[jlgray]

I think an important aspect not mentioned in this article is the environment in which the computer and internet wunderkind founders got their starts.

You had a perfect storm of brand new, super powerful tools (the internet providing dirt-cheap distribution, cheap computation, beginner friendly programming languages -- php for facebook, java and python for google, etc.). There was so much low-hanging fruit with relatively little competition.

A very similar thing happened in physics in the early 20th century, and led to the same notion that genius is a fleeting trait concentrated in the young. To quote this BBC article: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37578899

It was like discovering a new toolkit which could quickly yield discoveries. Or, less charitably, as one scientist said: "mediocre physicists could discover great physics".