Sergey Brin was enrolled in an advanced PhD candidate program at a super-elite technology university. Brin's parents were highly educated academics. Brin himsel

Sergey Brin was enrolled in an advanced PhD candidate program at a super-elite technology university. Brin's parents were highly educated academics. Brin himself was highly educated and was raised in an environment of middle-class affluence. This is not the story of a struggling immigrant who struggled to pay rent. Brin had a priviliged upbringing. Elon Musk also had a middle class upbringing with highly educated parents who provided him with an affluent middle class childhood. He enrolled at elite universities (UPenn, NYU Wharton, Standford) where he started his career surrounded by wealth and access to capital. Musk is an interesting case in particular in that luck and timing account for most of his initial capital. He started a website (Zip2.com) in the middle of the dotcom bubble and it was purchased from him $300 million. The site was acquired by Compaq in 1999 and ceased operations in 1999. The dotcom bubble burst less than one year later. The money from that sale positioned Musk as a member of the capitalist class and he leveraged the money and connections from that for all his future businesses. While he did, technically, bootstrap his career, it would be naive and foolish to ignore the element of luck involved here. I'm having trouble taking you seriously because you choose such bad examples to make your points and ignore the obvious counter-examples. In short, the system just works differently for people of low socio-economic status. Musk and Brin were not of low socio-economic status. They started as very high status and ascended to become ultra-elite status. You make another assumption that is flawed and unfounded, and makes it seem like you are arguing against a strawman. I do not assume that equality of outcome is desirable. There are some in the social justice left that believe this but I don't, and in fact very few Americans do (as can be seen by election results). I believe that sane policy must acknowledge that inequality of opportunity is an endemic problem in our society and that success in capitalism is based on opportunities, which are not distributed in a fair manner.