Because having some degree of runway is almost always necessary but never sufficient. Thousands of Americans receive similar amounts of money from their parents in the form of inheritance of the family home and other major assets. Only one took windfall of that size and created Amazon.
The "necessary, but not sufficient" is unintuitive to most people. Billionaires who come from working class families are almost unheard of, but probably more than half the self made (for a definition, something like multiplied familial investments by at least 100x maybe?) billionaires come from upper middle class families.
I wonder if they are actually more likely to come from upper middle class (where parents are highly paid professionals) than the proper idle rich or even CEOs and company founders...
If you gave the $300,000 Bezos got from his father to 10,000 random Americans in 1994, none of them would have created a company the equivalent of Amazon's scale.
How many of those 10k would have the same background? We can pretend Bezos' dad raised him in a "normal" middle class background then randomly dropped 300K on him, or we can acknowledge he is the business equivalent of an Olympic athlete.
Miguel worked at Exxon for 32 years as an engineer and a manager. It's not like he was the CEO or anything close to that. There would literally be hundreds of thousands of people in a similar position to him across the world.
Also worth noting that Jeff Bezos was(and I think still is) the youngest person who ever became a senior VP at DE Shaw. That is a position earned by merit alone.
I think you are agreeing with the poster you are responding to, right? Bezos is the equivalent of an Olympic athlete: a combination of innate talent as well as opportunity.
So $300K in 1994 is about $640K. That's nice but about 80th percentile of net worth. It's nice his parents believed in him. How many of your parents would do that for you? I'm sure at 1 in 5 of them have that kind of money because of the distribution here. So the difference here is He was smart, he got lucky, and your parents don't believe in you enough on this front.
But compare and contrast Bezos and Musk. Bezos's mid-life crisis is leaving his wife to run around on his yacht banging models. Musk's mid-life crisis is trying to destroy democracy so he and his mom won't have to pay US taxes. Neither one is a role model, but I don't even get the point of the latter.
Which brings us back to AlphaFold. The AlphaFold team did something amazing. But also, they had a backer that believed in them. David Baker, for better or worse, didn't achieve what they did and he'd been at it for decades. It's amazing what good backing can achieve.
That's one metric, that only reflects Amazon's function as an income generator.
I view businesses through other metrics as well, including their impact on society in a variety of different ways. From some of those perspectives, it is not clear to me that Amazon (where I was the 2nd employee) is a net benefit.
This Amazon the company specifically or online shopping in general? E.g. if Amazon hadn't been made and some other online retailer had dominated (or even if there had been many!)
That may be true, but I don't think that's really the crux of the argument. This article talks about how Amazon was initially funded by Bezos' family members: https://luxurylaunches.com/celebrities/jeff-bezos-parents-in.... The bigger point is that relatively very few parents (like a couple percent maybe?) would be in a position to give their kid $250k to start a new venture, and it's not that surprising that the most financially successful people in the world needed both: intrinsic talent and drive, and a huge amount of support from their birth circumstances.
The way I like to put it is that both of the following are true:
1. Bezos is uniquely talented and driven, and his success depended on that
2. Bezos' success also depended on him having an uncommon level of access to capital at a young age.
The reason I like to say "both of these are true" is that so often today I see "sides" that try to argue that only one is true, e.g. libertarian-leaning folks (especially in the US) arguing that everything is a pure meritocracy, and on the other side that these phenomenally successful people just inherited their situation (e.g. "Elon Musk is only successful because his dad owned an emerald mine")
hypothesis : it's not per se affluence. it's the culture of the family and social circle. A dollop of $ to have some free time and maybe buy some books would help and might be necessary.
imagine a family where youngster is encouraged to work on intellectual problems. where you aren't made fun of for touching nerdy things. or for doing puzzles. where the social circle endorses learning. these things more important than $ in a first world economy. (if third world, yes give me some money please for a book or even just food. and hopefully with time, an internet connected device then the cream will rise they can just watch feynman on YouTube...)
that said, it's "better" than it used to be. hundreds of years ago most interesting science, etc. was done by the royal class. not because they are smarter (I assume). But they had free time. And, social encouragement perhaps too.
bill gates and zuck dropped out of Harvard right? it's not per se Harvard, at least not the graduating bit? being surrounded by other smart people is helpful -- and or people who encourage intellectual endeavors.
> hundreds of years ago most interesting science, etc. was done by the royal class
Not really true. Newton, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Mendel, Faraday, Tesla... Not from royals, nor from high nobility. Many great scientists were born to merchant families, of a level that wasn't even all too rare.
The mental exercise is to compare two identical Jeff Bezos' (identify his attributes), one has the background/funds they did, one doesn't.
Of course, that's not possible, so then you do the same with other highly intelligent and skilled tech professionals. I'd argue that without the funding and other resources, those skilled pro's won't get anywhere. But with it, some would do incredibly well. It's not common in a global sense, but we see it every single day.
Comparing Bezos to thousands/millions of randomised others is pointless.
Then you may say, oh but Amazon is unique. Yes, but then there are other factors at play. Like the luck (skill? funding?) to take advantage of a unique moment in time at the start of the web. That moment isn't available eveI mean, try to start an Amazon today ... etc
I think the question is not whether Bezos, or Gates, were helped by a reasonably wealthy family. The question is- was that wealth helpful because it allowed them to fully develop their own potential; or they have no merit at all and anybody with that wealth would have done the same?
I think those who point out the privileged start of these entrepreneurs are suggesting the second, and yet that makes no sense (millions had the same privilege and didn't get anywhere close).
Disagree. I'm not suggesting the person in question does not have potential or merit and that anyone can do it. It's just that the wealth of a family can pour rocket fuel on that person to enable them to reach their potential.
Yes, that's debatable in each case, everyone has a different story. But it's very likely.
You do get the counterfactual, the plucky upstart who came from nothing. But I'd wager big that that's much rarer and more difficult.
There’s another side to this: if you accept the idea of “nature” — genes capable of carrying “talent” (in some sense) — it should be common for children of talented people to be talented.
Of course, talent doesn’t always mean prosperity. But in a society modeled on meritocracy, it often will.
