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The good old "Bill Gates the bootstrapped college dropout" argument. These myths never die. William Henry Gates the Third had a trust fund before he was born.

by FD3SA 11y ago

The good old "Bill Gates the bootstrapped college dropout" argument. These myths never die. William Henry Gates the Third had a trust fund before he was born. His downside risks for anything he chose to do in life were completely nonexistent. Same with Zuck. Same with Spiegel. Same with 99% of the entrepreneurs HN idolizes. Here's some light reading: http://qz.com/455109/entrepreneurs-dont-have-a-special-gene-for-risk-they-come-from-families-with-money/ http://qz.com/455109/entrepreneurs-dont-have-a-special-gene-... http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/ http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/ EDIT: Removed potentially inflammatory line, which went as follows: "Just a bunch of rich kids trying to prove a point to their parents". This is definitely a personal opinion, but one that has merit if you examine the evolutionary psychology of parent-child relationships. The conversation is a bit in depth, but please understand that I was not trying to simply fire off an ad hominem. I was instead trying to hint at the incentives which drive an already rich child to strive for more wealth. For the vast majority of us who have to work for a living, such behaviors seem confusing. Only upon deeper analysis do the pyschological incentives for such individuals begin to make sense.

drumdance 11y ago
It's a bunch of rich kids trying to get richer than their parents to prove a point. You had me until there. Why question their motives? Is it really so hard to believe that Gates really loved computers? If he was just thinking in terms of outstripping his parents, there were lots of other more-credible avenues available to him. The very idea of a personal computer was scoffed at. Not just by non-techies, but people like DEC founder Ken Olsen.
- Anechoic 11y ago
  Why question their motives? Is it really so hard to believe that Gates really loved computers? Did Gates' love of computers motivate Microsoft's anticompetitive moves in the 1990s?
  - drumdance 11y ago
    I don't see what one has to do with the other. Professional athletes get caught cheating all the time, but I don't doubt they still love their sports. One may as well doubt that Hitler actually liked being a vegetarian.
    - Retra 11y ago
      It's a funny way of showing love to a sport when you subvert the rules that make it fair. No doubt if everyone cheated all the time, practically nobody would love the sport. One may as well think that Hitler eating meat remains a vegetarian.
      - drumdance 11y ago
        It's a funny way of showing love to a sport when you subvert the rules that make it fair. Uber and AirBnB are subverting rules and breaking laws in hundreds of municipalities. Do you think they don't care about what they're building over there? Is it just money-money-money and no serious interest in technology? Does that mean, by proxy, that Paul Graham only cares about money? Is it really so hard to believe that people can have more than one thing that motivates them? Why did Ray Ozzie join such an evil beast? Surely he's just motivated by greed! Black and white thinking will be the death of us all.
        Retra 11y ago
        I don't know where you got black and white thinking from. I wouldn't say Bill Gates doesn't love computers, just that he loves something else more. Something that may very well not be good for computing. Uber and AirBnB? Do they love the work they do? Maybe. But they love themselves more. They love the idea of being "disruptors" or "innovators" or "rich" more than they care about transportation, housing, or their customers. And those guys who love sports? Maybe they love winning more. It's easy to feign passion, after all. Especially when you're already committed to investors.
        11y ago
- e40 11y ago
  It's pretty obvious that he didn't just like computers. Bill Gates was a consummate competitor. He loved competing. I agree, it doesn't matter what his motivation was, but he wasn't solely motivated by "computers".
  - drumdance 11y ago
    Of course not. But if he was more motivated by money than technology, I doubt he would have spent four years building a company trying to sell a product that nobody wanted. (Microsoft basically had zero revenue for its first four years.) He would have been better off going into real estate, and I think he was smart enough to know that even at 19. I love computers, but I don't start companies just to say I start companies. I expect a financial return.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  The PC revolution owes its greatest debt not to Gates, but to Kildall, in terms of individual contribution. It may well be that Gates was driven to purposeful action from a love of computers. That he has had no notable productivity since Altair BASIC (other than third-party accounts of him doing code reviews early at Microsoft), nor any research, would nevertheless make his contributions to the field quite little.
  - drumdance 11y ago
    "Code reviews" makes it sound like something he did for 15 minutes as part of a standup. He was known to be incredibly sharp, asking extremely detailed questions. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html "Bill Gates was amazingly technical. He understood Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date functions. He didn't meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn't bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual, programmer." Edit: My point is, one can love computers and be very good at them without making significant contributions to the field. That describes me and probably most of the people on HN.
    - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      Of course you can. The fact remains that Bill Gates has not been associated with any directly technical work in decades, so his action in the distant past is of little relevance to his action in the less distant past and the present, and moreover is irrelevant to the GP's assertion of his familial wealth.
Natsu 11y ago
> The good old "Bill Gates the bootstrapped college dropout" argument. These myths never die. You appear to be refuting a claim that was not made in the GP post or in the Forbes article they cited. Grandparent only said that Gates is among the top 3 riches and is not going to pass on his wealth, they did NOT claim that Gates was born poor or otherwise among the self-made millionaires. Similarly Forbes lists Gates as the richest person, but makes no claims whatsoever about how he made his fortune. There are two independent claims there and at no time does either source claim that Gates is in the self-made group. Your QZ article is more responsive, but it boils down to saying that one needs access to capital to start a business. This is not really surprising and ensuring that any capable person can get funding is why we have things like YC. If there's any group out there with good ideas that's being systematically ignored or denied funding, you and anyone else could make big money by investing in them. All you need to do is prove there's an opportunity being ignored and people will jump on it, chasing the money.
- tw04 11y ago
  "Not going to pass on his wealth" is pretty relative. He gave his kids millions of dollars, he just didn't give them billions.
  - Natsu 11y ago
    A million dollars is rather achievable with a good education, good health and drive, provided you live in a developed part of the world and can keep expenses lower than earnings. Hopefully we someday develop the rest of the world, as well as making sure that everyone can get all the education and healthcare they need, so that this level of success no longer boils down to luck.
    - lmartel 11y ago
      But a million dollars at age 18/21/whatever isn't. Trust fund kids still get a head start of a couple decades.
FD3SA 11y ago
>"[f]ully 1,191 members of the list are self-made billionaires, while just 230 inherited their wealth"[1]. The top 3 richest people on the planet at this point made their money themselves, and 2 of them (Gates & Buffett) are not going to pass their wealth down the family tree. @Natsu, my point of contention is the very liberal definition of "self-made" and "made their money themselves". If you give every reader on HN a trust fund, and a few start successful companies, would these individuals be considered "self-made"? I don't think so. Self made means start with zero net worth. That means no trust funds, no loans at 0% from parents with infinite payback periods, and no parent board members making absurdly lucrative deals that you'd never get otherwise. Just money you've made from your own labor, and loans you've received without nepotism. You'd be surprised how few entrepreneurs fall under this category. If you don't restrict your definition in this way, then every rich person is self made, because the interest accruing in their trust fund happened during their lifetimes.
- thedufer 11y ago
  > Just money you've made from your own labor, and loans you've received without nepotism. You'd be surprised how few entrepreneurs fall under this category. Frankly, I'd be surprised if anyone fits under that category. Pretty hard to survive as an infant completely on your own. I mean, obviously that doesn't count. But where exactly are you drawing the line? It's less black and white than you are implying; it seems like there's enough fuzziness here that you can put anyone in the "not self-made" category, so of course group X has very few members outside that category. Because, you know, Mr. CEO over here was driven to college by his parents once, so he's out, and Ms. Entrepreneur there inherited a few hundred dollars from her grandfather, so that's no good either.
JonFish85 11y ago
That's not at all the argument I'm making, and probably isn't an argument made by anyone. Going from dirt-poor to richest-in-the-world is much harder than any other economic jump. My argument was simply that "the richest don't stay the richest" for very long. If you take $330bn and spend $1m a day (getting no interest on the principle) it would take 1,000 years to spend it all. You'd expect that the money would last the Rockefellers for centuries, but in fact it's pretty quickly been "returned" to the central money pot.
- crpatino 11y ago
  If every tycoon has 2 or 3 heirs, chances are that unless one of them inherits the parent drive (and then goes to amass more wealth), the fortune will spread out. We all know how the exponential function works, it does not take that many generations to level off any finite amount of money.

by FD3SA 11y ago

drumdance 11y ago

It's a bunch of rich kids trying to get richer than their parents to prove a point. You had me until there. Why question their motives? Is it really so hard to believe that Gates really loved computers? If he was just thinking in terms of outstripping his parents, there were lots of other more-credible avenues available to him. The very idea of a personal computer was scoffed at. Not just by non-techies, but people like DEC founder Ken Olsen.

Anechoic 11y ago
Why question their motives? Is it really so hard to believe that Gates really loved computers? Did Gates' love of computers motivate Microsoft's anticompetitive moves in the 1990s?
- drumdance 11y ago
  I don't see what one has to do with the other. Professional athletes get caught cheating all the time, but I don't doubt they still love their sports. One may as well doubt that Hitler actually liked being a vegetarian.
  - Retra 11y ago
    It's a funny way of showing love to a sport when you subvert the rules that make it fair. No doubt if everyone cheated all the time, practically nobody would love the sport. One may as well think that Hitler eating meat remains a vegetarian.
    - drumdance 11y ago
      It's a funny way of showing love to a sport when you subvert the rules that make it fair. Uber and AirBnB are subverting rules and breaking laws in hundreds of municipalities. Do you think they don't care about what they're building over there? Is it just money-money-money and no serious interest in technology? Does that mean, by proxy, that Paul Graham only cares about money? Is it really so hard to believe that people can have more than one thing that motivates them? Why did Ray Ozzie join such an evil beast? Surely he's just motivated by greed! Black and white thinking will be the death of us all.
      - Retra 11y ago
        I don't know where you got black and white thinking from. I wouldn't say Bill Gates doesn't love computers, just that he loves something else more. Something that may very well not be good for computing. Uber and AirBnB? Do they love the work they do? Maybe. But they love themselves more. They love the idea of being "disruptors" or "innovators" or "rich" more than they care about transportation, housing, or their customers. And those guys who love sports? Maybe they love winning more. It's easy to feign passion, after all. Especially when you're already committed to investors.
        11y ago
e40 11y ago
It's pretty obvious that he didn't just like computers. Bill Gates was a consummate competitor. He loved competing. I agree, it doesn't matter what his motivation was, but he wasn't solely motivated by "computers".
- drumdance 11y ago
  Of course not. But if he was more motivated by money than technology, I doubt he would have spent four years building a company trying to sell a product that nobody wanted. (Microsoft basically had zero revenue for its first four years.) He would have been better off going into real estate, and I think he was smart enough to know that even at 19. I love computers, but I don't start companies just to say I start companies. I expect a financial return.
vezzy-fnord 11y ago
The PC revolution owes its greatest debt not to Gates, but to Kildall, in terms of individual contribution. It may well be that Gates was driven to purposeful action from a love of computers. That he has had no notable productivity since Altair BASIC (other than third-party accounts of him doing code reviews early at Microsoft), nor any research, would nevertheless make his contributions to the field quite little.
- drumdance 11y ago
  "Code reviews" makes it sound like something he did for 15 minutes as part of a standup. He was known to be incredibly sharp, asking extremely detailed questions. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html "Bill Gates was amazingly technical. He understood Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date functions. He didn't meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn't bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual, programmer." Edit: My point is, one can love computers and be very good at them without making significant contributions to the field. That describes me and probably most of the people on HN.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    Of course you can. The fact remains that Bill Gates has not been associated with any directly technical work in decades, so his action in the distant past is of little relevance to his action in the less distant past and the present, and moreover is irrelevant to the GP's assertion of his familial wealth.

Natsu 11y ago

> The good old "Bill Gates the bootstrapped college dropout" argument. These myths never die. You appear to be refuting a claim that was not made in the GP post or in the Forbes article they cited. Grandparent only said that Gates is among the top 3 riches and is not going to pass on his wealth, they did NOT claim that Gates was born poor or otherwise among the self-made millionaires. Similarly Forbes lists Gates as the richest person, but makes no claims whatsoever about how he made his fortune. There are two independent claims there and at no time does either source claim that Gates is in the self-made group. Your QZ article is more responsive, but it boils down to saying that one needs access to capital to start a business. This is not really surprising and ensuring that any capable person can get funding is why we have things like YC. If there's any group out there with good ideas that's being systematically ignored or denied funding, you and anyone else could make big money by investing in them. All you need to do is prove there's an opportunity being ignored and people will jump on it, chasing the money.

tw04 11y ago
"Not going to pass on his wealth" is pretty relative. He gave his kids millions of dollars, he just didn't give them billions.
- Natsu 11y ago
  A million dollars is rather achievable with a good education, good health and drive, provided you live in a developed part of the world and can keep expenses lower than earnings. Hopefully we someday develop the rest of the world, as well as making sure that everyone can get all the education and healthcare they need, so that this level of success no longer boils down to luck.
  - lmartel 11y ago
    But a million dollars at age 18/21/whatever isn't. Trust fund kids still get a head start of a couple decades.

FD3SA 11y ago

>"[f]ully 1,191 members of the list are self-made billionaires, while just 230 inherited their wealth"[1]. The top 3 richest people on the planet at this point made their money themselves, and 2 of them (Gates & Buffett) are not going to pass their wealth down the family tree. @Natsu, my point of contention is the very liberal definition of "self-made" and "made their money themselves". If you give every reader on HN a trust fund, and a few start successful companies, would these individuals be considered "self-made"? I don't think so. Self made means start with zero net worth. That means no trust funds, no loans at 0% from parents with infinite payback periods, and no parent board members making absurdly lucrative deals that you'd never get otherwise. Just money you've made from your own labor, and loans you've received without nepotism. You'd be surprised how few entrepreneurs fall under this category. If you don't restrict your definition in this way, then every rich person is self made, because the interest accruing in their trust fund happened during their lifetimes.

thedufer 11y ago
> Just money you've made from your own labor, and loans you've received without nepotism. You'd be surprised how few entrepreneurs fall under this category. Frankly, I'd be surprised if anyone fits under that category. Pretty hard to survive as an infant completely on your own. I mean, obviously that doesn't count. But where exactly are you drawing the line? It's less black and white than you are implying; it seems like there's enough fuzziness here that you can put anyone in the "not self-made" category, so of course group X has very few members outside that category. Because, you know, Mr. CEO over here was driven to college by his parents once, so he's out, and Ms. Entrepreneur there inherited a few hundred dollars from her grandfather, so that's no good either.

JonFish85 11y ago

That's not at all the argument I'm making, and probably isn't an argument made by anyone. Going from dirt-poor to richest-in-the-world is much harder than any other economic jump. My argument was simply that "the richest don't stay the richest" for very long. If you take $330bn and spend $1m a day (getting no interest on the principle) it would take 1,000 years to spend it all. You'd expect that the money would last the Rockefellers for centuries, but in fact it's pretty quickly been "returned" to the central money pot.

crpatino 11y ago
If every tycoon has 2 or 3 heirs, chances are that unless one of them inherits the parent drive (and then goes to amass more wealth), the fortune will spread out. We all know how the exponential function works, it does not take that many generations to level off any finite amount of money.