Reminder that billionaires are just 0.00000032% of world population and yet a third of them have been born into that group
. If you aren't born into that, there's an extremely small chance of you making it among their ranks.
And that's just the general inherited vs self-made difference. Then you peel through the general "self-made" label, and see that a good number of them are people who got lucky once and made really good investments they just left to balloon, rich kids who managed to surpass their parents and simply inflated their wealth, or, such as in Russia and China which absolutely dominate the "self-made" categories, people who were already very upper-class in their societies, and simply were elevated into dollar billionaire positions by the economic boom in their countries, so they just went from one very privileged position to another.
Forbes actually ranks self-madeness of American billionaires. The clear majority of them came from middle and, probably mostly, upper-middle-class backgrounds, while there were half as many ones born wealthy who climbed the ranks as working-class ones, despite even in the US there being many, many more working-class people than the wealthy, and all of this is probably much worse in most other countries. The poor outcast kid becoming super-rich, or in other way acquiring money, status or power, is such an extreme outlier and unlikely scenario it's hard to even properly convey, and yet a lot of fiction is exactly about that, because that's the one thing most humans want and acknowledging how unrealistic it is would break them.
. If you aren't born into that, there's an extremely small chance of you making it among their ranks.
And that's just the general inherited vs self-made difference. Then you peel through the general "self-made" label, and see that a good number of them are people who got lucky once and made really good investments they just left to balloon, rich kids who managed to surpass their parents and simply inflated their wealth, or, such as in Russia and China which absolutely dominate the "self-made" categories, people who were already very upper-class in their societies, and simply were elevated into dollar billionaire positions by the economic boom in their countries, so they just went from one very privileged position to another.
Forbes actually ranks self-madeness of American billionaires. The clear majority of them came from middle and, probably mostly, upper-middle-class backgrounds, while there were half as many ones born wealthy who climbed the ranks as working-class ones, despite even in the US there being many, many more working-class people than the wealthy, and all of this is probably much worse in most other countries. The poor outcast kid becoming super-rich, or in other way acquiring money, status or power, is such an extreme outlier and unlikely scenario it's hard to even properly convey, and yet a lot of fiction is exactly about that, because that's the one thing most humans want and acknowledging how unrealistic it is would break them
.
