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by whybroke 3465 days ago
No, only about 10% of billionaires are self made, as in not having inherited wealth or come from wealthy families. And even this is a record high up from a more typical 3%. (and remarkably, these are numbers that forbes feels excited about)

http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2014/10/03/there-a...

1 comments

>In 2004, we had 59% of the Forbes 400 having made their own fortune, as opposed to 41% who inherited it.

Quote from your own source...

The article explains that they rank the level of "self-made-ness" out of 10, with 10 being from a poor family with no advantages. Then it says " A total of 34 billionaires, or 8.5%, scored as 10s".
So given 10 possible rankings, it is pretty well distributed then?
Well distributed for what metric? Their backgrounds clearly don't match the normal population, since the normal population isn't 7% billionaires.