[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.