Throughout our lives, we’ve been told over and over again that with pure hard work, by servicing the corporate system and by sacrificing our time for our betters, we will one day achieve our dreams.
We were told that all people start on a level playing field, and that the only reason some of us are richer than others comes down to a person’s willingness to put in longer hours… their ingenuity… their intellect.
Even as the wealth gap keeps widening, we look up to our “betters” because we hope to one day be as wealthy and snobbish as they are.
However, in reality, more than half of the wealthiest people in world have inherited their wealth, according to HowMuch.net.
Although the statistic is by no means comprehensive (indeed it is quite lacking), it seems to tear apart the assertion that hard work and gumption are the only things that are required to obtain massive wealth.
According to HowMuch.net, although they are fewer in number, the self-made rich are the richest people in the world. The top three richest people in the world happen to also be self-made billionaires: Bill Gates (79.4 billion dollars) of the US, Amancio Ortega of Spain (78.7 billion dollars) and Carlos Slim from Mexico (62.8 billion dollars).
Apparently, the self-made billionaires on the list managed to disrupt the status quo by coming up with revolutionary new tech; on the other hand, those who had inherited their wealth, much prefer to stay the course, according to the article. Of course, as we have seen with Bill Gates, self-made billionaires do love the status quo once they’re beneficiaries of it, and go to extraordinary lengths to suppress or buy out competitors.
Although HowMuch.net concludes that 48% of the richest people of each country were self-made, which thus implies that you apparently have a 50-50 shot at making it big… one should note that there are 1645 billionaires in the world, and the percentage of them who are self-made has fallen since 2012.
Indeed, a 1645/ 7300,000,000 chance of being a billionaire- or a 0.00001082% chance- is substantially different to the 100% chance you will have if you are born into Steve Jobs’ family…
This Article (Billionaires: Born or Self-Made? ) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author(CoNN) and AnonHQ.com.
i want to correct your map, i’m from algeria, our only billionair was at first partner with 3 friends he ordered to slaughter them and then ordered to burn their factory, the assurance company gave him money he went to france then came back to be a friend with the secrect president who own the terrorism of algeria for the black ten years of slaughering he gave him the only sugar factory and killed anyone tried to import sugar to algeria so our billionair become billiain for selling sugar in algeria by himself, the sugar is 0,13 dollars in world price but we still buy it it 1.3 in algeria coz he’s horrible
bill gates is a harvard drop out he had to be rich to get in the first place same with zuckerberg