Jeff Bezos now has more money than can be made if an American family earned 63k for 2 million years. He also had parents that gave him a so-called "three hundred thousand dollar investment" (more money than most people see in a lifetime even while working hard for their family, dedicating most of their life to work and barely managing to enjoy life), while ignoring or dodging every single tax he can get away with.

It's weird how most people are fine with that, because they seem to see themselves as temporarily embarrassed billionaires, or because they aren't able to understand the sheer amount of money.

Jeff Bezos also had a teen mother, a biological father that abandoned him, and a Cuban immigrant father that came to the US alone at 16 with nothing and no ability to speak English.

After passing through a refugee camp, just six years later Mike Bezos was raising Jeff as his own and had successfully gone to college.

If - having survived all of that well enough to build a decent life for himself - Mike could afford to invest into his son's business, then it's a remarkable accomplishment that should be cheered, rather than attacked.

Quick research says that Mike Bezos worked as an engineer for Exxon after graduating college, and saving that money wisely can add up to $300k.

Let alone that Sr. should have the knowledge and support he required to manage his money so well. I look at the Jr. Bezos having a privilege to have a father who he could turn to for advise, or who may have guided his development. Not saying he did, cuz I don't know the family, but it sounds like it was a real possibility. Who saves all that money, only to entrust it to his estranged son who he don't know or trust--as if he haven't had a hand in imparting the necessary temperament, sensibility, and wisdom for his son to be successful in some way in the economy? LOL.

How many people today are fortunate to have grown up in this time, in this is a period of unprecedented economic growth and social change, who have squandered their earnings, because they didn't have the support of knowledgeable and trustworthy parents or family?

Sounds to me like a chain of great decisions, luck or both.

I can give a counter example. I moved to an affluent town on the North Shore of Long Island, NY. I met a woman in my neighborhood who described to me her career at the local hospital, as a nurse, for over 20 years. She's African American, and landed this job in the late 70s early 80s by my calculation. She benefited by the social changes at the time that accepted African Americans as nurses in a largely white community. I also met her son, and he struggles with under-employment in his career. I had the impression she didn't understand why he was in that situation. She was proud of her success. I imagine it was difficult for her to reconcile her career in nursing, and her son's struggles. She had success, why not him? Unlucky, more like it.

Right now--that hospital is part of one of those large health care corporate systems. If she had this job today, its very possible she would not have seen her salary increase year after year, nor enjoyed a pension, nor stayed with the same organization for so long just being a nurse. There will always be new nurse graduates with more energy with just enough knowledge who are more manageable by corporate. That's the reality of hospitals and healthcare today, despite growth in this field.

Fortune goes to the right person who is in the right place at the right time. And if you frack up and fall out, someone else is ready to take your place, hey. Who in a great position can say they did it entirely alone? Meag Lottery winners. haha.

I hope people don't mind the former, but the latter is a bit problematic. When individuals can control that much wealth, democracy breaks down, they can control politics. It wouldn't hurt capitalist incentives at all if the richest of the rich were limited to earning say $100 m.

parents != parents

maybe i'm stating the obvious, but "if you want to get rich, come up with a good idea and work hard" is way easier when your parents can invest 300K in your startup and you have that safety net to fall back on. as in, that's a substantial factor into somebody's "self-madeness" that's often overlooked

(i know that's not what you said, but imo it's a common sentiment re: creating a successful business)

They may never be able to achieve even modest financial security and live in constant dread that they'll lose one of their 2-3 jobs and be on the street, but hey, they can define success as meaning a family that loves them, so that makes absolutely everything OK! /s

But what you can do is realise that things aren't always under your control so not to worry about them. Instead just concentrate on things you do have and things you can do. You have the power to be useful to society so do that. You have the power to do good things so do it. How you feel doesn't really matter.

In that sense, the most successful CEO isn't necessarily the smartest individual/CEO in the same way the most successful artist isn't necessarily the best one on a technical level.

The claim that charisma, street smarts, or connections are more important than intelligence is absurd. There are so many fields in which those things just don't matter. If you're not charismatic don't pursue a career in a field that requires charisma. Simple.

It's easy to think that intelligence isn't a strong predictor for success because there are many intelligent people who don't accomplish much. But there are many more charismatic and well-connected people who don't accomplish much! But we don't culturally expect charismatic people to automatically become successful, like we do for smart kids. That's where the real difference is.

I'm sorry, what field would that be?

I have yet to see a field where extraversion, persuasiveness, and regularly going out and having beers with the boss is less likely to get you promotion than being utterly brilliant, doing an amazing job at what you do, and maintaining a healthy work-life balance.

At least in America, charisma has a massively outsized influence on your success in anything but the very most menial of fields.

At that level, you definitely don't need to be a genius, I'd say if anything a genius is much less likely to make a million a year.

For success within theoretical physics you see, again, exactly how important raw intelligence is. Charisma and people skills are nice, but top researchers are disproportionately brilliant. This isn't nearly as true in those scientific fields where research results are unverifiable. We've seen this in the recent months with the embarrassing quality of epidemiological modeling.

Earning $1m a year doesn't require exceptionalism of any kind, but there is a huge gap between $1m a year and the global top 100. And intelligence becomes more dominant and other traits start to matter less as the stakes increase.

I actually believed physics has repeated run into the problem where large swaths of research is in fact unverifiable and exists purely on a theoretical basis until technology has caught up with the theory. Wasn't there a large discussion within the past 12 months or so about the many flaws of the field of physics, including the repeating of the same mistakes due to not wanting to stray too far from the existing literature? Doesn't this field also have large swaths of theories with plenty of mathematics behind both that are also mutually exclusive?

If I would think about a field with a long history of verified research, physics would most certainly not be up there. I'd say chemistry has physics beat there for example.

Additionally, epidemiological modeling has to deal with real data from sources whose trustworthiness are largely only somewhat known and somehow project this into the future. This is a garbage in, garbage out situation and I don't know if this should reflect on the field overall. It'd be like judging ML as a field based off of a problem case in which all training data has untrustworthy labels.

Wee need to teach thiss type of logical reasoning about statistical information at the high school level. It needs to be instinctive, and our default instincts are completely wrong for the task.

Statistical information has become extremely salient. Covid-19 is the current example. Most information is statistical. The same is true in many work contexts, where companies generate statistical knowledge that people need to interpret.

Meanwhile, this logic toolset is typically much weaker than our other ones. Average numerical ability is actually quite good, comparatively. The average person would perform ok on classic logical reasoning (Socrates is a man...). Throw in some statistical information... bogus conclusions (or no conclusion) are more common.

It's doable. Nothing too hard here. It's on par with simple algebra. We just haven't adjusted education to the needs of the times.

So if someone success without talent, you explain it with another monovariable: luck.

By the way, for me being talented in something is just another version of luck. So we can say that you believe in just one variable: Luck is everything.

The world is way more sophisticated and complicated than a single variable.

Because of my work I have met people that are today highly successful. For example I have met motorcycle's world champions when they were children, that now earn tens of millions of dollars.

The most interesting thing is that for every world champion I know, I have met way way more incredible talented children that never became world champions and don't earn much or work in other areas.

They are human beings that took and take different decisions in their lives.

Some of them were very hard workers(and did not success after all the work), some of them were lazy(and succeeded anyway).

Some of them loved going to parties, others prefered to play guitar or read. Some were very social, others had few friends. Some were impulsive, some were analytical. Some were perfectionistic, others only care about doing things as fast as possible. Some had impulsive sex, other preferred stable relationships. Some accepted others helping them and listened, others refuse to learn or advice from others.

At the end of the day, there are hundreds of variables out there. There are usually some patterns that emerge on successful people on each specific discipline.

For example, in motosport you find that most successful people are highly competitive. They are obsessed with winning. I played ping pong with one of the kids and won. He could not stand it and trained and trained until he could win me(a year or so later). This kid is rich and famous now.

By the way, Success is different for different people. For me success could be not having a boss, working in front of the beach everyday without stress,and able to support my family.

For other people, being successful means earning millions of dollars, even when this means living for work inside a concrete hive watching numbers all day on a computer screen, and not having children until you can pay for a house that you never have time to visit.

There is a lot of survivor bias in the assessment of success.

I believe that successful people tend to have a high base level of intelligence, often high social intelligence, are often very persistent, and rich parents and good looks also help a lot. But it's equally important to happen to be at right place at the right time and meeting the right people.

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are good examples in my opinion, had they been born ten years later they might have ended up in only moderately successful software business, or selling printers and go out of business by the early 90s, or creating a failed video game console. They started their businesses at exactly the right time, met the right people, and made good decisions in some early, very dynamic and emerging markets.

The argument works regardless of the definition of success used.

That is exactly what Bayes' theorem predicts.

Many other conclusions , erroneously, seem more intuitively right, thou. Statistics is hard to master as our brains biases are strong forces.

― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

A lot of money simply isn't useful for anything interesting or valuable. Surviving is great, some comfort is nice, but after a certain order of magnitude, it's not so much people having money, it's money having people. While large scale projects are also important and those need money and other resources to be pooled in some form, but they don't require any involved person to be filthy rich.

Personal anecdote: I used to be very anxious about making the absolutely "best" choice at every fork in my life and would agonize and analyze every decision meticulously. A few years into my career, I have had enough positive experiences and successes under my belt that I feel much more relaxed about the choices I make because I think I'll always have the ability to correct or pivot if I make one wrong move right now.

Indeed, it would be a poor reflection on our society if you had to be in the top percentile for income to merely be economically secure.

Lots of rich well intentioned people doing harmful good. A tangent, I know.

In non mockery voice: I think there is nothing wrong in being smart and perusing academic titles, wealth or recognition. Can’t I be happy travelling the world because I have so much passive income that I don’t care how much I spend? Can’t I be happy running megacorporation without a child?

Keep the fame, I just want the freedom that money buys. I was never famous; but I have been asked for autographs and been stared at by total strangers with hero worship in their eyes--it is bizarre, and it made me feel extremely uncomfortable. I can't imagine anyone wanting that.

I don't care about being kicked out of the 9-zero club or whatever, I just want to lay about all day or if I want to take a week trip to Kenya or Moscow... and NO BOSS

And I didn’t mean to say that playing with three year old kids in the garden is the only thing that is worth pursuing. It was just an example close to my hearth right now in my life in my circumstances and in my part of the world. Of course there are many other worthy pursuits. My point was only that trying to get a bigger pile of money than other people I don’t consider one of them.

Granted there are some things we shouldn't be happy doing but I think that we all know what they are and it goes without saying.

Social status (consumption, skills and achievements) helps you secure higher quality mates and offers greater security to your offspring. That's why gaining social status, feels worthwhile, but without kids it feels a bit empty.

Before kids, I knew the breeding was pretty good fun, but my genes gave me no indication that having kids would be fun too.

Perhaps thats just to ensure those genes are spread far and wide and to concentrate on social status before the all consuming process of caring for offspring begins.

I disagree. Generally happiness comes from being happy/content/thankful for what you have (as opposed to "having a lot"). You can be happy having no children, no fortune, no fame, etc. Conversely all of these do not guarantee happiness - Robin Williams committed suicide despite having them all, I think it's fair to assume he was not happy.

That's why I added 'Generally' and 'should be found'. It would be fair to say that Robin Williams was ill.

Onne would definitely expect the highly gifted to think/act differently socially as well as in several other areas, but is it actually correct to say they have less "developed skills", except possibly in the sense that they probably has had less reason to, and fever opportunities to develop these skills with their peers?

Besides, “Mo money, mo problems”. I have a couple thousand square feet of house, few thousand square feet of yard and garden. It’s way too much for just me, I have a dedicated VR room. Billionaire or bust mentality is a sickness.