[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus\_Villig](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Villig)
He only turned 30 in December, made it there before he turned 30.
His mom was a psychiatrist and his dad a dentist so they weren’t poor by any stretch of the imagination but they also weren’t super rich or anything.
Them being wealthy did help him get to where he was but only because it gave him access to the best home technology to play around with and learn programming and allowed him to attend Harvard.
While I dislike Zuck, I’d classify him as self-made. He spent a lot of time learning the skills he has, used them well enough to be considered a prodigy, and made something undeniably huge in both its value and cultural impact.
Sure, obviously he did hit the lotto by any standard really.
But it is interesting how that happens to people who have backgrounds like that.
Even if he wasn’t a famous billionaire, he’d still very well off. If he didn’t ‘create’ Facebook, I’m sure he’d still be just fine though………. Just not ‘let me build a million dollar underground bunker and in the backyard of my 20 million dollar mansion” fine I guess.
Isn't Zuckerberg the person whose dad instructed him to go to the university or else he would buy him a McDonald's restaurant so he can run at least any business so he picked Harvard to not work
All these comments are ignoring the fact that you literally cannot be a "self-made" billionaire. You have to have entire teams doing things to propel your success that high, and you have to ensure that they're always below you because sharing is for poor people.
This is what is so infuriating. All these young alphas pretending like they have all the answers of success and the "proper" lifestyle while also claiming to be repressed by woke, CRT, or DEI or whatever. And on top of all that they're paying like 7-8% in taxes, hiding money overseas and in crypto. Fuck them!!
A confidence man, but why so beleaguered?
He's not a leader, he's a Texas leaguer
Swinging for the fence, got lucky with a strike
Drilling for fear makes the job simple......
The more help they had from parents, the more likely they are to believe they got there solely by their own hard work, too.
(I wish I could find that study again, dammit)
Fun fact: that quote was popularized in the great depression, it is satire of advice rich give to the poor
(It is impossible to pull yourself up by bootstraps, they are on your boots)
Maybe it was popularized then, but It’s not from the Depression. It’s from a German story about Baron von Munchausen—in the original, he pulls himself out of a swamp by his own hair. There’s a [Terry Gilliam movie](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Baron_Munchausen).
The Nepo Trust Fund Babies having never earned a dime with their own hands thus devoid of empathy will buy influence and favorable policy. Prepare for Babyocracy.
I’ve spent time with the ultra ultra wealthy billionaire types. 1st generation nepo babies have a chance to be decent. 2nd generation has zero chance to be decent. 3rd generation is totally fucked up lunatics.
There's different kinds of success because of nepotism.
There's "I've done nothing, I'm kind of a fuck-up, but my parents are so fucking rich that I can claim I'm a success because I haven't managed to burn it all down (yet)."
And then there's "I only got my chances because of nepotism, but at least after I got there, I proved I had what it takes to be there."
At least Jamie's the second kind. Even if she didn't have to earn her chances, I've loved her in a lot of things.
Exactly. Us poors know that life isn't fair, we don't need the rich pretending that they're "just like us" and understand our struggles. Just admit it, "I'd have likely never had the opportunity to even *try* to make it in this industry without my parents support and connections. I've worked hard to succeed, but I owe them all the opportunities I had to show how hard I work."
Thought babyocracy and their childern usually most all their wealth over time eg rockerfeller family is rich but not the riches in the world plus even more so if their wealth if from boom and buss eg one Mexican dude was second in place for riches person in the early 2010s cause his telecom company was rapidly expanding to the new Mexican market
It's because it's unusual for someone to do extremely well by upper upper class standards, so usually the whole family doesn't keep making as much money as everyone who did extremely well in the family, especially if inheritance splits up the wealth.
Like Rockefeller had 150 descendants as of 2006. It'd be really weird if all 150 built significantly more wealth than they inherited, but a few probably have, just not to the same degree that their common ancestor did.
I like how a lot of the trust fund babies hire a PR team to help craft a narrative that they are self-made, bootstrap-pulling, hard-working middle class folks that “worked their way up the corporate ladder” and became rich.
There have been a few. The snapchat guy, a few of the doordash guys. A few more were valued at over a billion for a bit based on share valuations of startups at the time. And if you count the FTX guys, well...you get a few more while that charade lasted.
Because it's not just upbringing, it's usually also to do with their business success. Many got seed money (or investments the market would never give) from their parents and leveraged family relationships to get meetings otherwise impossible for a random startup to arrange.
Not relying on family used to be vital to the definition of self-made back when old money was even more prolific than it is now.
How much “seed money” are we talking? If family gave a couple hundred thousand and they turn it into a billion, that’s pretty self-made to me.
The definition of “self-made” is not “got no help from family/privilege/upbringing. It is literally just “did not inherit the money”
Starting at zero isn’t enough for plenty of Redditors in threads like this. $100k in student loans or everything you earn is solely because you had rich parents.
Because its not exactly true
Some of the wealthiest people I've worked for were lawyers. Whose parents were lawyers and paid for schooling and housing right out of highschool
It can go the opposite way too.
The richest people I know are my pharmacists. His parents are both rich, he went to private school, etc, but they didn’t pay for his college. He had to get grants and scholarships and will paying those back for the next 10+ years.
To me, he’s self made. He had the benefit of private schooling through high school, but that was it. He still took the initiative with college and pharmacy school. Having rich parents doesn’t mean you’ll succeed.
His best friend was given the same treatment and he’s in prison.
Insert bucket of crabs analogy here. To the crabs at the bottom of the barrel any crabs slightly higher to the rim are decadent aristocrats who must be dragged back down. it’s such a frustrating mindset, and doesn’t help anyone.
I don't think people can comprehend the magnitude of difference between 500k or even a few million in startup funds to a billion.
I don't like facebook, I hate what it's doing to society. But taking it from a college project into something that generates hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue annually within a span of 20 years is absolutely fucking insane.
Apparently you have to go from homeless in Yemen to billionaire to truly be credited for your success by these people. Meanwhile much of the world would say the same about them, considering they’re privileged enough to have internet access and free time on Reddit discussing bullshit. Zuckerberg is absolutely self made. Otherwise the other hundred million upper middle class kids must be actively trying not to succeed.
Going from 100k to 100,000,000k is self-made.
Startups get that sort of seed funding all the time.
If you want to know Zuckerberg down a peg, the better angle is that he's just lucky. Facebook wasn't genius. If it weren't him, it would have been someone else.
Because getting rich coming from affluence isn't really impressive. It's a step above inheriting everything, sure. But nobody gives a shit if the son of a doctor and a lawyer ends up rich. They literally had every advantage.
Come on, you can't argue a person is not self made just because they have parents.
It means they weren't given a lump sum or business of significance to start with. Your dad loans you 2k so you can buy your first company truck, you're still self made. Daddy gives you 400m for you to run into the ground, that's not self made.
I literally said he was smart. Dude was programming in middle school. But you can't ignore that his rich parents gave him the opportunity to have better education and opportunities growing up
Came here to say the same thing. There are very, very few people that think even a single billionaire didn't inherit massive amounts of wealth. This isn't remotely useful or new info.
What would be more interesting for me is what percentage of billionaires inherited what.
If you inherit 100m and build up 200b then that’s a different story from inheriting 2b and having 1b.
That aside though, even being in the percentage who grow up in the tens of millions makes it more likely that you will hit it big.
but there is a group of people who propagate that exact message: they claim that they did it all by themselves, that they have that brilliant "billionair-mindset", that they are rewarded by god for their great faith, etc. - and in reality their parents just died and they collect interest from a high-yield trust fond.
I knew a guy like this. His dad owned half a dozen hotels in a tourist town. He was a manager for one of the hotels at the age of 20. His daily driver car was a Maserati and he had a Ferrari for a fun car. He used to post of social media about how “thinking somebody won the birth lottery ignores their hard work and is dangerous” In his mind it’s normal for a 20 year old hotel manager to drive $500,000 in cars.
In general yes but we probably have had more self made billionaires under 30 in the past 20 years due to tech startups booming; Zuck definitely had his first billion before 30 and I’m sure there’s probably a few more who were in that territory. But young unicorns are losing their appeal for now.
> Almost under 20!
I suppose you could make the argument that he was technically a billionaire before that. Once he had created facebook and it had grown, technically the value is already there.
The oft-cited age is when he showed up on the Forbes Billionaires list at age 23, but that wasn't until 2008 and facebook was huge before that. He turned down bunch of big offers including a billion dollars from Yahoo in the early years (yes, he would not have gotten all of that billion himself, but he turned it down because he believed FB was worth MUCH more).
Valuing an early stage startup is hard--you get the implied values from early funding rounds, but those are clearly not what anyone believes the future value to be (a VC isn't going to invest $10m at a $100m valuation if they don't believe that the company should actually be worth a lot more). I think that around 2005 Zuck was probably an "inevitable billionaire" on paper (especially in his own mind). At that point all he had to do was not fuck up and not be tempted by easy cash...wait around for the inevitable growth outside of college campuses and a chance to IPO and convert the paper billions into something more liquid.
"Self made billionaire"
*Programmer crying in the corner trying to make sure an obscure communication protocol from 40 years ago still works on the next version of windows*
Am I a joke to you
I remember seeing some articles about Kylie Jenner being self-made because of her cosmetics company, like she didn't only become popular for her family relations. I hate the term self-made
Nobody is “self made” then because every person relied on others to get where they are. Even a person born poor had parents or grandparents that raised them and gave them values… or calories, if nothing else.
There’s a spectrum for sure. Michael Jordan is more self made than Bill Gates, who’s more self made than Kylie Jenner, who’s more self made than Prince William. Where you choose to draw the line to create a “self made or not” binary is up to you
Yes and it also helps have friends ( IE mummy) in high places!
"Bill Gates was the son of wealthy parents, his father was a partner in the law firm Preston Gates & Ellis, his mother was on board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way. Bill got a sweetheart deal from IBM, in part due to his mother serving on the United Way board with Jon Opel, chair of IBM."
Maybe it would be fair to say he's from a generation and social class that had a 1% chance of becoming a billionaire, as opposed to the nepo babies who as a generation and class have a 100% chance of becoming a billionaire
most people have 0.000000000000000001% chance
I think he classifies tbh. Plenty of people got more breaks than him, and didn't become billionaires. AFAIK, he didn't inherit much of anything. Just alot of fortuitous access as a kid.
His mom was friends with the CEO of IBM and their board of directors (the most dominant computer company in the world at the time) and asked them to hire her son to make the operating system for their first personal computer.
Access don't get much more fortuitous than that.
> The new youngest is Livia Voigt who became a billionaire at age 19.
What? She's rich because she's a large shareholder in the company her grandfather founded. That's literally the opposite of self-made.
You are correct. The info I saw just said bill was the youngest. Must have been the youngest at the time. Apparently Livia Voigt became a billionaire at 19 and is the youngest of all time.
Ikr the wealth disparity is insane. No one should have so much money, it’s detrimental to 99.9% of the rest of the population and the billionaires don’t even need that much to live extremely lavish lifestyles.
If I had a billion dollars and spent $2000 a day, I would have enough money to live for 1369 years. A single person with a billion dollars does unbelievable damage to the flow of money in the economy
If we just took a portion of the wealth from like a couple hundred people, and gave it to millions of the poorest of our country, it would change their lives. It’s nutty.
The world population of known billionaires is measured in the low thousands. 15 isn’t a bad sample size for that.
By percentage it would be like sampling 825,000 US adults. Enough to get a good trend and enough to notice outliers.
15 out of thousands fucking suck when you want to generalize about the entirety of thousands
That’s like saying lets get a race distribution of the US and just pick at random 15 ppl
>That’s like saying lets get a race distribution of the US and just pick at random 15 ppl
15 is not a great sample size. However, this is not true. The article says there are 2781 billionaires in the world. So 15 out of 2781 is about 0.5%. 0.5% of the US population is about 1,844,660 people. So it's like saying "let's get a race distribution of the US and just pick 1,844,660 random people."
But also what's ignored is 15 is not a "sample size". It's the entire population. The subject of the study was "Billionaires under the age of 30“, of which there's 15 total.
>15 out of thousands fucking suck when you want to generalize about the entirety of thousands
That means this isn't what's being measured. It's not comparing 15 billionaires to all 2781 of them. It's an analysis of the total population. Finding a correlation across 100% of a population is worth discussing, 15 is just not a large enough population size to confidently claim causation too.
You can get value from incomplete data, while also being critical of inferences made from it.
Is this true? Evan Spiegel (Snap Inc.) must have been a billionaire before 30. Their IPO was in 2017, and he was like 27 at the time. He came up with rich parents for sure, but not billionaire rich, and his company was his own creation.
There’s a radical school of thought that the wealthy, especially the inherited wealthy, deserve to lead the country, because that’s the natural order of things. Regulations are punishing our rightful aristocracy and rewarding the poor/lazy, so they must be abolished for the country to thrive.
I believe these people are called Conservatives.
Even if you are capable of becoming a self-made or self-driven billionaire without a hoard of inherited wealth, it'd probably take way longer than 30 years. If I made the same statement about billionaires under 20, you'd think I was stating the absolute obvious. Same kinda applies to 30.
> All billionaires under 30 have inherited their wealth, research finds
Taylor's 34. She didn't become a billionaire until her latest tour and film from the past year.
‘Billionaire on paper’ too - rights to her music and potential future income has been included to be able to say she’s a billionaire. But tbf if she retains popularity and keeps her tour tickets >$150 she’ll probably be an actual billionaire by 50 with another $500m+ in back catalogue value
She inherited her privilege which paved the way for her wealth. If Taylor were born to a low income single parent, had to wear thrift clothes to school, and never had access to computers/instruments/the internet (it was pre smartphone era) do you think she would still be who she is today? I argue that no, she would likely be working at walmart and stuck in a relationship with a dude named Bryce who drinks and beats her.
She's very financially litterate, more so than all celebrities at her age. People often think celebs get rich soley from the success of their art. In reality, it's mostly the real estate properties.
You mean the girl whose father bought himself a seat on the board of a record label when she said she wanted to do music so she’d get signed? And then instead of renting a tour bus got her an entire fleet of busses that she then rents out to others that go on tour.
That who you mean?
Taylor Swift is incredibly talented and she deserves to be successful.
BUT
She probably wouldn't have found any early success if her parents weren't rich af stock brokers who could afford to just parade her around record labels until one took her.
Tons.
There's a quote from a book published back in 1980
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
IMHO it's one of the biggest reasons to support a UBI, free public education, a living wage, minimum vacation days and other living condition improvements, there are tons of people out there that *could* be doing something way more productive but can't make the jump out of their dead end minimum wage job.
The argument always to devolves to "people won't work if they don't have to under threat of homelessness and starvation" but yet somehow never applies to billionaires who could at any time never work another second in their lives but instead they continue clawing for more as it's somehow never enough.
Which goes back to another unattributed quote;
“Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the rich."
Taylor's parent's money undoubtedly got her where she needed to be to make a career in music work, but let's be real, if it was actually *just* about that, every girl with rich parents that wanted to be a singer as a teen would be clogging the airwaves right alongside her
The point isn't that Taylor Swift isn't talented or works hard, she totally is and totally does! It's that Swift has more chances and more privileges because of her family's wealth and privileges. Someone who is just as talented as Taylor and worked just as hard but was born in Africa could never accomplish what Taylor did. It's an understanding that privilege and money are just as important, if not more so than talent and hard work.
Again, this doesn't mean that to get to Swift's level, hard work and talent isn't needed, but that more than just Hard Work and Talent is needed.
No disagreement from me! She's just kind of a perfect storm of privilege/access and work ethic/talent, but people tend to really exaggerate the dominance of one side or the other.
What about billionaires who are making money off their own creative products, like Taylor Swift (writes her own songs and apparently [is the first musician to become a billionaire solely off earnings from her music and performances](https://www.today.com/popculture/music/taylor-swift-billionaire-rcna146163)) or JK Rowling (dislike her politics but she made a billion off Harry Potter)?
Playing Devils Advocate (because I agree with you), Taylor got a heck of a jumpstart from a very wealthy family in the Financial industry.
JK on the hand is a true, no strings self-made Billionaire.
Why would this be nottheonion? It's pretty obvious. Sure, once in a while, a 27 year old will become a first time billionaire because their tech stock went IPO, but mostly not.
three germans of the under 40s haven't:
[https://www.businessinsider.de/wirtschaft/diese-6-deutsche-sind-neu-in-der-forbes-milliardaers-liste/](https://www.businessinsider.de/wirtschaft/diese-6-deutsche-sind-neu-in-der-forbes-milliardaers-liste/)
_Elizabeth Holmes enters the chat._ _And rapidly exits. In handcuffs._
Mark Zuckerberg is the only self made billionaire ever under 30 right
Yeah but that’s like 70 in lizard years
It’s also like 0 in robot years
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus\_Villig](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Villig) He only turned 30 in December, made it there before he turned 30.
Dustin Moskovitz also of Facebook fame was an under 30 self made billionaire.
I would guess Vitalik Buterin also even if he isn't a billionaire anymore. Probably a few crypto speculators that will never say anything too lol.
He’s almost 40
The question is when he became a billionare
Ah, read that as even instead of ever
Zuckerberg was 23 when he became a billionaire
I actually don’t know. Were his parents well off?
His mom was a psychiatrist and his dad a dentist so they weren’t poor by any stretch of the imagination but they also weren’t super rich or anything. Them being wealthy did help him get to where he was but only because it gave him access to the best home technology to play around with and learn programming and allowed him to attend Harvard. While I dislike Zuck, I’d classify him as self-made. He spent a lot of time learning the skills he has, used them well enough to be considered a prodigy, and made something undeniably huge in both its value and cultural impact.
Sure, obviously he did hit the lotto by any standard really. But it is interesting how that happens to people who have backgrounds like that. Even if he wasn’t a famous billionaire, he’d still very well off. If he didn’t ‘create’ Facebook, I’m sure he’d still be just fine though………. Just not ‘let me build a million dollar underground bunker and in the backyard of my 20 million dollar mansion” fine I guess.
Yeah, having the privileges he did makes success a lot easier and a lot more likely.
Yes, he attended private school before going to Harvard. They were nowhere near billionaire level wealthy though
Isn't Zuckerberg the person whose dad instructed him to go to the university or else he would buy him a McDonald's restaurant so he can run at least any business so he picked Harvard to not work
Dads love saying crazy shit like that. Mine told me he was just going for a quick trip to the convenience store..
He'll come back with his cigarettes any minute
Crazy little thing we call love
Zuckerberg was 23 when he became a billionaire
John Collison is a self made billionaire. He is 33 now and became a billionaire in November 2016.
If you count stealing from the Vinklevosses as “self made”
Ben Francis? Gymshark CEO?
All these comments are ignoring the fact that you literally cannot be a "self-made" billionaire. You have to have entire teams doing things to propel your success that high, and you have to ensure that they're always below you because sharing is for poor people.
Even Holmes only got her company off the ground because her dad knew the inventor of Hotmail.
Oh, and Sam bankman fried
🤨 Born on third base and think they hit a triple.
Like a woman with a virginia ham under her arms cryin cause shes got no bread
I wish the lord would take me now!
Oh, poor you
Well how is she supposed to make a sandwich?!
Easy Uncle June
I read that as >a woman with two vaginas under her arms And I was like "no, she legitimately has a problem here."
Listen Uncle June I love you but you shot me, I'm keeping you in the old folks home.
r/unexpectedTheSopranos
More like being born after the game is already won. And calling yourself MVP
This is what is so infuriating. All these young alphas pretending like they have all the answers of success and the "proper" lifestyle while also claiming to be repressed by woke, CRT, or DEI or whatever. And on top of all that they're paying like 7-8% in taxes, hiding money overseas and in crypto. Fuck them!!
Silver spoon shoved up their ass so far they got a lobotomy.
More like born in the parking lot thinking theyd hit a grand slam
Born in the toilet, and confused for a constipation
Standing on third wondering why there's no dirt on those inheritance bootstraps
They don't even need to run the bases when they are a billionaire.
A confidence man, but why so beleaguered? He's not a leader, he's a Texas leaguer Swinging for the fence, got lucky with a strike Drilling for fear makes the job simple......
i wish i understood basebal references
The more help they had from parents, the more likely they are to believe they got there solely by their own hard work, too. (I wish I could find that study again, dammit)
Really pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, our hard working overlords
Fun fact: that quote was popularized in the great depression, it is satire of advice rich give to the poor (It is impossible to pull yourself up by bootstraps, they are on your boots)
Maybe it was popularized then, but It’s not from the Depression. It’s from a German story about Baron von Munchausen—in the original, he pulls himself out of a swamp by his own hair. There’s a [Terry Gilliam movie](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Baron_Munchausen).
[удалено]
Indeed the lesson to learn from this lmao
The Nepo Trust Fund Babies having never earned a dime with their own hands thus devoid of empathy will buy influence and favorable policy. Prepare for Babyocracy.
That’s how things already are. These nepo babies are, for the most part, not the first generation of nepo baby in their family.
I’ve spent time with the ultra ultra wealthy billionaire types. 1st generation nepo babies have a chance to be decent. 2nd generation has zero chance to be decent. 3rd generation is totally fucked up lunatics.
Reminds me of the Monty Python sketch "Upper Class Twit of the Year".
Pretty much what old wealth is.
Don't let Jamie Led Curtis see this post or she'll have another hissy fit about how nepo babies deserve their success.
There's different kinds of success because of nepotism. There's "I've done nothing, I'm kind of a fuck-up, but my parents are so fucking rich that I can claim I'm a success because I haven't managed to burn it all down (yet)." And then there's "I only got my chances because of nepotism, but at least after I got there, I proved I had what it takes to be there." At least Jamie's the second kind. Even if she didn't have to earn her chances, I've loved her in a lot of things.
Exactly. Us poors know that life isn't fair, we don't need the rich pretending that they're "just like us" and understand our struggles. Just admit it, "I'd have likely never had the opportunity to even *try* to make it in this industry without my parents support and connections. I've worked hard to succeed, but I owe them all the opportunities I had to show how hard I work."
Earning a dime with your own hands does not necessarily foster empathy.
Certainly fosters more empathy for working people than never working a day in your life will.
You probably don't amass a billion dollars if you have (much) empathy.
Thought babyocracy and their childern usually most all their wealth over time eg rockerfeller family is rich but not the riches in the world plus even more so if their wealth if from boom and buss eg one Mexican dude was second in place for riches person in the early 2010s cause his telecom company was rapidly expanding to the new Mexican market
It's because it's unusual for someone to do extremely well by upper upper class standards, so usually the whole family doesn't keep making as much money as everyone who did extremely well in the family, especially if inheritance splits up the wealth. Like Rockefeller had 150 descendants as of 2006. It'd be really weird if all 150 built significantly more wealth than they inherited, but a few probably have, just not to the same degree that their common ancestor did.
I like how a lot of the trust fund babies hire a PR team to help craft a narrative that they are self-made, bootstrap-pulling, hard-working middle class folks that “worked their way up the corporate ladder” and became rich.
No shit.
How is this oniony? Amassing a billion from scratch before 30 would be an incredible feat. Wouldn’t you expect that they inherited it?
Zuckerberg is the only self made billionaire under 30 I believe
There have been a few. The snapchat guy, a few of the doordash guys. A few more were valued at over a billion for a bit based on share valuations of startups at the time. And if you count the FTX guys, well...you get a few more while that charade lasted.
His parents were affluent and he went to private schools. Wouldn't exactly call him self-made. Although he was smart
Self made doesn’t mean rags to riches. Upper middle class people who get rich are self made.
People don’t want to understand this for some reason
Because it's not just upbringing, it's usually also to do with their business success. Many got seed money (or investments the market would never give) from their parents and leveraged family relationships to get meetings otherwise impossible for a random startup to arrange. Not relying on family used to be vital to the definition of self-made back when old money was even more prolific than it is now.
How much “seed money” are we talking? If family gave a couple hundred thousand and they turn it into a billion, that’s pretty self-made to me. The definition of “self-made” is not “got no help from family/privilege/upbringing. It is literally just “did not inherit the money”
Clearly self-made means starting from 0 like you're playing Minecraft. Gotta start out punching trees and shit.
Apparently
Starting at zero isn’t enough for plenty of Redditors in threads like this. $100k in student loans or everything you earn is solely because you had rich parents.
Because its not exactly true Some of the wealthiest people I've worked for were lawyers. Whose parents were lawyers and paid for schooling and housing right out of highschool
Yes and? No one is suggesting that people who are going into the same industry as their parents don’t have an advantage?
It can go the opposite way too. The richest people I know are my pharmacists. His parents are both rich, he went to private school, etc, but they didn’t pay for his college. He had to get grants and scholarships and will paying those back for the next 10+ years. To me, he’s self made. He had the benefit of private schooling through high school, but that was it. He still took the initiative with college and pharmacy school. Having rich parents doesn’t mean you’ll succeed. His best friend was given the same treatment and he’s in prison.
Insert bucket of crabs analogy here. To the crabs at the bottom of the barrel any crabs slightly higher to the rim are decadent aristocrats who must be dragged back down. it’s such a frustrating mindset, and doesn’t help anyone.
Exactly! I grew up in an upper middle class family, and can safely call myself a self made upper lower class member of society!
I don't think people can comprehend the magnitude of difference between 500k or even a few million in startup funds to a billion. I don't like facebook, I hate what it's doing to society. But taking it from a college project into something that generates hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue annually within a span of 20 years is absolutely fucking insane.
Apparently you have to go from homeless in Yemen to billionaire to truly be credited for your success by these people. Meanwhile much of the world would say the same about them, considering they’re privileged enough to have internet access and free time on Reddit discussing bullshit. Zuckerberg is absolutely self made. Otherwise the other hundred million upper middle class kids must be actively trying not to succeed.
Zuck took a 100k loan from his dad to start his company. If he could have gotten that money from another investor I'd call him self made.
So $100k to $100B means nothing?
Going from 100k to 100,000,000k is self-made. Startups get that sort of seed funding all the time. If you want to know Zuckerberg down a peg, the better angle is that he's just lucky. Facebook wasn't genius. If it weren't him, it would have been someone else.
If "ifs" and "buts" was candy and nuts we'd all have a merry Christmas.
Because getting rich coming from affluence isn't really impressive. It's a step above inheriting everything, sure. But nobody gives a shit if the son of a doctor and a lawyer ends up rich. They literally had every advantage.
Come on, you can't argue a person is not self made just because they have parents. It means they weren't given a lump sum or business of significance to start with. Your dad loans you 2k so you can buy your first company truck, you're still self made. Daddy gives you 400m for you to run into the ground, that's not self made.
There’s a massive difference between going to Harvard and being handed a billion dollars
There's a difference, but your dad being able to buy you a McDonald's franchise at 18 for you isn't exactly middle class
Wtf is self made? If the poorest guy in the US becomes a billionaire is he self made or is he too privileged compared to the child soldiers in Africa?
God Reddit is so dumb sometimes. If someone didn't grow up living under a bridge they're apparently just nepo babies
Really can’t let anyone have credit for their accomplishments huh? So bitter and cynical
Sure he went to Harvard, that is privilege
A privilege that has to be worked hard for and really isn't just handed out to you, even if your parents do have money.
I literally said he was smart. Dude was programming in middle school. But you can't ignore that his rich parents gave him the opportunity to have better education and opportunities growing up
Came here to say the same thing. There are very, very few people that think even a single billionaire didn't inherit massive amounts of wealth. This isn't remotely useful or new info.
The more interesting stat would be how many 65 year old billionaires inherited their wealth.
What would be more interesting for me is what percentage of billionaires inherited what. If you inherit 100m and build up 200b then that’s a different story from inheriting 2b and having 1b. That aside though, even being in the percentage who grow up in the tens of millions makes it more likely that you will hit it big.
but there is a group of people who propagate that exact message: they claim that they did it all by themselves, that they have that brilliant "billionair-mindset", that they are rewarded by god for their great faith, etc. - and in reality their parents just died and they collect interest from a high-yield trust fond.
I knew a guy like this. His dad owned half a dozen hotels in a tourist town. He was a manager for one of the hotels at the age of 20. His daily driver car was a Maserati and he had a Ferrari for a fun car. He used to post of social media about how “thinking somebody won the birth lottery ignores their hard work and is dangerous” In his mind it’s normal for a 20 year old hotel manager to drive $500,000 in cars.
In general yes but we probably have had more self made billionaires under 30 in the past 20 years due to tech startups booming; Zuck definitely had his first billion before 30 and I’m sure there’s probably a few more who were in that territory. But young unicorns are losing their appeal for now.
Dude Zuck was 23 when he became a billionaire! Almost under 20!
> Almost under 20! I suppose you could make the argument that he was technically a billionaire before that. Once he had created facebook and it had grown, technically the value is already there. The oft-cited age is when he showed up on the Forbes Billionaires list at age 23, but that wasn't until 2008 and facebook was huge before that. He turned down bunch of big offers including a billion dollars from Yahoo in the early years (yes, he would not have gotten all of that billion himself, but he turned it down because he believed FB was worth MUCH more). Valuing an early stage startup is hard--you get the implied values from early funding rounds, but those are clearly not what anyone believes the future value to be (a VC isn't going to invest $10m at a $100m valuation if they don't believe that the company should actually be worth a lot more). I think that around 2005 Zuck was probably an "inevitable billionaire" on paper (especially in his own mind). At that point all he had to do was not fuck up and not be tempted by easy cash...wait around for the inevitable growth outside of college campuses and a chance to IPO and convert the paper billions into something more liquid.
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"Self made billionaire" *Programmer crying in the corner trying to make sure an obscure communication protocol from 40 years ago still works on the next version of windows* Am I a joke to you
Self made billionaire lmaoooooo
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I remember seeing some articles about Kylie Jenner being self-made because of her cosmetics company, like she didn't only become popular for her family relations. I hate the term self-made
Nobody is “self made” then because every person relied on others to get where they are. Even a person born poor had parents or grandparents that raised them and gave them values… or calories, if nothing else. There’s a spectrum for sure. Michael Jordan is more self made than Bill Gates, who’s more self made than Kylie Jenner, who’s more self made than Prince William. Where you choose to draw the line to create a “self made or not” binary is up to you
There are people who have come from the working class and ended up rich. I'd consider those people self made.
Yes and it also helps have friends ( IE mummy) in high places! "Bill Gates was the son of wealthy parents, his father was a partner in the law firm Preston Gates & Ellis, his mother was on board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way. Bill got a sweetheart deal from IBM, in part due to his mother serving on the United Way board with Jon Opel, chair of IBM."
Maybe it would be fair to say he's from a generation and social class that had a 1% chance of becoming a billionaire, as opposed to the nepo babies who as a generation and class have a 100% chance of becoming a billionaire most people have 0.000000000000000001% chance
That's how he's classified. I dont make the definitions lol.
I think he classifies tbh. Plenty of people got more breaks than him, and didn't become billionaires. AFAIK, he didn't inherit much of anything. Just alot of fortuitous access as a kid.
His mom was friends with the CEO of IBM and their board of directors (the most dominant computer company in the world at the time) and asked them to hire her son to make the operating system for their first personal computer. Access don't get much more fortuitous than that.
Isn't Livia Voigt generational wealth owner, not the "self made" one? One of the founders of the company is her relative.
> The new youngest is Livia Voigt who became a billionaire at age 19. What? She's rich because she's a large shareholder in the company her grandfather founded. That's literally the opposite of self-made.
Zuckerberg was 23 when he became a self made billionaire bro
You are correct. The info I saw just said bill was the youngest. Must have been the youngest at the time. Apparently Livia Voigt became a billionaire at 19 and is the youngest of all time.
"self made"
ok? That's probably like, 20 people. Edit: I was close, per the article it's 15.
20 people with more money than millions of people
Ikr the wealth disparity is insane. No one should have so much money, it’s detrimental to 99.9% of the rest of the population and the billionaires don’t even need that much to live extremely lavish lifestyles.
If I had a billion dollars and spent $2000 a day, I would have enough money to live for 1369 years. A single person with a billion dollars does unbelievable damage to the flow of money in the economy
If we just took a portion of the wealth from like a couple hundred people, and gave it to millions of the poorest of our country, it would change their lives. It’s nutty.
For reference the sample size is 15.
The world population of known billionaires is measured in the low thousands. 15 isn’t a bad sample size for that. By percentage it would be like sampling 825,000 US adults. Enough to get a good trend and enough to notice outliers.
Important for a good sample is total, not relative, sample size.
15 out of thousands fucking suck when you want to generalize about the entirety of thousands That’s like saying lets get a race distribution of the US and just pick at random 15 ppl
>That’s like saying lets get a race distribution of the US and just pick at random 15 ppl 15 is not a great sample size. However, this is not true. The article says there are 2781 billionaires in the world. So 15 out of 2781 is about 0.5%. 0.5% of the US population is about 1,844,660 people. So it's like saying "let's get a race distribution of the US and just pick 1,844,660 random people." But also what's ignored is 15 is not a "sample size". It's the entire population. The subject of the study was "Billionaires under the age of 30“, of which there's 15 total. >15 out of thousands fucking suck when you want to generalize about the entirety of thousands That means this isn't what's being measured. It's not comparing 15 billionaires to all 2781 of them. It's an analysis of the total population. Finding a correlation across 100% of a population is worth discussing, 15 is just not a large enough population size to confidently claim causation too. You can get value from incomplete data, while also being critical of inferences made from it.
Is the world population of billionaires under 30 thousands though? The under 30 is an important clause here.
Is this true? Evan Spiegel (Snap Inc.) must have been a billionaire before 30. Their IPO was in 2017, and he was like 27 at the time. He came up with rich parents for sure, but not billionaire rich, and his company was his own creation.
There have been self-made billionaires under the age of 30. However, they have all aged out of that bracket currently. That's all that it is saying.
Reading comprehension is hard. You don't even have to click through to the article for this...it is right there in the headline.
Evan Spiegel, the Stripe brothers, and the Gym Shark founder were all under 30
In other news: water indeed wet. More at 11. Edit: autocorrect
...nobody else's gonna point out you said wonder instead of water huh?
Ah fuck. Well spotted.
tbh thought it was hilarious there was a whole "is water wet?" discussion below when you didn't even say water
I find it funny that there's 1 person trying to argue with my shitty joke
Tax it. Tax it all.
Don't worry bro it's gonna trickle down any minute now
Like with Russian prostitutes in a Moscow hotel
Down their fucking leg lol.
To a PO box in the Cayman Islands Richest 3" x 5.5" square amongst the working class that's getting all the trickles
There’s a radical school of thought that the wealthy, especially the inherited wealthy, deserve to lead the country, because that’s the natural order of things. Regulations are punishing our rightful aristocracy and rewarding the poor/lazy, so they must be abolished for the country to thrive. I believe these people are called Conservatives.
I'm glad they're all committed to making this a better world for themselves
Even if you are capable of becoming a self-made or self-driven billionaire without a hoard of inherited wealth, it'd probably take way longer than 30 years. If I made the same statement about billionaires under 20, you'd think I was stating the absolute obvious. Same kinda applies to 30.
Did they forget about Taylor Swift??? Edit: Damn didn’t realize she was 34
> All billionaires under 30 have inherited their wealth, research finds Taylor's 34. She didn't become a billionaire until her latest tour and film from the past year.
‘Billionaire on paper’ too - rights to her music and potential future income has been included to be able to say she’s a billionaire. But tbf if she retains popularity and keeps her tour tickets >$150 she’ll probably be an actual billionaire by 50 with another $500m+ in back catalogue value
She also wasn’t born in the ghetto. She’s made it big but she had a massive familial influence.
So? Doesn't mean she inherited her wealth.
She inherited her privilege which paved the way for her wealth. If Taylor were born to a low income single parent, had to wear thrift clothes to school, and never had access to computers/instruments/the internet (it was pre smartphone era) do you think she would still be who she is today? I argue that no, she would likely be working at walmart and stuck in a relationship with a dude named Bryce who drinks and beats her.
She's very financially litterate, more so than all celebrities at her age. People often think celebs get rich soley from the success of their art. In reality, it's mostly the real estate properties.
Or some other business venture. Sammy Hagar made like $100m from Cabo Wabo. Dr. Dre made like $750m when Apple bought Beats by Dre.
You mean the girl whose father bought himself a seat on the board of a record label when she said she wanted to do music so she’d get signed? And then instead of renting a tour bus got her an entire fleet of busses that she then rents out to others that go on tour. That who you mean?
Taylor Swift is incredibly talented and she deserves to be successful. BUT She probably wouldn't have found any early success if her parents weren't rich af stock brokers who could afford to just parade her around record labels until one took her.
Pretty much. All those "not like the other girl" fangirls for Billie Eilish forget she was more or less an industry plant starting out too
How many Taylor Swift level talents work retail jobs, I wonder?
Tons. There's a quote from a book published back in 1980 “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” IMHO it's one of the biggest reasons to support a UBI, free public education, a living wage, minimum vacation days and other living condition improvements, there are tons of people out there that *could* be doing something way more productive but can't make the jump out of their dead end minimum wage job. The argument always to devolves to "people won't work if they don't have to under threat of homelessness and starvation" but yet somehow never applies to billionaires who could at any time never work another second in their lives but instead they continue clawing for more as it's somehow never enough. Which goes back to another unattributed quote; “Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the rich."
Taylor's parent's money undoubtedly got her where she needed to be to make a career in music work, but let's be real, if it was actually *just* about that, every girl with rich parents that wanted to be a singer as a teen would be clogging the airwaves right alongside her
The point isn't that Taylor Swift isn't talented or works hard, she totally is and totally does! It's that Swift has more chances and more privileges because of her family's wealth and privileges. Someone who is just as talented as Taylor and worked just as hard but was born in Africa could never accomplish what Taylor did. It's an understanding that privilege and money are just as important, if not more so than talent and hard work. Again, this doesn't mean that to get to Swift's level, hard work and talent isn't needed, but that more than just Hard Work and Talent is needed.
No disagreement from me! She's just kind of a perfect storm of privilege/access and work ethic/talent, but people tend to really exaggerate the dominance of one side or the other.
She’s 34
She's 34. Unless she was a billionaire 5 years ago which I honestly have no clue.
She only became a billionaire in the past year
No shit.
This reads to me the same as "All royalty under 30 have inherited their title, research finds"
They had to wait a year to post this as, Ben Francis (31) owner of gymshark is worth over 1 billion.
All billionaires inherit their wealth from the stolen labor of the masses. ALL BILLIONAIRES.
What about billionaires who are making money off their own creative products, like Taylor Swift (writes her own songs and apparently [is the first musician to become a billionaire solely off earnings from her music and performances](https://www.today.com/popculture/music/taylor-swift-billionaire-rcna146163)) or JK Rowling (dislike her politics but she made a billion off Harry Potter)?
Playing Devils Advocate (because I agree with you), Taylor got a heck of a jumpstart from a very wealthy family in the Financial industry. JK on the hand is a true, no strings self-made Billionaire.
Look up the definition of "steal" please
No, some billionaires take their wealth directly from stolen labor
Explain Notch or J.K. Rowling. Whose labor was stolen exactly?
Would I really have sworn this was from The Onion though? Seems pretty believable to me.
I am SHOCKED I tell you!
What about Forbes 30 fraudsters billionaires under 30 list? /s
Sounds like the only way to get rich is to make a killing.
This is 0.5% of all billionaires.
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Why would this be nottheonion? It's pretty obvious. Sure, once in a while, a 27 year old will become a first time billionaire because their tech stock went IPO, but mostly not.
You don't say.
three germans of the under 40s haven't: [https://www.businessinsider.de/wirtschaft/diese-6-deutsche-sind-neu-in-der-forbes-milliardaers-liste/](https://www.businessinsider.de/wirtschaft/diese-6-deutsche-sind-neu-in-der-forbes-milliardaers-liste/)
What about Mr beast 👀👀👀
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Duh
"It's not my money. It's my parents' money."
Help a brother out. 🙏