Being born in a rich family helps a lot to become richer or successful in business or something else. Yes, having a safety net (wealthy family in the background) makes all the difference. Someone without wealth cannot afford to make financial mistakes, which is why it is so difficult to become super wealthy in one generation if one is poor at the outset with only average luck and breaks along the way.
People are sold a lie at school – the lie that everybody can make it and become a billionaire if only he/she really, really wants it. I also think that the youths should be encouraged to do business if their parents can support them, instead of telling them that they can only make it through education. There is an excellent book called, “Capital in the 21st Century” by the economist Thomas Piketty. Essentially, he contends that inheritance is what makes one rich. The central thesis of the book is that inequality is not an accident, but rather a feature of capitalism and can only be reversed through state interventionism. For most people, building wealth is a multi-generational process.
Most people don’t realize that most of the super wealthy successful startups are not rags to riches, but rather privileged people who used that privilege to great effect. They only sell the rags to riches story to win over the trust of the public and make themselves relatable. Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook founder), Bill Gates (Microsoft founder), Warren Buffet (worth $120 b), Richard Branson, etc., were all born in wealth.
Just to give you an idea, Bill Gates’s mother was on the board of directors of International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) with access to the whole of IBM, and not just an ordinary daughter of a wealthy businessman. She was the first woman on the First Interstate Bank of Washington’s Board of directors, and first female president of United Way. Her acquaintance with IBM CEO, John Opel, during her tenure as President of United Way, helped indirectly or directly Bill Gates to use his OS for IBM computers. Bill also had a 3 million inheritance from his grandparents. Bill, like most rich kids with a vision, he never showed off while in college. He used to live on pizzas while he worked on his product and business plan.
Jeff Bezos’s grandfather was one of the largest landowners in Texas. When Bezos finished his degree in Computer science and started Amazon, his parents invested some money into the startup. And that was in 1990s money, just to give you an idea of where his wealth originally came from. Now, Amazon is soon rolling out drones to do deliveries in our homes here in the UK and USA.
Warren Buffet’s father was called Howard Buffet, a powerful businessman and politician(senator). Having a rich dad helped him, but he is brilliant, and was worth far more than his father by age 21. Not to mention that he had saved over $10,000 by age 16 in 1940 – something that was unheard of. He has shown prudence in the way he has handled money throughout his life and has consumed knowledge like no other. He used to sell chewing gums, Coca-Cola, newspapers and weekly magazines as a teenager to earn money and had started investing his money too. He wanted to fully go into business after high school, but he was overruled by his father who wanted him to get degrees.
ELON MUSK
Elon and his brother Kymbal had access to rough gems and even managed to sell one to Tiffany’s in New York when they still were teens. His father himself said in an interview that he drove Elon to school in a Rolls Royce Corniche. He also had horses and a motorbike when he was 14. It is believed that Elon Musk’s father “arranged” his admission in UPenn as well.
Musk may have been born into privilege, but we need to acknowledge his enormous capacity for risk, hard work, and intellectual drive. Elon’s father was against him moving to Canada and refused to pay for his Canadian education. So, he ended up doing odd jobs to pay for his own college and upside down in student debt loans. Elon left South Africa at 17, went to Canada with about 2000 – 4000 bucks to his name. His mother soon followed and lived in a small, rent controlled apartment. He started his own company with a computer he built, and the rest is history.The richest man in the world has vision. That’s why his products are very unique. Till date there is no alternative to Tesla cars, no alternative to SpaceX, no alternative to Boring company, and PayPal was a completely new concept back then.
I am not sure about Jack Ma. He was a tour guide; he learnt and spoke English while doing that. He began small business and now he’s on top of the chain, but he did apply to Harvard 10 times. It costs 75USD to apply; so, applying 10x would be 750 dollars which may be very much for a poor guy. But there are some rags to riches stories. People like Howard Schulz, Lakshmi Mittal, Roman Abramovich etc. They were born into poor families but managed to become among those running the world economy.
The fact is, while there will always be exceptions like Bezos and Gates, most Americans and Europeans will spend their entire lives in the same social and financial class in which they were born. They are engineered, as like most of us, to look at educational courses as the main sure way out of poverty.
UGANDA’S RICH
Back in Uganda, most people we call “rich” today are not wealthy. They are not even rich – They are “middle class”. Unfortunately, most of them continue to masquerade in public as rich, and this is the case with most of our celebrities. When they die or get sick, their children get exposed to poverty.
The age of social media, E-news, and TV has really deluded people’s expectations of what being wealthy actually is. Wealth is comfortably being able to afford a good living, have money to save, and money to invest. In addition to that being able to pass that wealth to your children and grandchildren without affecting your lifestyle. That is Real wealth.
At some point people equated wealth with driving an expensive car, owning a mansion, heading a political party, owning a beach and having a private Jet, but most of those people who do live like that are actually also broke, living paycheque to paycheque, contract to contract, business deal to business deal. Wealth is defined as having an abundance of money or assets. Abundance is defined as having more than what is necessary.
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