To them, poor is probably like just a few dozen million USD.
Comment on YSK that 158 families made up 50% of all US Presidential Campaign Spending
dhork@lemmy.world 19 hours agoWhat they really mean is that they didn’t inherit their immense wealth, which means there was a time in their lives when they weren’t obscenely wealthy.
jimjam5@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
whostosay@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
I get what they’re getting at, but selfmade has that connotation with it.
They could say not inherited vs inherited wealth
haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 18 hours ago
Not inherited is also wrong. Because more than 50% of americans live paycheck to paycheck, one can assume that private schools, elite universities, etc are also inherited wealth.
They dont spawn with billions but they started at the top and just built exploitation empires.
The is no such thing as self made wealth and an insane majprity of it is already being very comfortable and just going full bore.
I’m not saying financial success has nothing to do with capabilities and discipline but surprisingly little.
Or to quote jay gould, who said it before:
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
boonhet@lemm.ee 18 hours ago
The is no such thing as self made wealth and an insane majprity of it is already being very comfortable and just going full bore.
There’s basically one self-made billionaire I’m aware of. Wealth turned him into a right-wing asshole unfortunately, but the original creator of Minecraft, Notch, is the closest thing to a self-made billionaire I can think of. He originally built Minecraft on his own and it was already doing insanely well when other people got involved. He did not have a rich background.
Now where we can argue about the self-made part: 1) None of what he did would’ve been possible without prior work by others (same goes for ANYTHING to do with computers nowadays), 2) There’s no guarantee he could’ve sold the game for over 2 billion dollars without help from others.
haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 17 hours ago
We’re arguing on the assumption that living in western europe isnt “rich”. Even the people living from state welfare with running water are better off then 50% of the planet because they even have clean water.
Notch btw started as a programmer at the age of 18 (wikipedia) and lived in sweden, one of the richest countries in the world. Having the time to learn programming at that age is already a sign of (white) privilege.
There. Is. No. Self. Made. Wealth. Period.
That on the other hand is not saying that notch wasnt successful, he undeniably was. But he is an unethical prick for keeping the money and engaging in debauchery. He does not deserve praise, neither does any rich person. You know who deserves praise? Dr. Ernesto “che” guevara does.
whostosay@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Very true as well. Directly exploitative vs indirectly idk man, but self made ain’t it
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Except even that doesn’t hold up under close scrutiny. A big component of the market cap of any Fortune 100 company stems from equity and debt held by the generationally wealthy. Amazon and Tesla aren’t worth $1T without the Vanderbilts and the Carnegies and the Adelsons and the Waltons bidding up asset prices.
What’s more, the biggest source of market capital is inevitably government contracts. You can’t tell me that Michael Dell is “independently wealthy” when the bulk of his fortune came via the Texas public school system buying all his company’s computers. Particularly when the governors, legislators, and board members making these decisions are (a) big shareholders of the Dell corporation and (b) legacy scions of wealthy Texas families.