4 ms·

Gates, Jobs, Ellison, Zuck et al didn't inherit their wealth.

• anigbrowl 10y ago
  One of the points Piketty makes in his book is that the rich generally aren't the heroic creative geniuses of Ayn Rand's imagination. 1. There are always going to be outliers, but most people are going to be closer to the middle of a normal distribution. 2. The examples you mention were all excellent entrepreneurs, but they were also a bit lucky with timing and social position; Jobs' adoptive parents were blue-collar workers but none of these future industrialists grew up in poverty. If we could reduce the latter a bit we might have even more of the former.
• Namrog84 10y ago
  They also didn't start at the absolute bottom. Most of them had an above average hand to start with.