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“Self made billionaires” is propaganda. No billionaire is self made. Their billions were leeched off all the workers who created their wealth.

You don't fucking say.

It's almost like switching from monarchism and aristocracy to oligarchism and capitalism didn't really change much of anything. I'm very shocked.

Eat the rich.

Finally a study on this, nice. All those "no fucking shit" comments should be thankful someone actually proved this

Most self-made billionaires are going to have founded a company that became very successful.

If you're gonna make a billion bucks from scratch and you start working around twenty or so, you're starting with no experience and have less than ten years to pull it off. You basically have no track record and have to convince investors that you have the chops to pull this off and then manage to multiply that investment many times over.

I'm not saying that it's impossible. It has been done. Mark Zuckerberg -- who is almost 40 now -- was a billionaire at 23, riding a major transition in tech:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg

Zuckerberg briefly attended Harvard University, where he launched Facebook in February 2004 with his roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. Originally launched in only select college campuses, the site expanded rapidly and eventually beyond colleges, reaching one billion users in 2012. Zuckerberg took the company public in May 2012 with majority shares. In 2007, at age 23, he was the world's youngest self-made billionaire at the time. He has since used his funds to organize multiple philanthropic endeavors, including the establishment of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Business-to-consumer social media companies like that had a huge incentive to be large, benefited from network effect, so there was a major advantage to starting quickly. You didn't require much capital to get started. The technology was new, and low-hanging fruit hadn't been picked, and new graduates were among the most-familiar with the technology.

...but it's only going to happen under pretty exceptional circumstances.

I'm not sure that I'd call that terribly surprising or alarming. I mean, you could probably graph the number of under-30 self-made billionaires -- in inflation-adjusted terms -- by decade, and I'd bet that it's pretty historically rare, because that particular combination of circumstances aren't likely to show up all the time.

If we can find some kind of new, extraordinarily-important technology that in a very short period of time expands collossally in uptake, and where starting out in the industry has relatively-low capital requirements, my guess is that we could do it again. Zuckerberg did it with the Internet. Maybe AI or something like that could be the next area.

EDIT: And if you wanted to do it over the last ten years, you needed to do it over the COVID pandemic and a major war in Europe, which spanned a pretty considerable chunk of that period of time. Now, okay, yes, adversity means upset and can bring its own opportunities. Maybe you can meet a need that people have in either of those areas. But generally, neither were very good for economic activity.

Not a fan of him by any means, but I believe the Zucc managed to become a billionaire at 23 without inheriting all or most of it like a bunch of these new young billionaires.

Still built his wealth off the back of others like any other billionaire, but I believe he's one of the more "self made" ones. Still couldn't have done it without family connections and risk-free loans most of us couldn't get, though.

Is this supposed to be surprising?

I wonder how many poor people under 30 had their formerly middle class parents homes bought by the rich.

There used to be a saying "never sell the family farm". I suspect this came from a similar period of massive transfer of wealth to the rich.

They can cough it up or choke on the noose.