6 ms·

Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Elon Musk, Bill Hewlett, David Packard, Henry Ford and many others who were born poor and succeed are the per

Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Elon Musk, Bill Hewlett, David Packard, Henry Ford and many others who were born poor and succeed are the perfect counterexample of this comunist manifesto. Life is not fair, but if the merit wasn’t rewarded soon there will be no achievement. Why try harder to get what everyone else gets? Look to a society who abolished meritocracy: Cuba.

raydev 6y ago
We should look to Cuba as an example of what happens when a neighboring rich and powerful country cuts off trade, and threatens other countries who try to trade.
px43 6y ago
I'm pretty sure most of those people were born into homes with plenty of access to good food and education. Elon had a nice computer from an early age in the early 80s, and went to a fancy prep school. Gates had parents who were successful lawyers, and who got him into Harvard. Bezos went to Princeon. Woz's dad was a well paid enigeer at Lockheed and went to UC Berkeley. Lots of mobility for sure, but it really does take a couple generations in most cases. None of those people you mentioned grew up poor.
- alexpc201 6y ago
  Wow.. they built an empire from their own garages and you say “yeah, but they had a nice computer in the 80’s”. I sense the resentment.
  - nottorp 6y ago
    > Gates had parents who were successful lawyers, and who got him into Harvard. ... and his mother was very cozy with IBM management :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates "the first woman to chair the national United Way’s executive committee where she served most notably with IBM's CEO, John Opel, " No relation to Microsoft getting the MS DOS contract, for sure.
  - px43 6y ago
    No resentment towards Musk etc. They all did some awesome work, and many of them continue to do so. My resentment is towards hacker news commenters who think someone is "poor" because their parents didn't buy them enough Nintendo games when they were a kid. Even in the US something like 1 in 9 households struggle to feed their children, and globally the numbers are much worse. Calling the upper middle-class families that these billionaires came from "poor" just trivializes the very real problems with economic mobility in the US today.

raydev 6y ago

We should look to Cuba as an example of what happens when a neighboring rich and powerful country cuts off trade, and threatens other countries who try to trade.

px43 6y ago

I'm pretty sure most of those people were born into homes with plenty of access to good food and education. Elon had a nice computer from an early age in the early 80s, and went to a fancy prep school. Gates had parents who were successful lawyers, and who got him into Harvard. Bezos went to Princeon. Woz's dad was a well paid enigeer at Lockheed and went to UC Berkeley. Lots of mobility for sure, but it really does take a couple generations in most cases. None of those people you mentioned grew up poor.

alexpc201 6y ago
Wow.. they built an empire from their own garages and you say “yeah, but they had a nice computer in the 80’s”. I sense the resentment.
- nottorp 6y ago
  > Gates had parents who were successful lawyers, and who got him into Harvard. ... and his mother was very cozy with IBM management :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates "the first woman to chair the national United Way’s executive committee where she served most notably with IBM's CEO, John Opel, " No relation to Microsoft getting the MS DOS contract, for sure.
- px43 6y ago
  No resentment towards Musk etc. They all did some awesome work, and many of them continue to do so. My resentment is towards hacker news commenters who think someone is "poor" because their parents didn't buy them enough Nintendo games when they were a kid. Even in the US something like 1 in 9 households struggle to feed their children, and globally the numbers are much worse. Calling the upper middle-class families that these billionaires came from "poor" just trivializes the very real problems with economic mobility in the US today.