> Either the willingness to risk own money in engineering startups is < 1 per cent among those

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.

"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.

By that point, he'd already been CEO of PayPal for a bit (after co-founding X.com that merged into the company that became PayPal) and made $175M for his stake when eBay bought it.

Then $100M went to found SpaceX.

But that does seem like a very large bet that millionaires don't often make.

I believe your analysis is flawed. Children of rich people often times aren’t motivated to be creators or be hard working. It’s not easy succeeding since luck plays a huge role but what is true is the following:

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.

Not even one percent of them?

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.

Much higher chance meaning it goes from something like 0.001% to 0.01%.