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Man Built a $188M Fortune Investing in Stocks Then Donated It to Charity

129 points by cow9 6y ago

circumvent123 6y ago
Joshua's blog is great for stories like these. It's too bad he took down a good percentage of his posts after opening his wealth management firm.
jsjsbdkj 6y ago
From the article: Most millionaires opt for stealth wealth. Their friends don’t know, their coworkers don’t know, their extended family doesn’t know. In a few cases, not even their children know! Wealth is accumulated through habits; at least in a free society like ours. At the moment, something like 1 out of 25 households falls into the millionaire category, most of it self-made. From the comments: Your right in Jack MacDonald's case too, he didn't make his initial money from stocks, his wealth was inherited which was then invested, he didn't spend any of it because he thought of himself as the steward of the inherited wealth "His wealth was inherited from his parents, who owned MacDonald Meat Co. in Seattle, and he sought to boost the funds by investing their money" "Wealth is accumulated through habits" is a great story to tell people but it seems very often to be complete BS.
- agent008t 6y ago
  What percentage of those millionaires are house-rich? I.e. the house they live in just happened to appreciate significantly and is now worth over $1mm? Those people can still feel as if they are not wealthy at all.
  - shawnz 6y ago
    It's almost ironic to call someone a "millionaire" these days in Toronto, which has been badly affected by the real estate bubble.
    - malandrew 6y ago
      We got a good century of usage out of the term, but inflation has certainly caught up with it. A boomer that inherited $1m shortly after the end of WWII would be the equivalent of like $14m today with inflation.
  - woah 6y ago
    They still have $1 million dollars more than someone without a house
    - mikepurvis 6y ago
      I mean yes, but when you've built your life in a place, it's little comfort being a "millionaire" if the only way to cash in on it is to pull up stakes and move hundreds of kilometers away.
      - unishark 6y ago
        I suspect arguments like this are even less comfort to people who have rented apartments their entire lives and aren't sitting on a million dollars of property.
      - kapp_in_life 6y ago
        If you cash out for a million dollars I'm positive you could find somewhere to rent in the city you currently live in. Maybe not a kilometer away but certainly fewer than hundreds.
    - lostcolony 6y ago
      Which is helpful if they want to and are able to move to an area with lower real estate prices. Otherwise that 'wealth' is tied up in a good they are unable to sell (without incurring an implicit debt of either needing to find another house in the same high price area, or having to pay for rent in the same high price area). A house may be a reasonable investment vehicle; it can also be an extremely illiquid one.
      - throwawayfire 6y ago
        If so, they still have $1 million more to spend on rent.
        lostcolony 6y ago
        Certainly. If they've actually purchased the home, and are not mid-mortgage on it. Honestly, crunching the numbers in my high COL area, the cost for a ~$1 million mortgage and the cost for renting a nice two bedroom, at the current rates, are basically the same. Essentially what you're saying is that because someone has put money into mortgage payments instead of rent, they're better off financially, and I'm completely in agreement with you. I just don't agree that it somehow implies they're living high on the hog, so to speak; yes, they have additional options if shit hits the fan (metaphors metaphors!), in that they can cut their losses, look to sell, and move to a lower cost area and have a bit banked (and -maybe- retain their income given remote work, but also maybe not), but that's still quite a lot to expect.
  - gh-throw 6y ago
    It's old retired people, mostly, I guarantee it. One million dollars doesn't mean what it used to. If you hit 65 and don't have at least a million dollars in retirement accounts, you'll be working as a Wal-Mart greeter. Healthcare's insanely expensive, even on medicare. A "household" at retirement is probably two people, so that's half a million a person and you're "millionaires" but sure can't live like the term implies. Retire at 65 a low-end "millionaire" and your kids may well not inherit jack-shit. It'll all go to hospitals and hospice care and such, before the end. Add in that Boomers skew much richer at the same stage in life as later generations, and that they're a large chunk of retired people, and yeah, "1 in 25 households are millionaires" just means half or 1/3 of retired people aren't living on cat food, and were actually able to retire. Hooray.
- mouzogu 6y ago
  > "Wealth is accumulated through habits" > his wealth was inherited I really dislike these kind's of articles.
  - tdhz77 6y ago
    He gain wealth by having wealth. The opposite is true too... you lose wealth by not having wealth.
  - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
    The two statements aren't incongruent. People who inherit money but spend it all because of bad habits don't accumulate wealth.
    - craftinator 6y ago
      Similarly, people who don't inherit money can't spend it, and for the most part also don't accumulate wealth!
      - leppr 6y ago
        Well that's the very nature of ponzinomics. How would you preserve social class otherwise? This is all working as intended.
      - mym1990 6y ago
        I don't think this is completely true as credit cards/bad loans can be a great way to not inherit money, still spend it like you have it, and stay in a very deep financial hole.
- krageon 6y ago
  > very often This can just be replaced with "always". You can be lucky or you can have inherited wealth.
  - colecut 6y ago
    Luck is very subjective. Having opportunities around is lucky, but most people aren't interested in taking the risks or making sacrifices necessary to seize those opportunities. And often times the ones willing to do this are then later called lucky.
    - krageon 6y ago
      Those risks are risks because they very often don't pan out. The folks that "make it" get to deliver clever speeches about how self-made they are and what a nice pair of bootstraps they used to get where they are today. What's left out of those stories is how many folks tried the same thing and failed. If all it took was the audacity to take a step others are not taking then it wouldn't be a risk in the first place, just a job. Put differently: To gamble you also need to take risks and make sacrifices. Some people will make it and by necessity those people are the ones that are willing to do that. That takes absolutely nothing away from the fact that the success is due to luck.
      - colecut 6y ago
        Luck is still subjective. A good investor does not feel like he is gambling. He just knows industries well enough to make educated guesses that are likely to happen. Someone else could put up the same amount of money because he overheard a tip in a bathroom. In my opinion, that person is gambling. But really its all the same and it's all subjective. The gambler was lucky, the investor was smart, who cares they both won. The investor is more likely to win again though I wouldn't necessarily call him luckier.
        krageon 6y ago
        You're essentially not engaging with my comment at all, just repeating what you said before. I don't find that a compelling way to have a conversation.
- vmception 6y ago
  well this is mostly semantics: the quote does not contradict, most of the wealth was self-made. as in the profits accumulated during their lifetime, it doesn't say anything about how the first one million or any amount was made. your consternation requires you to have a fixed and shared definition of self made that is just not described at all here. it does leave a glaring hole about then which wealth was not self-made. alimony? child support? having a million now but having inherited ten million? of course its not people that spent years in debt, worked on salary, dealt with illness in their family, and made millions. that's very rare and life will never be catering to that, so, yes, a life with more options from earning this way is BS and it does keep people motivated enough to continue trying anyway, but that's not what this article was talking about.
  - FactolSarin 6y ago
    I mean, it takes money to make money. It's a lot easier to get a hundred million dollars when you start out with 1 million to put in the stock market.
    - vmception 6y ago
      that's also my point. oh, I don't find that controversial in case my lack of stated opinion prompted someone to fill in their own.
    - malandrew 6y ago
      > It's a lot easier to get a hundred million dollars when you start out with 1 million to put in the stock market. This statement could only ever be uttered by someone that has not tried to do this. 100x increase in any endeavor is extremely exceptional. It's as hard to do as turning $10,000 into $1,000,000. The only thing having a larger starting amount helps with is that it opens up types of opportunities you did not have before that require greater starting capital and are outside the stock market. Those additional opportunities are as hard to capitalize on as the smaller opportunities that only require $10,000, especially since you need not only money but a lot of people with expertise that you can trust. But within the stock market, a 100x return is something very few people in the market ever achieve. The only place where having money clears some significant initial hurdles is probably getting to the first $10,000, maybe the first $100,000. This is a hurdle many have cleared in their lifetime and they still haven't succeeded in turning it into $1 million to $10 million, respectively.
- borplk 6y ago
  > "Wealth is accumulated through habits" is a great story to tell people but it seems very often to be complete BS. Yes. It's capitalist propaganda. If you are a highly paid heart surgeon or CEO you can "accumulate wealth with habits". If you are anywhere between flipping burgers to many other types of jobs there's just not enough money "coming in" for these things to make a huge difference. You can be more sensible with your money and you may end up with a slightly nicer car, a slightly bigger house in a slightly better location than your other careless peers. But that's about it.
  - achillesheels 6y ago
    My grandfather flipped burgers in high school and worked his way up to VP of a glass installation firm in the Mountain West, providing his grandchildren with a college education and a small nest egg. But if you are ego-centric then I can understand why you’d be bitter.
  - cik 6y ago
    That's exceptionally untrue - though it can be true in context. In the city beside mine, renting a place downtown, and working in the grocery store it's very possible to save $500 per month. For reference, minimum wage is the equivalent of $1700 USD, and renting a one-bedroom, all in will cost roughly $454 USD. With cellphone (250GB of 5G speeds) costing the equivalent of $15 USD, and groceries and electricity costing another $350, there's still plenty of space. Investing that money in the S&P at its historical rate, for 45 years will yield $2.3 million (rounded down). Now, quality of life would be rubbish. But it's technically possible.
    - HEmanZ 6y ago
      And most people don't flip burgers. The median household income in the US in 2019 was $68,000/yr [1]. In the part of the US I am from, and the parts I have lived most of my life, this affords an extremely good quality of life with plenty of room for intelligent financial decisions. So crying "this doesn't apply to people with really low incomes" is true to an extent, but that's only a fraction of the population. Going around saying "well, you shouldn't give that advice because it doesn't apply to everyone, it only applies to most people" is insane. [1] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-270.html#:~:text=Median%20household%20income%20was%20%2468%2C703,and%20Table%20A%2D1 https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-27...).
- economusty 6y ago
  He had to have some good habits to grow the portfolio.
- pge 6y ago
  Compounding is also a huge factor in cases like this. If you make (or inherit) money early in life, even if you don’t add much principal, 70 years of compounding does wonders for wealth creation.
  - bluescrn 6y ago
    The wealthy enjoy compound interest while the less wealthy suffer compound inflation
- nemacol 6y ago
  I keep trying to develop the habit of having wealthy parents but they keep being poor. Also, those articles about getting rich keep telling me to utilize my assets to earn additional income but that is illegal in my state. Please send help.
  - andreilys 6y ago
    utilize my assets to earn additional income but that is illegal in my state What state would make investing illegal?
    - newsclues 6y ago
      It’s a prostitution joke
    - lowercased 6y ago
      Possibly the poster was referring to a different set of assets.
      - newsclues 6y ago
        ASSets!
      - breck 6y ago
        All states make it legal for men to give each other brain damage in a boxing ring for money. Maybe women should make the rules.
      - llampx 6y ago
        Onlyfans is legal
  - dagw 6y ago
    I keep trying to develop the habit of having wealthy parents If you really cannot manage that, then your second best option is to have a wealthy spouse. It's not ideal, but it's better than nothing.
- tivyrind 6y ago
  The article also contains a link to an about.com article about penny stock investing, which is a whole bucket of red flags all by itself.
- adventured 6y ago
  > At the moment, something like 1 out of 25 households falls into the millionaire category, most of it self-made. 4% of households is off the mark. It's presently closer to 7%-10% depending on the source [1]. 8% of American adults (~19-20 million people) are millionaires [2]. It's not what it used to be, given the median sale price of a home is now around $350,000. Demographically the mean white household in the US is now approximately a millionaire household. About 9-12 million households out of 128 million have a million dollars in net assets, including primary residence. The number of millionaires in the US has soared in the past 4-5 years with the asset price boom in housing and the stock market. For example back in 2016 [3]: > As of the end of 2016, there were a record 10.8 million millionaires nationwide, according to a new study from Spectrem Group’s Market Insights Report 2017. That’s more than ever before and marks a 400,000 person increase from the previous year. ... In 2016, there were 9.4 million individuals with net worth between $1 million and $5 million, 1.3 million individuals with net worth between $5 million and $25 million, and 156,000 households with more than $25 million in net worth, the report says. The US has been adding a huge number of millionaires per year (temporary or not) as the asset bubbles have been making new highs by the year. [1] https://www.kiplinger.com/slideshow/investing/t006-s001-millionaires-america-all-50-states-ranked/index.html https://www.kiplinger.com/slideshow/investing/t006-s001-mill... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/09/more-than-8-percent-of-american-adults-are-millionaires-heres-how-they-got-wealthy.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/09/more-than-8-percent-of-ameri... [3] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/24/a-record-number-of-americans-are-now-millionaires-new-study-shows.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/24/a-record-number-of-americans...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    There’s two kinds of millionaires. The technically millionaires on paper, and those who have access to a million dollars without altering their lifestyle (or sacrificing their lifestyle, i.e. selling their house and moving somewhere cheaper). The latter is a more interesting statistic, in my opinion.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  > "Wealth is accumulated through habits" is a great story to tell people but it seems very often to be complete BS. I see a lot of these. One of my favorite examples is https://www.businessinsider.com/how-ebony-horton-paid-off-220000-worth-of-student-loans-in-3-years-2017-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-ebony-horton-paid-off-22.... "How one 31-year-old paid off $220,000 in student loans in 3 years" is the exciting title. You have to get to paragraph #7 to learn "work at your parent's charity" is one of the techniques. Paragraph #8 tells you another trick is "be gifted a condo". #9 tells you the third one is "have grandma pay your rent".
  - nibsfive 6y ago
    $20M net worth at 27 while being financially independent at 17 years old here. AMA.
    - davnn 6y ago
      Invested in crypto? :)
    - EliRivers 6y ago
      What was the habit that made you rich?
      - monkeybutton 6y ago
        It was making your daily coffee at home and forgoing avocado toast, wasn't it?
    - nickkell 6y ago
      Did you inherit your wealth? No further questions
    - AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
      Please tell us how you built your vast empire while starting with only a meager $1mil loan from your father.
    - 6y ago
- dionidium 6y ago
  About 20% of millionaires inherited their wealth. [0] (It may actually be far less than that, if you interpret "inherited their wealth" to mean "inherited over a million dollars." [1]) Almost 70% of those with ultra-high net worths are self-made. [2] [0] https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0810/7-millionaire-myths.aspx#:~:text=Many%20people%20have%20preconceived%20notions,about%2080%25%20worked%20for%20it https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0810/7-millionai.... [1] https://www.chrishogan360.com/investing/how-many-millionaires-actually-inherited-their-wealth https://www.chrishogan360.com/investing/how-many-millionaire... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/26/majority-of-the-worlds-richest-people-are-self-made-says-new-report.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/26/majority-of-the-worlds-riche...
  - sidlls 6y ago
    These articles are all exceptionally light on details. A good example: Zuckerberg is considered "self-made," right? Except he had a wealthy father (dentist) with wealthy social connections who funded his company. It is at best misleading to claim Zuckerberg is "self-made", in that it completely elides substantial luck and money he did not, in fact, earn, to get where he is.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      Zuckerberg certainly has the benefit of having parents a few standard deviations above the mean who could afford to send him to a nice school a few standard deviations above the mean and coming of age at exactly the right time that the internet was about to become ubiquitous. However, compared to others, he is pretty self made in the sense that he did the grunt work to create his website and get it off the ground. Obviously, almost no one vaults themselves to the top with zero help, but Zuckerberg is a far cry from someone who inherited a trust fund and then placed various bets hoping to hit it big by funding someone else's work.
    - dionidium 6y ago
      "Self-made" is one of those terms that one should probably never use, since it rankles otherwise generous readers. If you can get past that indiscretion, I think you'll see that I didn't actually make any claims that contradict your rebuttal.
- conradev 6y ago
  On one hand, I find the rhetoric in the (originally linked) article annoying and unhelpful. On the other hand, I wish it wasn’t taboo to talk about money in our society. I wish I could read stories about normal people managing their finances well, from how to save wages from a minimum wage job up to managing a large salary, liquidation event, or trust fund. I feel like I was wholly unprepared to deal with money effectively and had to learn from my mistakes along the way. I’m horrified when I talk to people with money who don’t know the difference between an appreciating asset and a depreciating one, or have never touched the stock market, or don’t understand risk versus reward and how to manage risk. After my sister bought some stocks on Robinhood, I had to explain how it encourages risky behavior (my euphemism for gambling). Comparing notes with friends in similar situations was like a breath of fresh air. I hate twiddling with numbers as much as the next person, but you kinda need to understand capital to do well for yourself in the US.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    >On the other hand, I wish it wasn’t taboo to talk about money in our society. I wish I could read stories about normal people managing their finances well, from how to save wages from a minimum wage job up to managing a large salary, liquidation event, or trust fund. r/personalfinance covers what you can do with less money. Bogleheads or biggerpockets forums for experiences about handling more money. For even more money, you should network and hang out with rich people and will probably need to get involved in politics at some point. https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/commontopics https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/commontopics
- zthrowaway 6y ago
  > "Wealth is accumulated through habits" is a great story to tell people but it seems very often to be complete BS. I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet, but I encourage you to dig more into financial independence, and how living more frugally can help you save more money to invest in the right ways to generate wealth. There's plenty of books on these habits, "The Millionaire Next Door", and even some popular communities that attest to it such as https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/ https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/. You don't need to be rich to generate wealth, but it takes sacrifice (like everything in life), or even habits to get there.
  - jsjsbdkj 6y ago
    If you make 35k a year, what would you sacrifice to save up to become a millionaire? What if you need a car to get to work because public transit has been gutted in your community? What if you have kids? The whole "personal responsibility" myth is designed to fool comfortably middle-class people who still do labour all day into not resenting the elites who live solely off the surplus value of their labour. It tells you to aspire to "passive income", which is ascension from the worker class into the capital class, instead of redistributive policies that would harm the capital class. You're not poor, you're a temporarily embarassed millionaire.
    - jimbokun 6y ago
      Without pre-existing wealth, the "Money Moustache" paradigm pretty much requires 1. Get college degree enabling 6-figure income. 2. Marry spouse making 6-figure income. 3. Live off of 1 income for 10 years or so, save the second income. Then you can implement Money Moustache style finance plans. Or maybe for singles if you can make 6 figures and save over half of income. But yeah, on 35k it's not very useful advice. Except "get a degree or training to get you into 6 figure income bracket", which may not be realistic, either, given existing time commitments.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- misiti3780 6y ago
  Compound interest is a thing. If you are fortunate to have a job that allows you to save money, and you put that money in the S&P 500 it will double every 7-10 years. His wealth was inherited, but if you start to invest money in your 20s, and you invest every month at dont touch it, you will most likely get rich if you live to be a senior.
  - jimbokun 6y ago
    Not $188 million rich.
    - misiti3780 6y ago
      why is that not possible - warren buffet didnt inherit money and became a billionaire. it's possible to get very rich on compound interest.
      - lotsofpulp 6y ago
        Buffet’s dad was a federal congressman with his own investment firm, and grandparents were owners of a grocery store. Not saying he didn’t work for any of it or didn’t deserve it, but you’re not going to be Buffett by socking away 20% of your pay in a retirement account (you might be nominally if US gov keeps printing money, but not in real terms). He certainly is an outlier in terms of intelligence and work ethic, but I would assume connections from his dad helped, as well as the family being able to afford sending their kid to good schools and NYC for further networking and education, all the way from Nebraska in the 1950s.
        misiti3780 6y ago
        he is certainly and outlier, and probably a bad example, but i read his biography and if i remember correctly he started investing money he made on is paper route in stocks early on. It's true your probably not going to make 188M, but even a lot less than that is still rich.
- RickJWagner 6y ago
  I often visit bogleheads.org, where thrifty investors hang out and share ideas. There are many fantastically wealthy people there who got rich exactly as this article described. Go check it out, you'll find it's true.
yboris 6y ago
Related: Effective Altruism is a movement & community of people focusing on the effectiveness - > about answering one simple question: how can we use our resources to help others the most? https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ Giving What We Can is a community of people who have pledged to give at least 10% of their income to cost-effective charities. I'm a proud member of 10 years. https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/ https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/ Zell Kravinsky gave nearly-all of his $45 million he made from real-estate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zell_Kravinsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zell_Kravinsky and a talk he gave https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvUcbcUMtXw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvUcbcUMtXw
- ihm 6y ago
  Effective Altruism is very confusing to me as it seems to only address the symptoms of poverty and not the root causes. In a very abbreviated version, that root cause being that our society requires that some labor in terrible conditions for little pay because it is necessary to maintain profits. And, those people having little power to oppose this state of affairs compared to those who perpetuate the status quo, nothing changes. Individual acts of charity like these are inspiring, but you will never get enough people/money on board with your program through the kindness of their hearts. It’s like trying to change the direction of the wind by blowing and trying to convince your friends to blow as well, except it’s even worse because those who have tons of money (as a class) will actively act to keep the system going.
  - yboris 6y ago
    Early years of Effective Altruism (EA) was about promoting "earning to give" as it was a straight-forward and simple way for people who are late in their careers to do a tremendous amount of good (by giving to cost-effective charities). But as the movement grew, there are more individuals joining at the beginning of their career and are more flexible with what they can do: enter https://80000hours.org/ https://80000hours.org/ (80,000 hours is roughly the amount of hours people will spend during their working life). There is now a misconception that EA is about "patch fixes" rather than addressing "systemic causes". This is unfortunate, as numerous people within EA are concerned with the far future and broader goals than helping most-in-need individuals immediately. For example, pandemic risk (and decreasing it) has been on the EA radar well before the current pandemic. One lesson from EA, is that you can't in good faith say "I can't do much good, I'm not working in a non-profit" -- since just about everyone (who is well over the US poverty level) is able to give at least some amounts to charity. And since giving to cost-effective charities can be 1000x the positive impact of average charities, you don't even have to give much to do a lot of good (see https://givewell.org/ https://givewell.org/ for recommendations). As for people who want systemic change, EA is all in favor of it - connect with others working on the same issues, and focus on effectiveness as you do the best you can with your efforts.
secondcoming 6y ago
Chuck Feeney was a billionaire who gave pretty much all of it away [0] [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2020/09/15/exclusive-the-billionaire-who-wanted-to-die-brokeis-now-officially-broke/?sh=5edcb8023a2a https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2020/09/15/exclus...
rory 6y ago
The author is a money manager, so it shouldn't be surprising he mixed in a bunch of feel-good simplifications and tautologies about rich people. But regardless of the source of his wealth, the subject still faced the temptation of greed and didn't succumb to it. Good on you, Jack.
sethc2 6y ago
Here’s a guy who saved his money and invested it and made a huge fortune from an inherited fortune, all so he could give it away. The response - “ugh what an a-hole, who inherited his wealth”. I’m so sick of hacker news. I mean if you were defending someone who squandered their opportunities but the bias was in the system, I applaud that defense. We should be very aware that some people are screwed and oppressed. But it’s like you can do no good, unless you’ve overcome some huge gross injustice, or had zero privilege. It reminds me of the Baptist’s who tell people they have no faith because you haven’t first went off and totally screwed yourself up and riddled yourself with addiction before “coming to Jesus”. If you respond well “I’ve just tried helping the poor, trusting and worshipping what I know of God, and being compassionate towards my fellow man” they’ll ask “but have you been first an awful human being then prayed the Jesus prayer?” Likewise on HN - “I gave all my money to charity to help the less fortunate” response - “yeah but did you inherit that wealth?”
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  > The response - “ugh what an a-hole, who inherited his wealth”. I don’t see any comments calling the donor a pejorative. The other comments are accurately pointing out the article is wrong about how he obtained his wealth.
- zpeti 6y ago
  The religion analogy is great, because that's what this is. Wealth, privilege is now original sin for a lot of people. There is no real way to get out of it. See here. Even giving it away means you stay guilty. Never mind the guy didn't even spend his money on anything. Just having it is sin. I think the only way you can get rid of this original sin is by donating to climate change efforts or BLM or something similar. But I'm pretty sure even then you will be thought of as the inheritor of priviledge. And this, by the way, is how bolshevism is born. Like actually.
  - frongpik 6y ago
    We even have a prominent populist who "will return power to the people". And to be frank, when half of the nation lives in poverty, poulists won't have any trouble getting votes.
noxer 6y ago
Kinda funny that people think he makes the world a better place but all his earnings are someone else loses and there is no was to know how much of these loses comes form people who dont need it. Most of it probably came form taking a cut out of someone else profits because long time the marks only go up so by beating other players his assets went up more. He may got it form "the rich" or maybe from a retirement fund who knows.

129 points by cow9 6y ago

Joshua's blog is great for stories like these. It's too bad he took down a good percentage of his posts after opening his wealth management firm.

jsjsbdkj 6y ago

From the article: Most millionaires opt for stealth wealth. Their friends don’t know, their coworkers don’t know, their extended family doesn’t know. In a few cases, not even their children know! Wealth is accumulated through habits; at least in a free society like ours. At the moment, something like 1 out of 25 households falls into the millionaire category, most of it self-made. From the comments: Your right in Jack MacDonald's case too, he didn't make his initial money from stocks, his wealth was inherited which was then invested, he didn't spend any of it because he thought of himself as the steward of the inherited wealth "His wealth was inherited from his parents, who owned MacDonald Meat Co. in Seattle, and he sought to boost the funds by investing their money" "Wealth is accumulated through habits" is a great story to tell people but it seems very often to be complete BS.

agent008t 6y ago
What percentage of those millionaires are house-rich? I.e. the house they live in just happened to appreciate significantly and is now worth over $1mm? Those people can still feel as if they are not wealthy at all.
- shawnz 6y ago
  It's almost ironic to call someone a "millionaire" these days in Toronto, which has been badly affected by the real estate bubble.
  - malandrew 6y ago
    We got a good century of usage out of the term, but inflation has certainly caught up with it. A boomer that inherited $1m shortly after the end of WWII would be the equivalent of like $14m today with inflation.
- woah 6y ago
  They still have $1 million dollars more than someone without a house
  - mikepurvis 6y ago
    I mean yes, but when you've built your life in a place, it's little comfort being a "millionaire" if the only way to cash in on it is to pull up stakes and move hundreds of kilometers away.
    - unishark 6y ago
      I suspect arguments like this are even less comfort to people who have rented apartments their entire lives and aren't sitting on a million dollars of property.
    - kapp_in_life 6y ago
      If you cash out for a million dollars I'm positive you could find somewhere to rent in the city you currently live in. Maybe not a kilometer away but certainly fewer than hundreds.
  - lostcolony 6y ago
    Which is helpful if they want to and are able to move to an area with lower real estate prices. Otherwise that 'wealth' is tied up in a good they are unable to sell (without incurring an implicit debt of either needing to find another house in the same high price area, or having to pay for rent in the same high price area). A house may be a reasonable investment vehicle; it can also be an extremely illiquid one.
    - throwawayfire 6y ago
      If so, they still have $1 million more to spend on rent.
      - lostcolony 6y ago
        Certainly. If they've actually purchased the home, and are not mid-mortgage on it. Honestly, crunching the numbers in my high COL area, the cost for a ~$1 million mortgage and the cost for renting a nice two bedroom, at the current rates, are basically the same. Essentially what you're saying is that because someone has put money into mortgage payments instead of rent, they're better off financially, and I'm completely in agreement with you. I just don't agree that it somehow implies they're living high on the hog, so to speak; yes, they have additional options if shit hits the fan (metaphors metaphors!), in that they can cut their losses, look to sell, and move to a lower cost area and have a bit banked (and -maybe- retain their income given remote work, but also maybe not), but that's still quite a lot to expect.
- gh-throw 6y ago
  It's old retired people, mostly, I guarantee it. One million dollars doesn't mean what it used to. If you hit 65 and don't have at least a million dollars in retirement accounts, you'll be working as a Wal-Mart greeter. Healthcare's insanely expensive, even on medicare. A "household" at retirement is probably two people, so that's half a million a person and you're "millionaires" but sure can't live like the term implies. Retire at 65 a low-end "millionaire" and your kids may well not inherit jack-shit. It'll all go to hospitals and hospice care and such, before the end. Add in that Boomers skew much richer at the same stage in life as later generations, and that they're a large chunk of retired people, and yeah, "1 in 25 households are millionaires" just means half or 1/3 of retired people aren't living on cat food, and were actually able to retire. Hooray.
mouzogu 6y ago
> "Wealth is accumulated through habits" > his wealth was inherited I really dislike these kind's of articles.
- tdhz77 6y ago
  He gain wealth by having wealth. The opposite is true too... you lose wealth by not having wealth.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
  The two statements aren't incongruent. People who inherit money but spend it all because of bad habits don't accumulate wealth.
  - craftinator 6y ago
    Similarly, people who don't inherit money can't spend it, and for the most part also don't accumulate wealth!
    - leppr 6y ago
      Well that's the very nature of ponzinomics. How would you preserve social class otherwise? This is all working as intended.
    - mym1990 6y ago
      I don't think this is completely true as credit cards/bad loans can be a great way to not inherit money, still spend it like you have it, and stay in a very deep financial hole.
krageon 6y ago
> very often This can just be replaced with "always". You can be lucky or you can have inherited wealth.
- colecut 6y ago
  Luck is very subjective. Having opportunities around is lucky, but most people aren't interested in taking the risks or making sacrifices necessary to seize those opportunities. And often times the ones willing to do this are then later called lucky.
  - krageon 6y ago
    Those risks are risks because they very often don't pan out. The folks that "make it" get to deliver clever speeches about how self-made they are and what a nice pair of bootstraps they used to get where they are today. What's left out of those stories is how many folks tried the same thing and failed. If all it took was the audacity to take a step others are not taking then it wouldn't be a risk in the first place, just a job. Put differently: To gamble you also need to take risks and make sacrifices. Some people will make it and by necessity those people are the ones that are willing to do that. That takes absolutely nothing away from the fact that the success is due to luck.
    - colecut 6y ago
      Luck is still subjective. A good investor does not feel like he is gambling. He just knows industries well enough to make educated guesses that are likely to happen. Someone else could put up the same amount of money because he overheard a tip in a bathroom. In my opinion, that person is gambling. But really its all the same and it's all subjective. The gambler was lucky, the investor was smart, who cares they both won. The investor is more likely to win again though I wouldn't necessarily call him luckier.
      - krageon 6y ago
        You're essentially not engaging with my comment at all, just repeating what you said before. I don't find that a compelling way to have a conversation.
vmception 6y ago
well this is mostly semantics: the quote does not contradict, most of the wealth was self-made. as in the profits accumulated during their lifetime, it doesn't say anything about how the first one million or any amount was made. your consternation requires you to have a fixed and shared definition of self made that is just not described at all here. it does leave a glaring hole about then which wealth was not self-made. alimony? child support? having a million now but having inherited ten million? of course its not people that spent years in debt, worked on salary, dealt with illness in their family, and made millions. that's very rare and life will never be catering to that, so, yes, a life with more options from earning this way is BS and it does keep people motivated enough to continue trying anyway, but that's not what this article was talking about.
- FactolSarin 6y ago
  I mean, it takes money to make money. It's a lot easier to get a hundred million dollars when you start out with 1 million to put in the stock market.
  - vmception 6y ago
    that's also my point. oh, I don't find that controversial in case my lack of stated opinion prompted someone to fill in their own.
  - malandrew 6y ago
    > It's a lot easier to get a hundred million dollars when you start out with 1 million to put in the stock market. This statement could only ever be uttered by someone that has not tried to do this. 100x increase in any endeavor is extremely exceptional. It's as hard to do as turning $10,000 into $1,000,000. The only thing having a larger starting amount helps with is that it opens up types of opportunities you did not have before that require greater starting capital and are outside the stock market. Those additional opportunities are as hard to capitalize on as the smaller opportunities that only require $10,000, especially since you need not only money but a lot of people with expertise that you can trust. But within the stock market, a 100x return is something very few people in the market ever achieve. The only place where having money clears some significant initial hurdles is probably getting to the first $10,000, maybe the first $100,000. This is a hurdle many have cleared in their lifetime and they still haven't succeeded in turning it into $1 million to $10 million, respectively.
borplk 6y ago
> "Wealth is accumulated through habits" is a great story to tell people but it seems very often to be complete BS. Yes. It's capitalist propaganda. If you are a highly paid heart surgeon or CEO you can "accumulate wealth with habits". If you are anywhere between flipping burgers to many other types of jobs there's just not enough money "coming in" for these things to make a huge difference. You can be more sensible with your money and you may end up with a slightly nicer car, a slightly bigger house in a slightly better location than your other careless peers. But that's about it.
- achillesheels 6y ago
  My grandfather flipped burgers in high school and worked his way up to VP of a glass installation firm in the Mountain West, providing his grandchildren with a college education and a small nest egg. But if you are ego-centric then I can understand why you’d be bitter.
- cik 6y ago
  That's exceptionally untrue - though it can be true in context. In the city beside mine, renting a place downtown, and working in the grocery store it's very possible to save $500 per month. For reference, minimum wage is the equivalent of $1700 USD, and renting a one-bedroom, all in will cost roughly $454 USD. With cellphone (250GB of 5G speeds) costing the equivalent of $15 USD, and groceries and electricity costing another $350, there's still plenty of space. Investing that money in the S&P at its historical rate, for 45 years will yield $2.3 million (rounded down). Now, quality of life would be rubbish. But it's technically possible.
  - HEmanZ 6y ago
    And most people don't flip burgers. The median household income in the US in 2019 was $68,000/yr [1]. In the part of the US I am from, and the parts I have lived most of my life, this affords an extremely good quality of life with plenty of room for intelligent financial decisions. So crying "this doesn't apply to people with really low incomes" is true to an extent, but that's only a fraction of the population. Going around saying "well, you shouldn't give that advice because it doesn't apply to everyone, it only applies to most people" is insane. [1] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-270.html#:~:text=Median%20household%20income%20was%20%2468%2C703,and%20Table%20A%2D1 https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-27...).
economusty 6y ago
He had to have some good habits to grow the portfolio.
pge 6y ago
Compounding is also a huge factor in cases like this. If you make (or inherit) money early in life, even if you don’t add much principal, 70 years of compounding does wonders for wealth creation.
- bluescrn 6y ago
  The wealthy enjoy compound interest while the less wealthy suffer compound inflation
nemacol 6y ago
I keep trying to develop the habit of having wealthy parents but they keep being poor. Also, those articles about getting rich keep telling me to utilize my assets to earn additional income but that is illegal in my state. Please send help.
- andreilys 6y ago
  utilize my assets to earn additional income but that is illegal in my state What state would make investing illegal?
  - newsclues 6y ago
    It’s a prostitution joke
  - lowercased 6y ago
    Possibly the poster was referring to a different set of assets.
    - newsclues 6y ago
      ASSets!
    - breck 6y ago
      All states make it legal for men to give each other brain damage in a boxing ring for money. Maybe women should make the rules.
    - llampx 6y ago
      Onlyfans is legal
- dagw 6y ago
  I keep trying to develop the habit of having wealthy parents If you really cannot manage that, then your second best option is to have a wealthy spouse. It's not ideal, but it's better than nothing.
tivyrind 6y ago
The article also contains a link to an about.com article about penny stock investing, which is a whole bucket of red flags all by itself.
adventured 6y ago
> At the moment, something like 1 out of 25 households falls into the millionaire category, most of it self-made. 4% of households is off the mark. It's presently closer to 7%-10% depending on the source [1]. 8% of American adults (~19-20 million people) are millionaires [2]. It's not what it used to be, given the median sale price of a home is now around $350,000. Demographically the mean white household in the US is now approximately a millionaire household. About 9-12 million households out of 128 million have a million dollars in net assets, including primary residence. The number of millionaires in the US has soared in the past 4-5 years with the asset price boom in housing and the stock market. For example back in 2016 [3]: > As of the end of 2016, there were a record 10.8 million millionaires nationwide, according to a new study from Spectrem Group’s Market Insights Report 2017. That’s more than ever before and marks a 400,000 person increase from the previous year. ... In 2016, there were 9.4 million individuals with net worth between $1 million and $5 million, 1.3 million individuals with net worth between $5 million and $25 million, and 156,000 households with more than $25 million in net worth, the report says. The US has been adding a huge number of millionaires per year (temporary or not) as the asset bubbles have been making new highs by the year. [1] https://www.kiplinger.com/slideshow/investing/t006-s001-millionaires-america-all-50-states-ranked/index.html https://www.kiplinger.com/slideshow/investing/t006-s001-mill... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/09/more-than-8-percent-of-american-adults-are-millionaires-heres-how-they-got-wealthy.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/09/more-than-8-percent-of-ameri... [3] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/24/a-record-number-of-americans-are-now-millionaires-new-study-shows.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/24/a-record-number-of-americans...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  There’s two kinds of millionaires. The technically millionaires on paper, and those who have access to a million dollars without altering their lifestyle (or sacrificing their lifestyle, i.e. selling their house and moving somewhere cheaper). The latter is a more interesting statistic, in my opinion.
ceejayoz 6y ago
> "Wealth is accumulated through habits" is a great story to tell people but it seems very often to be complete BS. I see a lot of these. One of my favorite examples is https://www.businessinsider.com/how-ebony-horton-paid-off-220000-worth-of-student-loans-in-3-years-2017-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-ebony-horton-paid-off-22.... "How one 31-year-old paid off $220,000 in student loans in 3 years" is the exciting title. You have to get to paragraph #7 to learn "work at your parent's charity" is one of the techniques. Paragraph #8 tells you another trick is "be gifted a condo". #9 tells you the third one is "have grandma pay your rent".
- nibsfive 6y ago
  $20M net worth at 27 while being financially independent at 17 years old here. AMA.
  - davnn 6y ago
    Invested in crypto? :)
  - EliRivers 6y ago
    What was the habit that made you rich?
    - monkeybutton 6y ago
      It was making your daily coffee at home and forgoing avocado toast, wasn't it?
  - nickkell 6y ago
    Did you inherit your wealth? No further questions
  - AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
    Please tell us how you built your vast empire while starting with only a meager $1mil loan from your father.
  - 6y ago
dionidium 6y ago
About 20% of millionaires inherited their wealth. [0] (It may actually be far less than that, if you interpret "inherited their wealth" to mean "inherited over a million dollars." [1]) Almost 70% of those with ultra-high net worths are self-made. [2] [0] https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0810/7-millionaire-myths.aspx#:~:text=Many%20people%20have%20preconceived%20notions,about%2080%25%20worked%20for%20it https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0810/7-millionai.... [1] https://www.chrishogan360.com/investing/how-many-millionaires-actually-inherited-their-wealth https://www.chrishogan360.com/investing/how-many-millionaire... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/26/majority-of-the-worlds-richest-people-are-self-made-says-new-report.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/26/majority-of-the-worlds-riche...
- sidlls 6y ago
  These articles are all exceptionally light on details. A good example: Zuckerberg is considered "self-made," right? Except he had a wealthy father (dentist) with wealthy social connections who funded his company. It is at best misleading to claim Zuckerberg is "self-made", in that it completely elides substantial luck and money he did not, in fact, earn, to get where he is.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    Zuckerberg certainly has the benefit of having parents a few standard deviations above the mean who could afford to send him to a nice school a few standard deviations above the mean and coming of age at exactly the right time that the internet was about to become ubiquitous. However, compared to others, he is pretty self made in the sense that he did the grunt work to create his website and get it off the ground. Obviously, almost no one vaults themselves to the top with zero help, but Zuckerberg is a far cry from someone who inherited a trust fund and then placed various bets hoping to hit it big by funding someone else's work.
  - dionidium 6y ago
    "Self-made" is one of those terms that one should probably never use, since it rankles otherwise generous readers. If you can get past that indiscretion, I think you'll see that I didn't actually make any claims that contradict your rebuttal.
conradev 6y ago
On one hand, I find the rhetoric in the (originally linked) article annoying and unhelpful. On the other hand, I wish it wasn’t taboo to talk about money in our society. I wish I could read stories about normal people managing their finances well, from how to save wages from a minimum wage job up to managing a large salary, liquidation event, or trust fund. I feel like I was wholly unprepared to deal with money effectively and had to learn from my mistakes along the way. I’m horrified when I talk to people with money who don’t know the difference between an appreciating asset and a depreciating one, or have never touched the stock market, or don’t understand risk versus reward and how to manage risk. After my sister bought some stocks on Robinhood, I had to explain how it encourages risky behavior (my euphemism for gambling). Comparing notes with friends in similar situations was like a breath of fresh air. I hate twiddling with numbers as much as the next person, but you kinda need to understand capital to do well for yourself in the US.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  >On the other hand, I wish it wasn’t taboo to talk about money in our society. I wish I could read stories about normal people managing their finances well, from how to save wages from a minimum wage job up to managing a large salary, liquidation event, or trust fund. r/personalfinance covers what you can do with less money. Bogleheads or biggerpockets forums for experiences about handling more money. For even more money, you should network and hang out with rich people and will probably need to get involved in politics at some point. https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/commontopics https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/commontopics
zthrowaway 6y ago
> "Wealth is accumulated through habits" is a great story to tell people but it seems very often to be complete BS. I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet, but I encourage you to dig more into financial independence, and how living more frugally can help you save more money to invest in the right ways to generate wealth. There's plenty of books on these habits, "The Millionaire Next Door", and even some popular communities that attest to it such as https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/ https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/. You don't need to be rich to generate wealth, but it takes sacrifice (like everything in life), or even habits to get there.
- jsjsbdkj 6y ago
  If you make 35k a year, what would you sacrifice to save up to become a millionaire? What if you need a car to get to work because public transit has been gutted in your community? What if you have kids? The whole "personal responsibility" myth is designed to fool comfortably middle-class people who still do labour all day into not resenting the elites who live solely off the surplus value of their labour. It tells you to aspire to "passive income", which is ascension from the worker class into the capital class, instead of redistributive policies that would harm the capital class. You're not poor, you're a temporarily embarassed millionaire.
  - jimbokun 6y ago
    Without pre-existing wealth, the "Money Moustache" paradigm pretty much requires 1. Get college degree enabling 6-figure income. 2. Marry spouse making 6-figure income. 3. Live off of 1 income for 10 years or so, save the second income. Then you can implement Money Moustache style finance plans. Or maybe for singles if you can make 6 figures and save over half of income. But yeah, on 35k it's not very useful advice. Except "get a degree or training to get you into 6 figure income bracket", which may not be realistic, either, given existing time commitments.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
misiti3780 6y ago
Compound interest is a thing. If you are fortunate to have a job that allows you to save money, and you put that money in the S&P 500 it will double every 7-10 years. His wealth was inherited, but if you start to invest money in your 20s, and you invest every month at dont touch it, you will most likely get rich if you live to be a senior.
- jimbokun 6y ago
  Not $188 million rich.
  - misiti3780 6y ago
    why is that not possible - warren buffet didnt inherit money and became a billionaire. it's possible to get very rich on compound interest.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      Buffet’s dad was a federal congressman with his own investment firm, and grandparents were owners of a grocery store. Not saying he didn’t work for any of it or didn’t deserve it, but you’re not going to be Buffett by socking away 20% of your pay in a retirement account (you might be nominally if US gov keeps printing money, but not in real terms). He certainly is an outlier in terms of intelligence and work ethic, but I would assume connections from his dad helped, as well as the family being able to afford sending their kid to good schools and NYC for further networking and education, all the way from Nebraska in the 1950s.
      - misiti3780 6y ago
        he is certainly and outlier, and probably a bad example, but i read his biography and if i remember correctly he started investing money he made on is paper route in stocks early on. It's true your probably not going to make 188M, but even a lot less than that is still rich.
RickJWagner 6y ago
I often visit bogleheads.org, where thrifty investors hang out and share ideas. There are many fantastically wealthy people there who got rich exactly as this article described. Go check it out, you'll find it's true.

yboris 6y ago

Related: Effective Altruism is a movement & community of people focusing on the effectiveness - > about answering one simple question: how can we use our resources to help others the most? https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ Giving What We Can is a community of people who have pledged to give at least 10% of their income to cost-effective charities. I'm a proud member of 10 years. https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/ https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/ Zell Kravinsky gave nearly-all of his $45 million he made from real-estate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zell_Kravinsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zell_Kravinsky and a talk he gave https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvUcbcUMtXw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvUcbcUMtXw

ihm 6y ago
Effective Altruism is very confusing to me as it seems to only address the symptoms of poverty and not the root causes. In a very abbreviated version, that root cause being that our society requires that some labor in terrible conditions for little pay because it is necessary to maintain profits. And, those people having little power to oppose this state of affairs compared to those who perpetuate the status quo, nothing changes. Individual acts of charity like these are inspiring, but you will never get enough people/money on board with your program through the kindness of their hearts. It’s like trying to change the direction of the wind by blowing and trying to convince your friends to blow as well, except it’s even worse because those who have tons of money (as a class) will actively act to keep the system going.
- yboris 6y ago
  Early years of Effective Altruism (EA) was about promoting "earning to give" as it was a straight-forward and simple way for people who are late in their careers to do a tremendous amount of good (by giving to cost-effective charities). But as the movement grew, there are more individuals joining at the beginning of their career and are more flexible with what they can do: enter https://80000hours.org/ https://80000hours.org/ (80,000 hours is roughly the amount of hours people will spend during their working life). There is now a misconception that EA is about "patch fixes" rather than addressing "systemic causes". This is unfortunate, as numerous people within EA are concerned with the far future and broader goals than helping most-in-need individuals immediately. For example, pandemic risk (and decreasing it) has been on the EA radar well before the current pandemic. One lesson from EA, is that you can't in good faith say "I can't do much good, I'm not working in a non-profit" -- since just about everyone (who is well over the US poverty level) is able to give at least some amounts to charity. And since giving to cost-effective charities can be 1000x the positive impact of average charities, you don't even have to give much to do a lot of good (see https://givewell.org/ https://givewell.org/ for recommendations). As for people who want systemic change, EA is all in favor of it - connect with others working on the same issues, and focus on effectiveness as you do the best you can with your efforts.

secondcoming 6y ago

Chuck Feeney was a billionaire who gave pretty much all of it away [0] [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2020/09/15/exclusive-the-billionaire-who-wanted-to-die-brokeis-now-officially-broke/?sh=5edcb8023a2a https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2020/09/15/exclus...

rory 6y ago

The author is a money manager, so it shouldn't be surprising he mixed in a bunch of feel-good simplifications and tautologies about rich people. But regardless of the source of his wealth, the subject still faced the temptation of greed and didn't succumb to it. Good on you, Jack.

sethc2 6y ago

Here’s a guy who saved his money and invested it and made a huge fortune from an inherited fortune, all so he could give it away. The response - “ugh what an a-hole, who inherited his wealth”. I’m so sick of hacker news. I mean if you were defending someone who squandered their opportunities but the bias was in the system, I applaud that defense. We should be very aware that some people are screwed and oppressed. But it’s like you can do no good, unless you’ve overcome some huge gross injustice, or had zero privilege. It reminds me of the Baptist’s who tell people they have no faith because you haven’t first went off and totally screwed yourself up and riddled yourself with addiction before “coming to Jesus”. If you respond well “I’ve just tried helping the poor, trusting and worshipping what I know of God, and being compassionate towards my fellow man” they’ll ask “but have you been first an awful human being then prayed the Jesus prayer?” Likewise on HN - “I gave all my money to charity to help the less fortunate” response - “yeah but did you inherit that wealth?”

lotsofpulp 6y ago
> The response - “ugh what an a-hole, who inherited his wealth”. I don’t see any comments calling the donor a pejorative. The other comments are accurately pointing out the article is wrong about how he obtained his wealth.
zpeti 6y ago
The religion analogy is great, because that's what this is. Wealth, privilege is now original sin for a lot of people. There is no real way to get out of it. See here. Even giving it away means you stay guilty. Never mind the guy didn't even spend his money on anything. Just having it is sin. I think the only way you can get rid of this original sin is by donating to climate change efforts or BLM or something similar. But I'm pretty sure even then you will be thought of as the inheritor of priviledge. And this, by the way, is how bolshevism is born. Like actually.
- frongpik 6y ago
  We even have a prominent populist who "will return power to the people". And to be frank, when half of the nation lives in poverty, poulists won't have any trouble getting votes.

noxer 6y ago

Kinda funny that people think he makes the world a better place but all his earnings are someone else loses and there is no was to know how much of these loses comes form people who dont need it. Most of it probably came form taking a cut out of someone else profits because long time the marks only go up so by beating other players his assets went up more. He may got it form "the rich" or maybe from a retirement fund who knows.