[gottorf]

Your statement is true, for some definitions of "massive" and "financial assistance". We all Live In A Society, after all, and nobody exists in a vacuum, let alone build a billion-dollar enterprise in a vacuum. The first step is having other people pay you for products and services!

So, if we can agree that merely having gone to public school and driven on public highways is not "massive financial assistance", whereas having received a billion-dollar inheritance is definitely "massive financial assistance", where does the line fall, under which you can be considered self-made?

[scarmig]

Taking a stab at a reasonable definition for me, if you receive resources X or less as financial or in-kind assistance, and you go from X to 100X through regular market transactions, you can say you're a self-made 100Xaire. 10X seems too liberal (after all, someone could have just invested the X at birth in an index fund and waited 40 years and be at 10X), while 1000x seems too restrictive (if you start out with $10k and end up with $5M, I think it's still fair to say you're a self made millionaire). It's probably not a truly linear relationship, though (it's easier to go from $10M to $100M than $10k to $100k).

This is probably a broader definition than the original comment's. I suspect there the core issue is questioning whether it makes sense to even differentiate a billionaire who's self-made vs one who's not. I find that a useful distinction to make in many contexts, though.