As someone who was raised in the bottom of the socioeconomic classes it's interesting and a bit frustrating talking to people who don't understand what risk taking meant for us versus people with more money and a safety net.

For me, many of the risks I took to get to this point would've involved either bankruptcy or my death if they had failed. When I talked to my coworkers on how they feel people should rise up the ladder, they didn't seem to get that the people that made it simply had a good roll of the dice.

This is an underreported and unfortunately minimized part of the story of most successes.

For example, Bill Gates had a solid financial backing when he left Harvard: http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/

> [Bill Gates' Great-Grandfather] Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III.

Bezos' parents kicked money into what would become Amazon:

> The first initial start-up capital for Amazon.com came primarily from my parents, and they invested a large fraction of their life savings in what became Amazon.com

And Musk started with very little - at one point seeing if could get by on a dollar a day if it came to that. Or Kalanick who things went bad enough for that he was forced to move back in with his parents as an adult, and then later to Thailand for a lower cost of living. Or Dell who worked as a dish washer and newspaper boy - eventually using those funds to drop out of college to focus on his booming computer assembly/upgrade 'business' he was running out of his dorm room.

Musk absolutely didn't start from "very little": https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/04/10/2014-rocket-man-the-o...

> After [Musk's parents] divorced in 1980, Elon mostly lived with his father, who says he owned thoroughbred horses, a yacht, several houses and a Cessna. One of their homes was in Waterkloof, a leafy suburb of Pretoria that was popular with foreign diplomats.

> Wanderlust ran on both sides of the family. On holidays, Errol [Musk's Dad] and his kids would travel, he said: to Europe, Hong Kong, throughout the United States. Or they’d take the plane to Lake Tanganyika, where Errol had a stake in an emerald mine. Elon would later get his own pilot’s license, but he no longer has time to fly.

> While wealthy South Africans typically hired maids and gardeners, Errol decided that his children would do chores and cook their own food, taking shifts.

Michael Dell: http://www.notablebiographies.com/news/Ca-Ge/Dell-Michael.ht...

> In 1984, as a first-year college student in Austin, Texas, Michael Dell borrowed $1,000 from his parents to start a computer accessories business.

To put this in perspective, in 2015 less than 30% of Americans have $1000 in their savings: https://www.gobankingrates.com/banking/savings-account/62-pe...

Kalanick's parents: https://www.recode.net/2017/5/27/15705290/bonnie-kalanick-mo...

> From teaming over complex science projects like building a real electrical transformer to giving him his first experience programming computers, [Kalanick's dad] had been the one to bring home early computers for his tech-curious son to fiddle with.

You know I could provide more detail on the Musk thing (look up his relationship with his now estranged father - you're presenting a woefully misleading tale) but really I don't think you care. You're arguing here that Dell getting $1000 from his parents is something? $1000 is literally 2 weeks of overtime working at a McDonalds for the federal minimum wage - $7.25.

I don't entirely understand why people do this. It just seems pitiable. Rather than learn from others, people seem more interested in trying to look for reasons why they can't achieve.

> $1000 is literally 2 weeks of overtime working at a McDonalds for the federal minimum wage - $7.25.

If you don't have to do anything else with that money.

My parents couldn't have spared 1000 bucks just because when I was younger.

Musk grew up wealthy. He's the child of rich white south africans.

He was in college! In college now a days the the average kid is going to have thousands in his bank account due to the way student loans are tossed out like candy. Or in the case where that is not true, taking two weeks off to work, or even staying in college and getting in internship and people can easily get thousands on their own. There are just so many sad excuses.

It's important to remember that $1000 in 1984 went a lot further than it does now, especially when there was a fair amount more opportunity back then. Statistically speaking the United States is among the lowest in social mobility.

This is why pointing to these people is futile because not only did they have large advantages that many others did not, but they are also largely the exception to the norm. It's the survivorship bias in action.

Unemployment today is lower than it's been since the 1960s. And today vastly more people are wealthier than they've ever been. Saying there was more opportunity in the 1980s is bizarrely out of touch with reality. In the 80s, he was in college. Now a days anybody in college, which is something that's practically guaranteed to anybody that wants to and is willing to do remotely decent in high school, has access to thousands of dollars - if not directly from our excessive loans, then they can simply take a couple of weeks and work at their leisure. Or they can stay with a normal school schedule and work an internship, at a lab, or whatever else - easily earning many thousands.

I also started from the bottom and experienced plenty of adversity on the way up, yet I feel that my path is very replicable. We live in a nation where if you do well, even in a shit school, that's a fast track to admittance to a top tier university where you'll invariably have all the financial aid in the world, and then some, available literally [and exploitatively] at the click of a button. And from there success is not really in question so long as you major in something that's commercially viable.

And in that regard it's not really an economic issue as much as a social issue. People that come from families with no value for education, or individuals that themselves don't take their education seriously are obviously going to struggle. But those actions are something beyond socioeconomic reasons - as the same is true of somebody born into a rich family - though granted in that case the individual will obviously have more resources to rely on to subsidize his failure.

While I'm sure your circumstances may have dictated such, I'm not really understanding what you're talking about with such a high cost of failure. When I failed, and I did, it simply meant it was time to get a job and work myself up to be able to take shot #x. When one 'sticks', you're set and can use that to enable your future shots.

"When I failed, and I did, it simply meant it was time to get a job and work myself up to be able to take shot #x"

Years ago I did some real estate deals together with a few guys from rich families. The first deal went bad leaving me with debt that lasted more than 10 years to pay off. The other guys got more money from family, did a few more deals that went well and are now successful businessmen. When you don't have money you often can't afford to fail in the same way wealthy people can. The consequences are much more severe.

I think we might have very different experiences and definitions as what counts as the bottom

My bottom was having very little money in my name, with parents that were poor and disabled as a result of the hardships of being fishermen. I had barely enough to take care of my family and go to college (with financial aid) as a result of other very personal circumstances. Even then, I had to make a choice.

I could either spend some of that money on my failing health and never graduate from college, or focus on my education and hope I can fix it later. I went with the latter. Financial aid can only go so far when you're one medical issue away from disaster.

When I finally got a career I had to have multiple rotting and infected teeth extracted because I couldn't afford to get them fixed prior. My family had a history of bad dental issues and I managed to hit it hard.

This is what I mean by the bottom. If my dental issues had gotten worse, then I would've been screwed. This is the reality for a lot of people that grow up in poverty. It doesn't necessarily matter if we can get financial aid when there are other circumstances stopping us, affecting our education or worse.

Your parents were fishermen? Mine too. I grew up in Cordova, AK and fished until I was 20 and realized that I was not tough enough to do it year round. Winter fishing fucking broke me.

Anyway, I feel ya. I lucked out on my teeth but I didn't see a dentist for 15 years and when I did I had a dead tooth and some root canals to be done.

Both my mother and father were deep into the fishing business so a lot of my time as a kid was spent on their boat. It absolutely destroyed both of their bodies and their backs due to the daily rigors, so I have immense respect for those people that are able to do so and survive.

Yeah definitely a very different experience. I lived in the urban city with a mostly absent single parent enjoying fine cuisine like ramen and iceberg lettuce - actually pretty good eating! Probably a bit late now, but you can often get free dental and medical treatment at universities! My parent ended up getting cancer (and getting over it) largely through these programs.

Free treatment requires you to be in the right place with the funds to seek treatment though. I lived in an area where most of the free treatment we could get was a decent drive out of town and largely only covered children.

There were no universities near me that offered treatment and believe me, that was one of the first things I tried. You were lucky that you had the opportunity to get that free treatment; an option I didn't have. I'm sorry your parent had to deal with cancer, thankfully that's one way my parents have been lucky so far in.

Why not take a grey hound? I mean I just don't understand this. You can get anywhere in the country for what amounts to a few hours of minimum wage work. I'm damn sure going to be doing that if my teeth were getting to the point that it was becoming a health crisis! This is the thing that confuses me in general. People do have this immense opportunity all around them. But they always find a reason for not doing something. And these reasons never seem particularly compelling.

And there is no reason to be sorry for anything I went through. As bizarre as it is, I would not have had my life any other way and I doubt even my parent would have. No doubt as a part of the cancer it caused them to reevaluate their life and after I had gone off to college they started taking night classes at a community college for nursing, and succeeded and have now worked their way up to very comfortable middle class, starting with little more than a high school degree in their late 30s. Also caused them to catch the Jesus a bit hard, but hey if it completes their life then more power to them.

The public transit in the US is incredibly poor if you're not living in the middle of a large city. Acting like everyone has the opportunity to take a gray hound is rather naive and in my case, again, I didn't have the option nor the funds to do so.

You don't find these reasons compelling because you can't seem to understand that a lot of options are entirely circumstancial. For people that even do have the option to take a bus, you're effectively asking them to lose their job or stop taking care of their family for possibly an entire day. An option a lot of people don't have when they live paycheck to paycheck.

Okay, if I'm naive please enlighten me. Here is how things look from my view here. There are Greyhound stations in literally every single state, and certainly extremely close to near all coastal areas. Stating it's impossible to save up enough to take literally a day off to save your health is something I literally cannot believe. Work 80 hours for a week or two. If you can't get the hours, get a second job. It's not a longterm thing - just enough to get you what you need. What am I missing?

The beautiful thing about this country is that there are practically infinite possibilities and opportunities. Obtaining them can often involve a good deal of blood, sweat, and tears - but they're there. That's the thing that I find frustrating - sayings like 'when opportunity knocks' are idiotic. Opportunity doesn't knock. It's something that must be aggressively sought out, captured, and then chased after once it escapes which it frequently will - like tricky little bastard it is. People seem to believe that others just have things happen for them, or that they were born into fortunate circumstance. In some cases that's true. In the vast majority, it is not. Things are not given, they are taken.

> The extreme downvoting probably reflect the affluent upbringing of a large portion of the HN community.

No, it's just hardcore techno-libertarian insanity.