"Anschutz bought out his father's drilling company in 1961" (age 22)
... as you do.
Paging down the list shows a quite interesting mix of self-made to lesser or greater extents, but a lot of Waltons and Rockerfellers... still.
More broadly, the emphasis on the ultra-rich isn't enormously illuminating either way, although it's worth noting that a lot of the 'entirely self-made' ultra-rich come from extremely comfortable upper-middle-class backgrounds, most obviously Bill Gates.
I would be suprised to hear any evidence supporting your "Forbes 40,000" line - got any, or are you just making it up?
Despite the very visible presence of Gates, Buffer, Ellison, etc at the top of the list the Forbes 400 isn't exactly a startup playground (a lot of mineral wealth, the Waltons, a still-pretty decent whack of inherited $$$). The idea that American inequality en masse has much to do with startups is an idea that, well... let's just say it would be a compliment to call it sensible.
I'm sure that the American environment has resulted in great inequalities of outcome among, say, _tech_ firms (e.g. big winners and losers rather than having IBM and the seven dwarves pootle along for decades) but this doesn't translate to a fraction of the effect of, say, big declines in the tax rate paid by the very rich, or changes in the USA's blend of manufacturing or service jobs.
Not staking a position here either way, just saying that bringing startups into this is absurd navel-gazing.
It's hard to see what you're achieving trying to undermine specific points in an opinion piece ("You didn't show evidence that X" looks a lot like "I think you're wrong about X but am trying to look like the bigger man here") with this rather pointless bit of drive-by snark.
http://econ-www.mit.edu/files/6348
Stiglitz is a serious economist and a Nobel laureate, there is data behind what he says, but bear in mind that he's writing this for Vanity Fair and not the American Economic Review.
For example, you write: "As anyone who has worked for the government knows, the important thing is not to make the right choices, but to make choices that can be justified later if they fail."
What evidence do you have of this? What about agencies like DARPA? Your statement could also apply to employees of large corporations.
You are doing the same thing that Joe Stigliz did in the article (without his academic ethos)
That's an important distinction. In advocacy, you start already knowing the conclusion you want to reach, and you try as hard as you can to convince the audience of it, the way a lawyer or a politician would. Whereas an essay, as the name implies, starts with a question, and from there you try to follow the truth wherever it leads.
I wrote about this in "The Age of the Essay" (http://paulgraham.com/essay.html).
There is not a mathematically sharp distinction between the two approaches, of course. A lawyer or politician will use the truth when it suits his purpose. And an essayist trying to follow the truth will inevitably have biases that cause him not to follow the truth as far down some roads as others. But though the two approaches form a continuum, and writers sometimes drift along it in the middle of a given piece, the distinction is a meaningful one.