Still takes some skill, I don't doubt that. But the main ingredient is risk.
I'm also pretty sure with his first company sale he made much more money than his family ever had to begin with.
Because of the rarity of multi-billion dollar companies it makes more sense to flip the question - what are the demographics of those who found those companies?
If the odds of doing something are 1:100 who is going to have better odds at succeeding - the person who gets 1 throw or 10 throws? Neither are guaranteed to succeed, but they both have a chance and one is much more likely than the other. That's what's at play here.
Of course there’s also hereditary factors at play that people like to ignore.
Well, this is why we have to look at the numbers. And it depends on the odds. If it's one in a billion and the rich get ten million throws and the poor get 1 each then the fact there are a lot of non-rich people isn't as impactful.
> Of course there’s also hereditary factors at play that people like to ignore.
Yes, like having cash to throw around and a safety net to rely on so that those shots can be taken as well as easier access to potentially important connections and resources.
> I'm also pretty sure with his first company sale he made much more money than his family ever had to begin with.
Well yeah. But he got there partly because he had some money to invest in the first place, and partly because he had useful connexions.
This hypothesis is somewhat testable statistically.
There are approximately 25 thousand people worth 100 million dollars+ in the world, with more than a third of that number residing in the US. [0] I think we can safely say that people worth 100 million and more are rich.
If it is easy to get lucky several times with a rich family, you would expect some nontrivial share of Musk equivalents among them or their kids. Say, two hundred?
Not observed. Either the willingness to risk own money in engineering startups is < 1 per cent among those, or it is not that easy.
[0] https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/money/2022/10/18/us...
Maybe? The thing about having a rich family is... you're already rich.
That removes one of the prime motivations to take serious risks, of the sort that paid off for Musk; namely, to become rich.
I'm sure you get a lot of people who invest, or toss some money into this or that.
But I'd be surprised if a significant number invested their entire net worth and time into a single endeavor.
AFAIK Musk was a relative nobody in the millionaire world when he poured a majority of his wealth into SpaceX (2002). They were very close to bankruptcy during the Falcon 1 experiments and if the fourth launch failed, they would have joined a fairly extensive graveyard of defunct space startups, together with Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace and a few hundred others.
Then $100M went to found SpaceX.
But that does seem like a very large bet that millionaires don't often make.
Smart people, who are cutthroat, and who are driven/motivated have a much higher chance of success if they start out rich than those who don’t.
I get the argument and it has certain logic in it, but surely they all cannot be 100 per cent lazy. And if the non-lazy ones have it relatively easy to succeed, we should see a lot of successes from that cohort, even if they are in a minority compared to their lazy peers.