[duggan]

I dunno, it sounds like he's as self-made as it gets. Immigrant family, worked in Denny's, got an electrical engineering degree, founded Nvidia.

I don't mind dunking on the disconnected rich who luck their way into fortune, but this doesn't seem like one of those cases.

[nottorp]

There's no data on wikipedia about his family. They moved from Taiwan to Thailand and then the US. That doesn't say if they were rich, poor, or who they knew.

I mean, i used to believe self-made man stories until I found out who Bill Gates' mother is. Now I'd rather see some research.

[deciplex]

I know plenty of people like that and none of them are billionaires. No one's saying you're going to become a billionaire by sitting on your ass and waiting for it to happen (unless you're born into it of course, which many of them are) but the point of survivorship bias is to note that you have to do all those other things and then you have to get lucky. And once you're lucky the tendency is to attribute your oversized success to all the other things, but that simply isn't the case.

It's funny that all the comments pointing this out are getting heavily downvoted here. I thought we were all (or mostly) into Bayesian reasoning here. Perhaps not, or perhaps many of us are really bad at it.