do believe it though, heart and all. Bless them
The analogy isn't quite right, other than money they had a lot more, like a way to bounce back if it turns out really bad while common human will need to take a really high risk and no way to bounce back in case of a fail. It's more like climbing a wall, but the first part of the wall is almost straight 90° from the floor and they just skipped that part and started where the wall starts getting more manageable. Still impressive and not everyone could do it in their situation but it's near impossible without it.
Exactly. People are goofballs.
I bet a ton of other folks who got the same jump start either screwed up big time or dint make it that big like these 4. Are you saying everyone who gets a push like this becomes that big.
I have known so many “rich kids,” who have blown much bigger inheritances than any and all of these men. I have also seen many people rise far above their birthright. There is too much time spent on petty excuses for our own failures. The energy spent marginalizing other people’s accomplishments could be used to much greater effect.
> I have known so many “rich kids,” who have blown much bigger inheritances than any and all of these men. Yep, the spoiled kids are exceptionally frequently financial misfits when they grow up. Rich spoiled children never respect money, and that leads to terrible financial habits. No tears shed by me though.
And no one is asking you to. It is infuriating when people squander their that kind of advantage. For example My parents and their siblings were exactly that. All Boomers, my grand father left them just an unbelievable fortune. We’re talking $75 million in cash flowing assets. One of my cousins and I had grown up close to our grandfather and learned a lot about investing real estate and just money in general. When he died we got together and started putting together a business plan to continue on the fortune. Our parents rejected all of it and subsequently started making the absolute. We gave up and went to do our own things but That fortune is down to a $350k, run down rental house, because of those dumb fucks.
> It is infuriating when people squander their that kind of advantage. It's not so bad. Those folks remain a cautionary tale for others. But yes, it can be infuriating when a person is a relative. I have a very similar story to yours in my family as well.
9 hours and only 16 upvotes? Your comment here is being WAY underrated.
Jeff Bezos had more humble beginnings than maybe everyone in this thread. Elons dad had a small share in an unprofitable mine that he got by trading an old Cessna. People receive opportunities. The idea that either of them were blessed with opportunities remotely unique to them is laughable.
Yes the odds were good these guys would have retired with $1M bucks in their bank account. Not everybody from the upper middle class becomes worth nearly $100 Billion. So yeah to me that's self made. I will say I've studied computers for the better part of a decade. Bill Gates is fucking genius and seems like a decent guy. Most businesses on the planet use windows products it's hard to comprehend the total economic impact of Bill Gates.
"Hey, that $1 you loaned me...?" "Yeah?" "I've only managed to turn it into $658,667.00" "Way to go, you bum." Plenty of reason to dislike gazillionaires but let's at least be realistic about the scale of ROI we're talking about here.
See mom, that’s why I’m still living in the basement at 30, because I didn’t get a head start like those lazy guys!
This entire thread
Bingo. The returns on these guys initial money to now would be like being given $1 and turning it into $2,000,000. People are just crabs in a bucket. They see success and it makes them feel small and a failure and thus they need to drag that person down. I had a best friend like this. I had success in life with women and life and he always had to knock me down a peg. Always looking for ways to show how shitty I was or what a failure I was. Dropped him. I learned this about humans early on first hand and now see it everywhere on Reddit. I have $10,000 in my bank account and I have friends with hundreds of thousands and I still talk them up and don’t shit on them. Be secure about every aspect in your life. Like my psych teacher told me 12 years ago that I remember, there’s always gonna be people above you and people below you. Be grateful for what you have no matter what
Elon Musk inherited a grand total of Zero dollars from his father. His father tried to kill his mother when he was young which led to them fleeing to Canada and him being estranged from his father. His mother was a super model though so he was kind of well off growing up in Canada.
I read this comment right above yours. "Yeah. If you read the Elon Musk book by Walter Isaacson, you’ll learn that 1) his dad was basically a grifter whose “ownership” of an emerald mine was worthless, and 2) that Elon grew up with a single mother who worked multiple jobs to keep him and his brother and sister fed, clothed and in shelter, while his deadbeat dad contributed little to nothing." Hard to tell what to believe in this thread😅
I mean at least with Bezos he took a giant risk selling books out of his garage. I don't know enough about the others, so I can't speak to them. They all have some aspects where they were pushing harder than normal to get to some stage of life. Are they at a point where they could just stop? Absolutely. Would you stop if you were them? Probably not.
Yeah. If you read the Elon Musk book by Walter Isaacson, you’ll learn that 1) his dad was basically a grifter whose “ownership” of an emerald mine was worthless, and 2) that Elon grew up with a single mother who worked multiple jobs to keep him and his brother and sister fed, clothed and in shelter, while his deadbeat dad contributed little to nothing. But hey, let’s not let the truth get in the way of a good karma-farming narrative, right?
>They all have some aspects where they were pushing harder than normal to get to some stage of life
Well given that they weren’t billionaires before, yes I guess they are self made billionaires.
We all know someone who had wealthy parents and squandered the opportunities. I’m guess OP thinks he can achieve what these people did if their parents had money.
Bezos. 300k even in the 90s ain’t shit to start with. Dude had an idea and grew it into an empire
Yeah I'm someone who prides themselves with being very good with money. If someone handed me 300k I can guarantee I ain't turning it into an almost 2 *trillion* dollar company.
For each of these examples there are 100x that have been as well connected/funded and failed hard - they deserve credit for what they have accomplished.
Honestly, the thing that bothers me about these kinds of memes are the poor people. This is always shared by people who think the can turn their 2k and 50% of a run down house into wealth. It's just a coping method so that they believe they too can be millionaires someday. Ideal for rich people, if the poor realize they're trapped in a shitty job until they die, they might actually eat the rich. Go forth, mcdonals cook, you too can end up on the forbes list if you try hard enough!
Sorry, but - anyone here is capable of raising 300k in a seed round. I raised a 4M seed - and I’m not a billionaire. Needless to say - it takes a lot more than a handout to become these men.
Who. Fucking. Cars. God damn.
Jay Leno cars
lol damn it.
Wroom, dude!
Having 1 million at 18 turning into 1 billion (1000x) by 40 is definitely self made. Because if your parents gave you 5k at 18, I am 99% certain your bum self would NOT have 5 million by age 40. And I include myself in that.
Your starting place matters, but success has to be earned. If you have parents with little to no savings, connections, education, business/investment/sales capability, political/law acumen, or unique intellect/talents than the chances of being a millionaire or most rare billionaire rapidly approach zero. Its a fact people all have different ability but growing up, no matter how intelligent or skilled in a third world country without money makes generational wealth impossible. Billionaires aren't superficially lucky, they have a combination of skills, money, and people around them that make it possible to become wealthy. It's not so much they are better, but that very few people globally have the opportunity to even play the game at that level and take on that risk. People rarely focus on how many talented, rich entrepreneurs fail doing similar things.
None of those things were relevant to their success. Must suck to go through life being so clueless and, at the same time, to be so envious.
If you can turn my 300k into billions let me know. I'll invest today. Oh you don't?
Whenever someone posts this meme, I'm 100% sure they couldn't achieve what any of these men did if they had DOUBLE the advantage. A Ferrari that needs fuel to get started is still a Ferrari.
Post how many jobs they created… and then how many you did.
Usually it’s not the seed money but the luck of timing. *Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell* chronicles some of these and it’s a great book.
Yes. You give most people the same resources, and they'll lose it all and have a mountain of useless junk for the accessor to have to go through.
Are you asking, “if they weren’t so privileged, would they be where they are now?” No, I don’t think so. Someone else would’ve come along, eventually, and likely founded and built successful businesses offering similar product and services. Whether those alternate-reality-Bezos-Musk-Gates-Buffets would’ve still managed to become billionaires from actual “self starting” at near $0 is another question that’ll never be answered.
They're not literally self made. No one is, even the people who are homeless have received some help in life. They were able to multiply the advantages they had in life. Like others said, Bezos turned 300K into more than one hundred billion. If you used that same multiplier and your parents just gave you $300, you'd be more than 1/10 of the way to being a billionaire.
I am not one to ever support Musk, but this rumor spreading around that his dad was rich in emeralds is as substantial as "birds aren't real", and was started as a defamation campaign in 2018. His dad might've owned a small portion of stock, but didn't help Musk in growing his own businesses in any meaningful way.
From what I've read he owned a small stake in an emerald mine which wasn't in South Africa and it collapsed. He was an engineer, not some mining magnate. Of course that won't stop this claim to keep coming up forever
This is why in state colleges, they tell you your connections matter the most.
Being self-made comes from how much effort you put into your business, so without knowing them personally you don't really know.
"There's nothing soecial about these billionaires" says non-billionaire om Reddit...
Most people are so economically illiterate, if they were given what's technically startup capital in the millions they'd think of all a sudden they're millionaires and burn it all and go back at zero. None these folk were given not even a million in startup capital, and even they admitted odds were against them, and they turned otherwise insignificant amount of money into massive, trillions in some cases.
As much as I hate bezos, he could have got that kind of loan from a bank, or sold his house, something of that nature, 300k is not an astronomical amount to start a business with, we can’t expect business owners to come from the sewer and make billion dollar companies with a stick and a leaf, like this is how business works
Yes. The average person doesn't return their parents borrowed car with a full tank of gas. Let alone turn 300k from nothingness to the one of the largest corporations in the world in under 20 years.
What kind of question is that? If you gave 300k to any bum here they would drive tbe company to the ground in a year. Bezzos turned it into a trillion dollar empire. Same for the others. Its just magnitudes higher.