[howscrewedami]

I'll go a step further and say there is no self made anything. Just by being born in America you have a huge advantage over someone born in say, Ethiopia. When I hear someone call themselves "self-made", I immediately assume that person does not value the support and love given by those close to them. It also means they very likely don't value how much society in general contributes to the life they live. In other words, if someone tells me they are "self-made" - I'd say there's a very strong chance they are either out of touch, ungrateful, or even narcissistic.

[gottorf]

This seems like an unnecessarily uncharitable view. Plenty of people are given support and love by those close to them. The overwhelming majority of such people do not become billionaires, or even millionaires. And at least in America, people who became wealthy generally did so by providing goods or services to others who voluntarily purchased those goods and services.

I think "self-made" is a shorthand for: the person didn't inherit the money, and engaged in entrepreneurial activity from which the majority of their wealth is derived. Of course there is an element of luck and being in the right place at the right time, and we certainly don't need to deify those people, but to say that "there is no self made anything" seems, I dunno, fatalistic.

Wealth isn't created by accident.

[jychang]

I’d argue wealth is often created by accident. How much wealth did the creation of penicillin create?

If anything, we aren’t being cynical enough towards the concept of “self-made”. Every single genius recognizes that they are standing on the shoulder of giants; would Einstein be possible if he had to invent Newton or the concept of 0 from scratch?

It also helps to remember that many people are working towards the same main ideas at any one time. If the Wright brothers didn’t invent the first plane, many other groups were right behind. Facebook could have failed and a dozen social networks taken its place. There were dozens of competitors to the Apple I and Apple II. We’d still have Windows-like operating systems if Microsoft failed. There were many scrapped covid vaccines that could have stepped up if Pzfier and Moderna failed.

For the person who captures the market and the wealth generated, it doesn’t mean they didn’t put in any work- but they certainly owe their success more to luck and their environment than their own effort. Again, none of the above could have happened in Ethiopia.