• @[email protected]
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    408 days ago

    What they really mean is that they didn’t inherit their immense wealth, which means there was a time in their lives when they weren’t obscenely wealthy.

    • chingadera
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      98 days ago

      I get what they’re getting at, but selfmade has that connotation with it.

      They could say not inherited vs inherited wealth

      • haui
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        378 days ago

        Not inherited is also wrong. Because more than 50% of americans live paycheck to paycheck, one can assume that private schools, elite universities, etc are also inherited wealth.

        They dont spawn with billions but they started at the top and just built exploitation empires.

        The is no such thing as self made wealth and an insane majprity of it is already being very comfortable and just going full bore.

        I’m not saying financial success has nothing to do with capabilities and discipline but surprisingly little.

        Or to quote jay gould, who said it before:

        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.

        • chingadera
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          58 days ago

          Very true as well. Directly exploitative vs indirectly idk man, but self made ain’t it

    • @[email protected]
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      8 days ago

      they didn’t inherit their immense wealth

      Except even that doesn’t hold up under close scrutiny. A big component of the market cap of any Fortune 100 company stems from equity and debt held by the generationally wealthy, typically through family funds managed by private equity groups. Amazon and Tesla aren’t worth $1T without the Vanderbilts and the Carnegies and the Adelsons and the Waltons bidding up asset prices. Microsoft doesn’t exist today without Bill Gates’s mom sitting on the IBM board of directors and handing her son the contracts for their 1980s OS. Hell, Berkshire Hathaway is owned by the sons of a Congressman and a federal judge, respectively.

      What’s more, the biggest source of market capital is inevitably government contracts. You can’t tell me that Michael Dell is “independently wealthy” when the bulk of his fortune came via the Texas public school system buying all his company’s computers. Particularly when the governors, legislators, and board members making these decisions are (a) big shareholders of the Dell corporation and (b) legacy scions of wealthy Texas families.