I appreciate the acknowledgement that a lot has to do with WHERE he was born as well as the timing of his entrance into his chosen field. That's something I've tried to impress on my own kids...
Often, success stories reduce their protagonists to stereotypical characters: the precocious boy, the brilliant engineer, the iconoclastic designer, the paradoxical magnate. In my case, what strikes me is the set of unique circumstances—largely beyond my control—that shaped both my character and my trajectory. It’s impossible to exaggerate the undeserved privilege I enjoyed: being born in a prosperous country like the United States is an important part of a winning lottery ticket, as is being born white and male in a society that privileges white men.
Add to that the temporal coincidences that favored me. I was a rebellious boy at Acorn Academy when engineers found a way to implant tiny electrical circuits on a silicon tablet, giving rise to the semiconductor chip. I was shelving books in Mrs. Caffiere’s library when another engineer predicted that these circuits would get smaller and smaller, at an exponential rate over years to come.
I appreciate the acknowledgement that a lot has to do with WHERE he was born as well as the timing of his entrance into his chosen field.
That's something I've tried to impress on my own kids growing up. We happen to live in one of the most prosperous places in the world. And despite all the bad news in the press (and there's a LOT of it) there are billions of people around the world who will never even have a chance to 'make it' as far as we have because they happen to be born in places like rural India or Bolivia. Not their fault, they just weren't nearly as lucky.
So when they start to think about how badly they want to buy a better house or a newer car, my hope is that they'll also remember that most of the world only dreams of owning a house and a car like the one they already have. Gratitude matters.
Personally, I have gained a lot more than I ever thought I would at this stage of life, but largely because I happen to buy the right thing at the right time and just held onto it. It wasn't really 'smarts' so much as just tenacity through some difficult financial problems.
As my father used to say, "Time and chance happen to them all" (which I didnt realize til just now, is based on Ecclesiastes 9:11. Huh.)
He leaves out a somewhat important factor though. While he acknowledges that being born into a prosperous country is like winning the lottery, he was also born into a financially well off and...
He leaves out a somewhat important factor though. While he acknowledges that being born into a prosperous country is like winning the lottery, he was also born into a financially well off and secure family. That's like winning the lottery twice.
It's honestly kind of fascinating to see the parallels between Trump and Gates and how they ended up at completely different destinations despite coming from the same upbringing (white, born to wealthy parents, same time frame and in the right place at the right time).
Your description of “coming from the same upbringing” leaves out the influence from their parents, which I think is the primary factor in what most people consider “upbringing”. Unfortunately I...
Your description of “coming from the same upbringing” leaves out the influence from their parents, which I think is the primary factor in what most people consider “upbringing”. Unfortunately I don't know anything at all about Bill Gates’s upbringing and the article barely even mentions his grandmother. We do, however, know about Frank Trump’s raging narcissism and his treatment of Donald as the golden child (and his cruelty towards Frank Jr., Donald’s brother, who was originally supposed to be the golden child). Frank Jr.’s daughter, Mary Trump, has written and spoken about it at length and it's chilling.
Obviously we can't know how much calculated PR is going into any book like this, but I do get the impression of Gates as someone who's had a few "there but for the grace of god..." realisations...
It’s impossible to exaggerate the undeserved privilege I enjoyed: being born in a prosperous country like the United States is an important part of a winning lottery ticket, as is being born white and male in a society that privileges white men.
Obviously we can't know how much calculated PR is going into any book like this, but I do get the impression of Gates as someone who's had a few "there but for the grace of god..." realisations through his philanthropic work. It'd be hard for any sufficiently intelligent and thoughtful person to look at the conditions some others grow up in and think that they still could have reached the same heights purely on merit, with such different starting points and opportunities.
Everything I've seen about Gates from his years at Microsoft still suggests he was a ruthless, self-interested businessman who screwed over plenty of people and companies along the way, but then his actions since do suggest a genuine belief in a better world. Makes me wonder what kind of mind leads a person to go that far for the goal of utter capitalist dominance while still seeing it for the rigged and unfair system that it is.
What follows is a rant, so please don't take anything I say personally, @Greg. Billionaire philanthropy is PR in and of itself. It's something that the rich learned in the Gilded Age; improve...
What follows is a rant, so please don't take anything I say personally, @Greg.
Billionaire philanthropy is PR in and of itself. It's something that the rich learned in the Gilded Age; improve their image or risk their power.
No, I am not saying that Gates's or anyone else's charity work does more bad than good.
But keep in mind that Gates is a man who has spent more than a decade being the richest man on the planet. To give a scale of how much money he still has, I did a quick internet search to find he has a net worth estimated to be worth around $160bn. Another internet search says that to lift every single American out of poverty would take $168bn.
Beyond that, every billionaire has a great deal of their money invested in the stock market, which means that the the mechanism that is supposed to make companies public often gets quite concentrated among billionaires. Right now the top 10% richest people own 93% of stocks. This allows them to get even richer without doing anything. Bill gates had a divorce and lost a great deal of his money because of that, and then because of his stocks he ended up making it all back and then some.
Philanthropy is all well and good, but the problem with billionaire philanthropy is that they should not have the power to be so effective to begin with. If one of them does things that you think are good, that's nice, but what if you don't? The most effective form of philanthropy is the stuff that will permanantly change things for the better, and that means involving yourself in politics and changing policy. It turns out that a lot of rich people spend their money on that kind of thing and it destroys democracy. The Koch family weren't only spending their money to support their business interests: a lot of it was to do what they thought would "fix" America. If you're on the Right you probably have a similarly bad opinion of George Soros who does the same thing.
I actually considered adding a similar rant myself and didn’t have the energy, so I appreciate you doing it for me! Given the choice I’ll take a philanthropic billionaire who reflects on...
I actually considered adding a similar rant myself and didn’t have the energy, so I appreciate you doing it for me!
Given the choice I’ll take a philanthropic billionaire who reflects on inequality over one who buys an entire social media platform to ban people who say mean things about them, but the fact that either individual can wield that kind of power is a huge failure of the system as a whole.
I assume accidentally, you phrased this oddly. It's the top decile of Americans by wealth, which is roughly 30 million people. (Not to detract from your overall point, which is totally correct.)
the top 10% richest people own 93% of stocks
I assume accidentally, you phrased this oddly. It's the top decile of Americans by wealth, which is roughly 30 million people.
(Not to detract from your overall point, which is totally correct.)
I disagree. What difference does it make? It’s not like I have a choice in who gets to be a billionaire. Most of them (all of them?) make money with services and products that I can’t avoid...
I disagree. What difference does it make? It’s not like I have a choice in who gets to be a billionaire. Most of them (all of them?) make money with services and products that I can’t avoid without withdrawing from society. I can badmouth the bad ones all day every day for the rest of my life and it wouldn’t make a difference to them. I cant vote them out of power or canvass people to have them divorced from their power and they tend to be so well divested that boycotting will do nothing.
It’s true that most of our conversations here make no difference. But asking “how can I use this to exercise political power” is sort of like a student asking “when we will we ever use this” and...
It’s true that most of our conversations here make no difference. But asking “how can I use this to exercise political power” is sort of like a student asking “when we will we ever use this” and “will it be on the test.” You’re understandably frustrated about politics, but there’s more to life than political activism. It’s quite rare to be able to change anything we read in the news.
If we’re going to discuss the news (and this is totally optional), it seems like it should be with some genuine curiosity? We should want to understand what happened and how it happened, rather than assuming we already know the answers. Abstract, ideological abstractions about “billionaires” are a poor way to understand people.
I don’t have a deep enough an interest in Bill Gate’s life to read the book, so I appreciate the book review.
The difference between this and your analogy is that in your scenario a teacher is trying to give a student something useful that they believe that they will need in their life. What positive...
The difference between this and your analogy is that in your scenario a teacher is trying to give a student something useful that they believe that they will need in their life. What positive impact will happen from learning about any given billionaire's life? Keep in mind, this isn't actually news or current events; it's all about this one guy's completely subjective retrospective into his own life. He is a man who has a history of ruining people's lives, and by holding on to his wealth he passively makes life worse for everyone else in the country. Why is he any more worth trying to understand than anyone else on this planet? From my perspective, he is less worthy of inspection because of who he is, but it seems like you think the opposite. That's a popular perspective, but I think that's a very bad thing for society because it just further entrenches rich peoples' power.
Sure, unlike a teacher in a classroom, I’m not telling you what to read. We’re just two near-strangers talking on the Internet. I do think that if you’re going to discuss something at all, it...
Sure, unlike a teacher in a classroom, I’m not telling you what to read. We’re just two near-strangers talking on the Internet. I do think that if you’re going to discuss something at all, it should be in the spirit of actually wanting to know more about it.
Along those lines, when you say Bill Gates “has a habit of ruining people’s lives,” could you give an example of that?
As for why Bill Gates might be more interesting to read (or write about) about than someone else, it’s because he’s played a larger role in history than most people we are likely to meet, for better or for worse. When an author decides to write a book about someone, it doesn’t mean they’re more virtuous. People with power have the opportunity to do very good and very bad things, often both.
That isn’t to say that histories focusing on ordinary people can’t be interesting, too, though.
You've misread me, it was a history of ruining people's lives. I was referring in this case to his use of unfair business practices to destroy his competition.
You've misread me, it was a history of ruining people's lives. I was referring in this case to his use of unfair business practices to destroy his competition.
Oops, sorry about that! Having been through a couple of failed startups, I don't think of losing at business as a "your life is now ruined" kind of thing, not in Silicon Valley anyway. It's not...
Oops, sorry about that!
Having been through a couple of failed startups, I don't think of losing at business as a "your life is now ruined" kind of thing, not in Silicon Valley anyway. It's not fun but people get other jobs. There's no lasting shame in it.
(Missed this conversation until way late, but still wanted to make a point.) I think it's worth making a distinction between MacKenzie Scott, who was mostly just in the right place at the right...
(Missed this conversation until way late, but still wanted to make a point.)
I think it's worth making a distinction between MacKenzie Scott, who was mostly just in the right place at the right time, and is actively liquidating her fortune; and Gates, whose wealth is certainly ill-gotten, but who is also actively liquidating his fortune; and someone like Elon Musk, whose wealth is ill-gotten and who is using it for a malignant combination of ego massage and power consolidation.
Someone who really wants to and likes to "win", but is has changed what "winning" is now that he beat all of the previous competitors? Bringing childhood mortality as close to zero as possible is...
Someone who really wants to and likes to "win", but is has changed what "winning" is now that he beat all of the previous competitors? Bringing childhood mortality as close to zero as possible is truly the Dark Souls of philanthropic endeavors.
His childhood always seems to be described as middle class. His dad was a lawyer, his mom was on the board of the local ma Bell, a bank, and a local TV station. I have nothing against his parents,...
His childhood always seems to be described as middle class. His dad was a lawyer, his mom was on the board of the local ma Bell, a bank, and a local TV station. I have nothing against his parents, they seem like good people, but that doesn't look like middle class to me.
His first access to computers happened because he attended a high end prep school.He had access to computer time in the late 60's.
I don't actually think this is an intentional misrepresentation on his part. Most people see whatever circumstances they grew up in as normal/average. He's spent a lot of time among the world's most poor and he's one of the richest people in the world; I think it's thrown his sense of scale off.
I think the definition of "middle class" has also shifted over time from his childhood. I remember as a kid, my grandfather once proclaimed our family was in something like the top 10-20% of...
I think the definition of "middle class" has also shifted over time from his childhood.
I remember as a kid, my grandfather once proclaimed our family was in something like the top 10-20% of wealth in America? Can't remember the exact number but it was a shock because we weren't (and aren't!) millionaires by a long shot. I went to very nice private schools my whole life, and we lived in a nice house, but we couldn't be called rich compared to the actual rich kids I knew. No mansions, both parents working, just a comfortable quality of life for the 2000's. It actually spooked me because if we're upper middle class, then what the hell does the rest of America look like!?
And... Yeah, it's definitely gotten worse since then.
That's textbook upper-middle class territory: highly educated, affluent, performing self-directed work. I grew up in an upper-middle class 100k+ pop. suburb. Many people's parents were employed as...
That's textbook upper-middle class territory: highly educated, affluent, performing self-directed work. I grew up in an upper-middle class 100k+ pop. suburb. Many people's parents were employed as accountants, lawyers, doctors, scientists, engineers, journalists, managers, and so on. Common for people to own a little cabin a few hours away and a home computer.
We do have a weird thing of too many people considering themselves "middle class", though. There are families that have sent their kids to ivy league schools for generations, own a multi-million...
We do have a weird thing of too many people considering themselves "middle class", though. There are families that have sent their kids to ivy league schools for generations, own a multi-million dollar home, and have enough money to never have to work again, that genuinely consider themselves to be "upper middle class". The fact that Bill Gates's mom connected him with Warren Buffet when he was a kid I think would put him in at least a peripherally elite upbringing.
That is true. The upper-middle class is, by definition, peripheral to the upper class — socially, intellectually, and professionally. The student bodies of Ivy League and other top schools are...
That is true. The upper-middle class is, by definition, peripheral to the upper class — socially, intellectually, and professionally.
The student bodies of Ivy League and other top schools are primarily comprised of children from the upper and upper middle classes. One group offers intellectual capital. The other offers financial and social capital. The upper and upper middle classes have a symbiotic relationship.
CEOs, VCs, the old moneyed, and other masters of the (capitalistic) universe still have their lieutenants that run their companies and family offices. These lieutenants comprise the upper-middle class.
My hometown suburb was not the 'elite' suburb. There was another suburb where the upper class lived: they were the ones who employed our parents.
We had cabins a few hours out of town. "They" had second or third homes in other cities.
I had a friend in grade school (1970s). His parents were college educated (mine made it to 8th grade). He lived in what I considered to be an enormous house. And his father was my mother's "boss's...
too many people considering themselves "middle class"
I had a friend in grade school (1970s). His parents were college educated (mine made it to 8th grade). He lived in what I considered to be an enormous house. And his father was my mother's "boss's boss's boss" at an international company that had a foothold in my town.
We were talking one day and he mentioned that he was "middle class."
I interrupted him and said, "You're not middle class! You're rich. I'm middle class."
And he responded with, "No. You are poor!" which shocked me. I had never considered myself to be poor.
In retrospect, we were probably both a little correct: He was upper and I was lower.
In high school, my family was "the rich ones." I never thought we were rich, but I know we were certainly well off. When I could drive, I was just driving the old family minivan. Aside from my...
In high school, my family was "the rich ones." I never thought we were rich, but I know we were certainly well off. When I could drive, I was just driving the old family minivan. Aside from my parent's Honda S2000 (which Yes, in retrospect, says something), they drove 10+ years old Acuras that they bought used, which I'd try to sneak off with because they were nicer than the minivan. Sure, we went on annual vacations, but we never flew, always roadtripping it, staying in cheap hotels and camping. But I also had many friends who rarely, if ever, went on vacations.
We did live in a much nicer suburb than where most of my friends were from, and definitely our house was bigger and newer than all my friend's. And my parents owned 4 cars, even if 3 were old. My brother and I could shop at Abercrombie & Fitch and Hollister with regularity (which was not cheap - sometimes even t-shirts were $50). Our family usually did an annual snowboard/ski trip and we all owned our own gear.
Both my parents are college educated: a nurse and a CS/IT professional. But my mom only worked part time. Which thinking about it now, probably also points to us be "the rich ones."
On the flipside, among my younger brother's friends, our family was probably considered more middle of the road. The high school he went to was different from the high school I went to, even though we obviously lived in the same place (has to do with us moving while I was already in high school). So he went to the high school he was supposed to based on where we lived, which was full of rich families and rich kids. But I stayed at the more working class/lower middle class background high school. He had friends who's families had bigger houses and nicer cars. Some of his friends, when they started driving, had brand new cars. And if/when they wrecked those, they'd get another brand new car.
This bothered me a little in the book, yes. Sometimes he downplays so hard things that for 99% of people are alien, such as spending time in the fields, in cabins owned by his family, as if this...
This bothered me a little in the book, yes. Sometimes he downplays so hard things that for 99% of people are alien, such as spending time in the fields, in cabins owned by his family, as if this were something everybody has. Other than that, it's a good book!
I didn't read the article, but if the title is accurate that is a commendable take on things ( and I hate microsoft ). There are many billionaires who believe they are rich independent of...
I didn't read the article, but if the title is accurate that is a commendable take on things ( and I hate microsoft ).
There are many billionaires who believe they are rich independent of advantages given to them by their families, government contracts, and luck. Many see themselves as modern day Horatio Algers working harder than anyone else and being business geniuses. Sort of how royalty believed there was something special in their blood besides genetic defects from inbreeding.
I appreciate the acknowledgement that a lot has to do with WHERE he was born as well as the timing of his entrance into his chosen field.
That's something I've tried to impress on my own kids growing up. We happen to live in one of the most prosperous places in the world. And despite all the bad news in the press (and there's a LOT of it) there are billions of people around the world who will never even have a chance to 'make it' as far as we have because they happen to be born in places like rural India or Bolivia. Not their fault, they just weren't nearly as lucky.
So when they start to think about how badly they want to buy a better house or a newer car, my hope is that they'll also remember that most of the world only dreams of owning a house and a car like the one they already have. Gratitude matters.
Personally, I have gained a lot more than I ever thought I would at this stage of life, but largely because I happen to buy the right thing at the right time and just held onto it. It wasn't really 'smarts' so much as just tenacity through some difficult financial problems.
As my father used to say, "Time and chance happen to them all" (which I didnt realize til just now, is based on Ecclesiastes 9:11. Huh.)
He leaves out a somewhat important factor though. While he acknowledges that being born into a prosperous country is like winning the lottery, he was also born into a financially well off and secure family. That's like winning the lottery twice.
It's honestly kind of fascinating to see the parallels between Trump and Gates and how they ended up at completely different destinations despite coming from the same upbringing (white, born to wealthy parents, same time frame and in the right place at the right time).
He's definitely mentioned the benefits of growing up in an upper-middle-class family in many other discussions and I'm certain it's in the book.
Your description of “coming from the same upbringing” leaves out the influence from their parents, which I think is the primary factor in what most people consider “upbringing”. Unfortunately I don't know anything at all about Bill Gates’s upbringing and the article barely even mentions his grandmother. We do, however, know about Frank Trump’s raging narcissism and his treatment of Donald as the golden child (and his cruelty towards Frank Jr., Donald’s brother, who was originally supposed to be the golden child). Frank Jr.’s daughter, Mary Trump, has written and spoken about it at length and it's chilling.
Obviously we can't know how much calculated PR is going into any book like this, but I do get the impression of Gates as someone who's had a few "there but for the grace of god..." realisations through his philanthropic work. It'd be hard for any sufficiently intelligent and thoughtful person to look at the conditions some others grow up in and think that they still could have reached the same heights purely on merit, with such different starting points and opportunities.
Everything I've seen about Gates from his years at Microsoft still suggests he was a ruthless, self-interested businessman who screwed over plenty of people and companies along the way, but then his actions since do suggest a genuine belief in a better world. Makes me wonder what kind of mind leads a person to go that far for the goal of utter capitalist dominance while still seeing it for the rigged and unfair system that it is.
What follows is a rant, so please don't take anything I say personally, @Greg.
Billionaire philanthropy is PR in and of itself. It's something that the rich learned in the Gilded Age; improve their image or risk their power.
No, I am not saying that Gates's or anyone else's charity work does more bad than good.
But keep in mind that Gates is a man who has spent more than a decade being the richest man on the planet. To give a scale of how much money he still has, I did a quick internet search to find he has a net worth estimated to be worth around $160bn. Another internet search says that to lift every single American out of poverty would take $168bn.
Beyond that, every billionaire has a great deal of their money invested in the stock market, which means that the the mechanism that is supposed to make companies public often gets quite concentrated among billionaires. Right now the top 10% richest people own 93% of stocks. This allows them to get even richer without doing anything. Bill gates had a divorce and lost a great deal of his money because of that, and then because of his stocks he ended up making it all back and then some.
Philanthropy is all well and good, but the problem with billionaire philanthropy is that they should not have the power to be so effective to begin with. If one of them does things that you think are good, that's nice, but what if you don't? The most effective form of philanthropy is the stuff that will permanantly change things for the better, and that means involving yourself in politics and changing policy. It turns out that a lot of rich people spend their money on that kind of thing and it destroys democracy. The Koch family weren't only spending their money to support their business interests: a lot of it was to do what they thought would "fix" America. If you're on the Right you probably have a similarly bad opinion of George Soros who does the same thing.
I actually considered adding a similar rant myself and didn’t have the energy, so I appreciate you doing it for me!
Given the choice I’ll take a philanthropic billionaire who reflects on inequality over one who buys an entire social media platform to ban people who say mean things about them, but the fact that either individual can wield that kind of power is a huge failure of the system as a whole.
I assume accidentally, you phrased this oddly. It's the top decile of Americans by wealth, which is roughly 30 million people.
(Not to detract from your overall point, which is totally correct.)
It still seems like some billionaires are better than others. Until the radical change you're hoping for comes, it's worth making some distinctions.
I disagree. What difference does it make? It’s not like I have a choice in who gets to be a billionaire. Most of them (all of them?) make money with services and products that I can’t avoid without withdrawing from society. I can badmouth the bad ones all day every day for the rest of my life and it wouldn’t make a difference to them. I cant vote them out of power or canvass people to have them divorced from their power and they tend to be so well divested that boycotting will do nothing.
It’s true that most of our conversations here make no difference. But asking “how can I use this to exercise political power” is sort of like a student asking “when we will we ever use this” and “will it be on the test.” You’re understandably frustrated about politics, but there’s more to life than political activism. It’s quite rare to be able to change anything we read in the news.
If we’re going to discuss the news (and this is totally optional), it seems like it should be with some genuine curiosity? We should want to understand what happened and how it happened, rather than assuming we already know the answers. Abstract, ideological abstractions about “billionaires” are a poor way to understand people.
I don’t have a deep enough an interest in Bill Gate’s life to read the book, so I appreciate the book review.
The difference between this and your analogy is that in your scenario a teacher is trying to give a student something useful that they believe that they will need in their life. What positive impact will happen from learning about any given billionaire's life? Keep in mind, this isn't actually news or current events; it's all about this one guy's completely subjective retrospective into his own life. He is a man who has a history of ruining people's lives, and by holding on to his wealth he passively makes life worse for everyone else in the country. Why is he any more worth trying to understand than anyone else on this planet? From my perspective, he is less worthy of inspection because of who he is, but it seems like you think the opposite. That's a popular perspective, but I think that's a very bad thing for society because it just further entrenches rich peoples' power.
Sure, unlike a teacher in a classroom, I’m not telling you what to read. We’re just two near-strangers talking on the Internet. I do think that if you’re going to discuss something at all, it should be in the spirit of actually wanting to know more about it.
Along those lines, when you say Bill Gates “has a habit of ruining people’s lives,” could you give an example of that?
As for why Bill Gates might be more interesting to read (or write about) about than someone else, it’s because he’s played a larger role in history than most people we are likely to meet, for better or for worse. When an author decides to write a book about someone, it doesn’t mean they’re more virtuous. People with power have the opportunity to do very good and very bad things, often both.
That isn’t to say that histories focusing on ordinary people can’t be interesting, too, though.
You've misread me, it was a history of ruining people's lives. I was referring in this case to his use of unfair business practices to destroy his competition.
Oops, sorry about that!
Having been through a couple of failed startups, I don't think of losing at business as a "your life is now ruined" kind of thing, not in Silicon Valley anyway. It's not fun but people get other jobs. There's no lasting shame in it.
How is this not advocating for violence with a euphemism?
(Missed this conversation until way late, but still wanted to make a point.)
I think it's worth making a distinction between MacKenzie Scott, who was mostly just in the right place at the right time, and is actively liquidating her fortune; and Gates, whose wealth is certainly ill-gotten, but who is also actively liquidating his fortune; and someone like Elon Musk, whose wealth is ill-gotten and who is using it for a malignant combination of ego massage and power consolidation.
Someone who really wants to and likes to "win", but is has changed what "winning" is now that he beat all of the previous competitors? Bringing childhood mortality as close to zero as possible is truly the Dark Souls of philanthropic endeavors.
His childhood always seems to be described as middle class. His dad was a lawyer, his mom was on the board of the local ma Bell, a bank, and a local TV station. I have nothing against his parents, they seem like good people, but that doesn't look like middle class to me.
His first access to computers happened because he attended a high end prep school. He had access to computer time in the late 60's.
I don't actually think this is an intentional misrepresentation on his part. Most people see whatever circumstances they grew up in as normal/average. He's spent a lot of time among the world's most poor and he's one of the richest people in the world; I think it's thrown his sense of scale off.
I think the definition of "middle class" has also shifted over time from his childhood.
I remember as a kid, my grandfather once proclaimed our family was in something like the top 10-20% of wealth in America? Can't remember the exact number but it was a shock because we weren't (and aren't!) millionaires by a long shot. I went to very nice private schools my whole life, and we lived in a nice house, but we couldn't be called rich compared to the actual rich kids I knew. No mansions, both parents working, just a comfortable quality of life for the 2000's. It actually spooked me because if we're upper middle class, then what the hell does the rest of America look like!?
And... Yeah, it's definitely gotten worse since then.
That's textbook upper-middle class territory: highly educated, affluent, performing self-directed work. I grew up in an upper-middle class 100k+ pop. suburb. Many people's parents were employed as accountants, lawyers, doctors, scientists, engineers, journalists, managers, and so on. Common for people to own a little cabin a few hours away and a home computer.
We do have a weird thing of too many people considering themselves "middle class", though. There are families that have sent their kids to ivy league schools for generations, own a multi-million dollar home, and have enough money to never have to work again, that genuinely consider themselves to be "upper middle class". The fact that Bill Gates's mom connected him with Warren Buffet when he was a kid I think would put him in at least a peripherally elite upbringing.
That is true. The upper-middle class is, by definition, peripheral to the upper class — socially, intellectually, and professionally.
The student bodies of Ivy League and other top schools are primarily comprised of children from the upper and upper middle classes. One group offers intellectual capital. The other offers financial and social capital. The upper and upper middle classes have a symbiotic relationship.
CEOs, VCs, the old moneyed, and other masters of the (capitalistic) universe still have their lieutenants that run their companies and family offices. These lieutenants comprise the upper-middle class.
My hometown suburb was not the 'elite' suburb. There was another suburb where the upper class lived: they were the ones who employed our parents.
We had cabins a few hours out of town. "They" had second or third homes in other cities.
I had a friend in grade school (1970s). His parents were college educated (mine made it to 8th grade). He lived in what I considered to be an enormous house. And his father was my mother's "boss's boss's boss" at an international company that had a foothold in my town.
We were talking one day and he mentioned that he was "middle class."
I interrupted him and said, "You're not middle class! You're rich. I'm middle class."
And he responded with, "No. You are poor!" which shocked me. I had never considered myself to be poor.
In retrospect, we were probably both a little correct: He was upper and I was lower.
In high school, my family was "the rich ones." I never thought we were rich, but I know we were certainly well off. When I could drive, I was just driving the old family minivan. Aside from my parent's Honda S2000 (which Yes, in retrospect, says something), they drove 10+ years old Acuras that they bought used, which I'd try to sneak off with because they were nicer than the minivan. Sure, we went on annual vacations, but we never flew, always roadtripping it, staying in cheap hotels and camping. But I also had many friends who rarely, if ever, went on vacations.
We did live in a much nicer suburb than where most of my friends were from, and definitely our house was bigger and newer than all my friend's. And my parents owned 4 cars, even if 3 were old. My brother and I could shop at Abercrombie & Fitch and Hollister with regularity (which was not cheap - sometimes even t-shirts were $50). Our family usually did an annual snowboard/ski trip and we all owned our own gear.
Both my parents are college educated: a nurse and a CS/IT professional. But my mom only worked part time. Which thinking about it now, probably also points to us be "the rich ones."
On the flipside, among my younger brother's friends, our family was probably considered more middle of the road. The high school he went to was different from the high school I went to, even though we obviously lived in the same place (has to do with us moving while I was already in high school). So he went to the high school he was supposed to based on where we lived, which was full of rich families and rich kids. But I stayed at the more working class/lower middle class background high school. He had friends who's families had bigger houses and nicer cars. Some of his friends, when they started driving, had brand new cars. And if/when they wrecked those, they'd get another brand new car.
So it's interesting how relative it all is.
This bothered me a little in the book, yes. Sometimes he downplays so hard things that for 99% of people are alien, such as spending time in the fields, in cabins owned by his family, as if this were something everybody has. Other than that, it's a good book!
I didn't read the article, but if the title is accurate that is a commendable take on things ( and I hate microsoft ).
There are many billionaires who believe they are rich independent of advantages given to them by their families, government contracts, and luck. Many see themselves as modern day Horatio Algers working harder than anyone else and being business geniuses. Sort of how royalty believed there was something special in their blood besides genetic defects from inbreeding.
Let's see Paul Allen's memoir.