[olewhalehunter]

Bill Gates was not upper "middle class", his household was solidly in the 1%, he had computer programming access at his private school (this is 1968), and his mother's friendship with the president of IBM at the time was the reason he got contracted to write DOS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates#Career

[dragonwriter]

> Bill Gates was not upper "middle class", his household was in the 1%

Seems to have been a successful petit bourgeoisie, or upper middle class, family. In traditional understanding of class relationships in capitalist society, the middle class isn't mostly middle income but well above; the majority of society is the working class dependent on wage-labor. The upper (capitalist or haut borgeoisie) class is a very thin layer.

The modern American media generally uses a different model which where “class” would more accurately be called “income group”, rather than focussing on relation to the economic system; this gets confusing in conversation when people could be using either model. In that model, Gates family was clearly upper class.

[olewhalehunter]

That archaic nobility distinction is useless to the conversation, especially when the most powerful men in the world we're discussing about have the background I'm talking about.

https://www.dailysabah.com/columns/taha-meli-arvas/2017/05/0...

[dragonwriter]

> That archaic nobility distinction is useless to the conversation,

It's not a mobility distinction,it's the classical distinction of classes in the capitalist economy (the bourgeoisie is a class in the preceding feudal economy, but there the whole bourgeoisie is the middle class, and the upper class is the nobility, not the haut bourgeoisie.)

[Jaruzel]

Sorry to nit-pick, but I didn't know the exact definition of 'petit bourgeoisie' and Google says it's actually lower middle class:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=petit+bourgeoisie&oq=petit...

[mborch]

It most certainly isn't. The Wikipedia article has an accurate description. Google pulls a wrong definition for some reason.

[rusk]

The petite bourgeoisie is economically distinct from the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat social-class strata who rely entirely on the sale of their labor-power for survival; and also are distinct from the capitalist class haute bourgeoisie (high bourgeoisie) who own the means of production, and thus can buy the labor-power of the proletariat and lumpenproletariat to work the means of production. Though the petite bourgeoisie can buy the labor of others, they typically work alongside their employees, unlike the haute bourgeoisie.

I think "lower middle-class" is a reasonable apropos of this. That said, I don't think the Gateses would fit this definition either ...

[dragonwriter]

The three basic classes are the working class which survived on wage labor, the petit borgeoisie that both rent labor and work as essential means of support, and he capitalists whose support is dominantly derived by renting labor to apply to capital.

The petit bourgeoisie is the middle class of the three. (The lower and upper middle class are both part of it.)

Bill Gates (the Microsoft one) parents appear to have derived wealth largely from his father's successful law practice, dependent on his own labor essentially alongside other rented labor, which would them petit borgeoisie, middle class. They were certainly at the quite high end of prosperity for that class, so upper middle class. (It's not impossible that they at some point crossed into the haut bourgeoisie, but the descriptions I've seen suggest mostly very successful petit borgeoisie.)

Bill Gates himself rapidly moved into the haut bourgeoisie with Microsoft's success.

[rusk]

Okay ... this is another one of those slippery terms. As a onetime student of European history I got hung up on the etymology [0]

Historically, the medieval French word bourgeois denoted the inhabitants of the bourgs (walled market-towns), the craftsmen, artisans, merchants, and others, who constituted "the bourgeoisie", they were the socio-economic class between the peasants and the landlords, between the workers and the owners of the means of production

I was incorrectly equating "upper class" with these "landlords", but I guess as of the French revolution, with the Aristocracy overthrown the semantics shifted and "haute bourgeois" became the term for the ruling class.

Contemporarily, the terms "bourgeoisie" and "bourgeois" (noun) identify the ruling class in capitalist societies, as a social stratum

I would contend that the modern phenomenon of "the 1%" more closely resembles the aristocracy of old than Haute Bourgeois but I would be at odds with accepted terminology.

So yeah Bill Gates is from a Bourgeois background (particular grade is unclear) but arguably now occupies a distant Aristocratic stratum beyond Haute Bourgeois.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeoisie#Etymology

[JoeAltmaier]

Aren't those categories unactionable? I mean, a lady owns a beauty shop, spends 10 hours a day ordering supplies, doing payroll, managing advertising, hiring and fireing, somehow she's not working class because other people are involved and paid by her? A guy like Bill Gate's Dad is categorized middle class because he works alone, sort of, despite essentially bossing around his clients with autocratic decisions made in the quiet of his office?

[RugnirViking]

You think lower middle class have employees?

[rusk]

Depends on how you define the term. But Bill's background was certainly neither.

[undersuit]

I've heard the same confused argument in the barrage of anti-Zuckerberg comments that came out after the most recent "Will Zuckerberg run for president?" articles. Gates and Zuckerberg lived in wealthy households with parents who worked. They may have been 1% in income, but their riches now place them so much higher on the income scale it's ludricrous to try and compare their incomes to their parents. To attack their childhood as privileged discounts all the other people who were less well off during childhood who had made similar gains in wealth and perpetuates a very limited argument that all the 1% are bad. Essentially Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg as children were closer to the rest of the nation financially then they are now. You want to attack the privileged; wait until their children start doing things.