[pystack]

Facebook, Walmart, and Ford Motor Company were built through hard work and perseverance, not through their founders' socioeconomic background. Building a successful business is so difficult, that the founders' socioeconomic background is an infinitely smaller obstacle to overcome. The self-made person is real, but there's so few of them that they are lost in the noise of this study's data.

[Throwaway23412]

>Facebook

No one denies that Facebook was built through hard work and perseverance, but how many people have doctor parents, a software engineer for a private tutor in middle school, admittance to the richest private boarding school in the country, a (former) best friend whose father is a wealthy industrialist, and a number of other untold privileges?

Using Zuckerberg as an example of a self-made person really hurts your argument.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Indeed.

Where are all the multibillion unicorn startups created by people from working class backgrounds?

Meanwhile:

Elon Musk - engineer father, privately educated

Jeff Bezos - landowning grandfather who was also regional director of the Atomic Energy Commission, engineer father

Bill Gates - father lawyer, mother on the board of IBM, privately educated

Steve Jobs - working class adoptive parents (but a complicated and interesting genetic background), father not an engineer but encouraged tinkering

Larry Page - father had PhD in CS and encouraged tinkering on hardware around the house

Sergey Brin - father maths professor, mother NASA researcher

I'm not sure if this has been researched, but it looks as if success in tech correlates with high IQ parents and plenty of opportunities for experimentation and hands-on tinkering.

I'm sure there are people doing okay in tech who had no parental input at all, but I'd guess they're much rarer than those who had opportunities and encouragement.

[Bahamut]

Don't know enough about the latter two, but Facebook had the benefit of Zuckerberg being from an upper middle class family in a county famed for being filled with old money (& Wall Street money), Westchester County. Hard work obviously came into play as well, but these factors break the point for that example.

[adotjdotr]

Its funny a lot of people discount this but Zucks father wrote him a $100k cheque that a lot of people miss.

I'm looking at my FB friends list, counts well over 600 people, the bulk are from well to-do families all privately educated, top unis, top careers. I don't think any, would have their parents allow them to drop out of Uni irrespective of whether it was the next FB they were building and write them a $100k cheque to get going.

This is an example of luck that many ignore in the narrative. However major kudos to Zuck his ad product has basically guaranteed me a career for the rest of my life. For that alone I'm grateful for FB being invented.

[vixen99]

Always helps to be able to test out an idea on one of the most privileged set of class mates in the world.

[eli_gottlieb]

>Facebook, Walmart, and Ford Motor Company were built through hard work and perseverance

Yes, that of their employees, who proceeded to get bread-crumbs compared to the "owners" (ie: mostly outside investors) who did a tiny fraction of the work.