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Alternate reading: being a billionaire is less impressive than it's hyped to be, if it's a pure numbers game.
by cratermoon 2y ago
Alternate reading:
being a billionaire is less impressive than it's hyped to be,
if it's a pure numbers game.
- PaulHoule 2y agoIt's not just a numbers game. Bill Gates was stupendously smart, driven and competitive. He and Paul Allen also got the idea that the microcomputer industry was going to need systems software before he could get a microcomputer to develop it on, so he developed it with an emulator on a PDP-10. It was "flip switches on the front panel" or "ship with Microsoft BASIC" which let Microsoft claim to be "the first microcomputer software"; they got a few lucky breaks such as getting a contract with IBM for the systems software for the PC which could have easily gone to a competitors like Digital Research. Bernard Arnault is another interesting case study, his talents were quite different, started with a wealthy family, had luck to multiply his family wealth with real estate and get out [2] had a lot of luck rolling luxury brands together, and also benefited from the growth of China, as "keeping up with the Chens" more than made up for the decline of materialism in the west. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Arnault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Arnault [2] it is easy to turn a small fortune into a huge one in real estate using leverage and then lose it all
- cratermoon 2y ago> Bill Gates was stupendously smart [citation needed] Gates had family and connections. Brain didn't come into play.