This comment bothers me. I happen to know a number of .1% people quite well and your characterization of them is not accurate. I myself quit a really good job a

This comment bothers me. I happen to know a number of .1% people quite well and your characterization of them is not accurate. I myself quit a really good job and gambled my life savings on starting a company at the age of 38. This company made a lot of money for all of its hundreds of employees, but naturally more for me and the senior engineers and executives that were there the longest. I didn't hide any sums offshore (and of course I know no one that has done so--why would they confide in anyone that they had done so). How does one go about hiding income from the sale of a publicly traded company? Every bit of it is reported to the IRS. If you really do know of people hiding money off-shore just report it to the IRS and reap the rewards for turning in tax-cheats. I'm not saying that everyone who has made money deserves it, by whatever definition one uses for the word "deserve", but I am saying that it is unfair to characterize everyone that has become successful as not having "earned" it. I can think of only one employee in my company that may have started with inherited money (I really don't know). What I do know is that he went to a top-notch, very hard to get into, university, was very smart, and totally pulled his weight. Everyone else in the company took a chance with their careers and joined us as a startup. We didn't hire recent graduates out of school, instead hiring really top talent from a number of companies (IBM, Sun, etc.). These people were extremely talented and already had very good jobs that they chose to give up to come work with us. They worked really hard, and we were very successful. After years of being one of the countries fastest growing companies we sold. How is this success not earned? We all ended up paying what I consider to be ridiculous taxes. I don't really understand how these uninformed threads are sustained so frequently on HN.