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Why you’ll never be a billionaire
We aspire to the heights of wealth and luxury, but a rigged system keeps them up there and us down here
Back in high school, I was hanging out at the Waffle House late one night, as kids in ditchwater towns are wont to do. My classmate and I ended up sharing a booth with an older friend of his who was maybe in his early 30s. He bragged to us: “I’m gonna be the next Bill Gates.” My critique of capitalism wasn’t too sophisticated back then, but I knew enough about the mechanism by which wealth is created to see that the prospects of him becoming a mogul were virtually non-existent. Bill Gates owes his success to an irreproducible combination of factors, of which brains, ambition and talent were the least decisive.
I expressed my skepticism to my new acquaintance and he brushed me off with a “You’ll see.”
For some reason, this encounter stuck with me. Over the years, I’ve met lots of aspiring Bill Gateses, a few wannabe Steve Jobses and more than my fair share of future Elon Musks.
There are about 500 billionaires in the United States, so a crude estimate based on population places your chances of becoming one at 650,000-to-1. By comparison you have a 700,000-to-1 chance of getting hit by lightning.
