Devina Mehra: Rags to riches? Most ‘self-made’ billionaires were not really self-made
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Which is the land that exemplifies ‘rags to riches,’ where you can be anything in the world? I am sure the US will come to mind. You know all those glamorous stories of college drop-outs, guys who started out in garages and made it big.
But dig into the details and the stories don’t quite hold up. To give a few examples: founders Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Elon Musk of Tesla, Space X, etc, Bill Gates of Microsoft, Michael Dell of Dell Computer all came from privileged backgrounds… as did Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway. The ‘merit’ argument that anyone can make it always tries to downplay privilege because those who make it usually have it.
How does privilege work? Let me count the ways. The first obvious one is quality education. For example, Bill Gates’ school was one of a handful in the world with a computer back in the 1960s.
Who your parents are and what they can afford is usually also a determinant of the university you can go to—never mind whether or not you drop out of it. Then a part that is often not talked about is parents’ financial support for one’s business in its early days. Bezos’s parents invested nearly a quarter of a million in his business 30 years ago.
Zuckerberg started with $100,000 from his father. Dell and Phil Knight of Nike also got seed money from their families. In hindsight, it is easy to call it loan or equity investment, but we know how much due diligence would have gone into these.
Read on livemint.com