"Someone paid a small fortune to buy Larry Page the same elite credentials that billionaires buy for their children, and it was the critical component in his su

"Someone paid a small fortune to buy Larry Page the same elite credentials that billionaires buy for their children, and it was the critical component in his success." Larry Page went to a public high school (East Lansing High School) and a public university (University of Michigan). "Others spent fortunes buying the same elite credentials for Bill Gates, Paul Graham, Mark Zuckerberg, Drew Houston, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, and most other "successful" Silicon Valley founders/investors." Three and a half out of the six people you named went to public high schools. What Paul Graham said about this question: "Closely related to poverty is lack of social mobility. I've seen this myself: you don't have to grow up rich or even upper middle class to get rich as a startup founder, but few successful founders grew up desperately poor. But again, the problem here is not simply economic inequality. There is an enormous difference in wealth between the household Larry Page grew up in and that of a successful startup founder, but that didn't prevent him from joining their ranks. It's not economic inequality per se that's blocking social mobility, but some specific combination of things that go wrong when kids grow up sufficiently poor." (http://www.paulgraham.com/ineq.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ineq.html)