[firstOrder]

> The underlying assumption that the rich don't deserve to spend their money however they want. Why can't you just celebrate success and encourage people to emulate the successful?

Well let us look at these rich people, on the Forbes 400 richest list. So people can celebrate success and encourage people to emulate the successful.

#1 Bill Gates - had a million dollar trust fund from his bank president grandfather, mother on United Way board with president of IBM #2 Warren Buffett - father was a congressman, grandparents owned a chain of stores in Nebraska #3 Larry Ellison - after a middle class upbringing, he was inspired by a 1970 CACM article and proceeded to hit several home runs over the the next few decades #4 Charles Koch - inherited an oil company #5 David Koch - inherited an oil company #6 Christy Walton - inherited Wal-Mart #7 Jim Walton - inherited Wal-Mart ...and the rest of the Wal-Mart heirs...

Aside from Larry Ellison, all of these people were to the manor born. Telling people to "emulate their success" is ludicrous. Plenty of people are paid good money to tell us why we should "celebrate success" for these people, and should try to "emulate the successful". Anyone who would actually believe these people's press clippings is clearly a fool. They have the same kind of "success" the czar in Russia had - they were born into it.

[tsotha]

>#1 Bill Gates - had a million dollar trust fund from his bank president grandfather, mother on United Way board with president of IBM

In what reality could the act of taking a million dollars and multiplying it by a factor of seventy six thousand be viewed as being "born into it"?

[dm2]

He worked very hard, it just came natural to him. If he was lower-class he would have never had access to early computers and it would be much less likely that he would have been successful at all.

He was a natural leader, but you can't just start out as a CEO unless you have a product or service to offer. Bill Gates couldn't have had time to build his software if he had to work daily to put himself through school (to have access to the computer).

Starting with a million dollars is no different than starting with 100 million, it all depends on how good the person is at spotting opportunity, learning from mistakes, and manipulating (not in a bad way) people to help you build your empire.

[tsotha]

>He worked very hard, it just came natural to him. If he was lower-class he would have never had access to early computers and it would be much less likely that he would have been successful at all.

At the time you didn't have to be rich to be a computer enthusiast. Silicon Valley was full of average Joes who had breadboarded up a simple computer but couldn't figure out what to do with it. Gates may have had more trouble if his family was at the very bottom end of the income spectrum, but computer geekery was a middle class thing. Literally millions of people could have done the same.

>He was a natural leader, but you can't just start out as a CEO unless you have a product or service to offer.

That's just nonsense. Anybody can be a CEO - you just need to start a corporation. When Gates and Allen started Microsoft it was just the two of them. There was no product either. This is all on the wiki page, by the way.

>Bill Gates couldn't have had time to build his software if he had to work daily to put himself through school (to have access to the computer).

That might be true except that he dropped out of school as soon as the company was founded.

>Starting with a million dollars is no different than starting with 100 million, it all depends on how good the person is at spotting opportunity, learning from mistakes, and manipulating (not in a bad way) people to help you build your empire.

You don't need a million dollars to start a company, and lots of now-powerful companies were started with far less. Apple, for instance. If Gates was lucky it was because he came of age in a time where computers were changing so fast there were more opportunities for small, agile companies. But that was true of his entire generation.

[WalterBright]

Microsoft was bootstrapped from an initial investment of about $5000, as I recall. Hardly uberwealth, and no VC.

I worked for a contemporary of Microsoft at the time. We had better technology, knew microcomputers upside down, had better everything, except had no vision. And that company was booted from nothing.

[nirnira]

> They have the same kind of "success" the czar in Russia had - they were born into it.

Oh brother. Most of these people started out in life ahead of the average person, sure. But you know what, they all took what they started with in life and worked their asses off to build it into something even greater. I'm sure for every person on this list there's ten people who started with a silver spoon in their mouth, and through sloth and weakness blew everything. Some probably wound up on the streets.

And have you looked into the family histories of these successful people? How many of these families started off with members who had nothing, who worked hard and made it? Does it invalidate their original success that they were smart enough to build a family culture which preserved and built upon success? Oh, I suppose that's another thing we shouldn't bother trying to emulate.

But hey, let's not bother trying to build a representative sample base for our snide claims eh?

Bill Gates may have come from privilege, but then he built on that - he brought computing to the world, introduced untold economic efficiencies to every single industry on earth, and produced more economic growth arguably than any other single individual in the last century. Buffett again worked hard, made smart bets, took risks, and it paid off. Ellison you admit invalidates your hypothesis. Koch I'm not familiary with. The Waltons have obviously been working diligently because last I heard Walmart was a powerhouse that millions of Americans choose of their own free will to shop at every day.

Comparing Bill Gates and the others on this list to a blatantly parasitic ruling class extracting resources from the toil of slaves through a monopoly on state violence is just plain, unforgivable idiocy.

I would expect better from the audience of a website devoted to the idea that anyone who has a valuable idea and works hard can make something of themselves.