I'm nowhere near Stewart's level of success, but I've done well enough in tech to own a home in SF, and I grew up in the 70's/80's quite poor in rural North Car

I'm nowhere near Stewart's level of success, but I've done well enough in tech to own a home in SF, and I grew up in the 70's/80's quite poor in rural North Carolina with an alcoholic ne'er-do-well father and mother who worked a paper route. We were poor enough that for a year or two we lived without electricity and indoor plumbing. I did homework by oil lamp. Our house was little more than a shack, for a long time the interior walls were cardboard staple gunned to the 2x4 studs. By the time I reached high school we had electricity though, and I managed to scrounge together enough to get a commodore 64 and learn to code, so what I lacked in luck in childhood economic and parenting circumstances got more than balanced out with luck of timing of computer access and obsession. But the main contributor to my rags-to-(feels-like)-riches story was government loans that largely put me through college leading to a job at IBM. The relatively inexpensive public university tuition costs were a factor as well.