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How many of those 10 richest people came from families which weren't already in the top 5th income percentile? Is that the social mobility that we care about?
by sharkjacobs 5y ago
How many of those 10 richest people came from families which weren't already in the top 5th income percentile?
Is that the social mobility that we care about? Anyone who is willing to work hard and already has the means to attend an Ivy League school can become a billionaire.
- btilly 5y agoTop 5% in the USA, or top 5% in the world? Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and Sergey Brin were NOT top 5% in the USA. Depending what period in his childhood that you look at, Sergey Brin wasn't top 5% in the world either. (His family was educated, but they arrived in the USA as refugees from the Soviet Union.) Several others started with rather less than you might expect. For example Elon Musk arrived in North America with only a few thousand dollars to his name, and had to work manual labor to get by. (Yes, his father was a businessman, but the two of them have a..difficult..relationship.)