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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13026 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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He also made it clear that you aren't going to even be able to take those risks unless you're a multi millionaire first.

I wonder how true this is. Looking at the richest men in America:

  1. Musk: Started his first company in 1995 with about $60k of capital in 2026 dollars and seemed to just bootstrap his success from that. His dad famously owned an emerald mine, but there's conflicting reports about how much money that actually brought in and he was estranged from his dad.

  2. Larry Ellison: mildly shitty childhood, raised by aunt and uncle, started his business with $11k starting capital in 2025 dollars, of which he personally invested about $6k. Not a multimillionaire and didn't come from money as far as I can tell.

  3. Zucc: professional parents, high status schools, probably UMC or LUC. It's not clear how much starting capital Facebook requires from a cursory skim, but I can't imagine it was a lot considering its humble beginnings. He had a parental safety net, but certainly wasn't a multi millionaire.

  4. Jeff Bezos: born to a teenage mother (high school student) and father (an alcoholic "Danish unicyclist"). Later adopted by a Cuban stepfather (petroleum engineer). I guess his mom's dad was a regional director of the atomic energy commission? Bezos had a successful professional career after college and started Amazon with $600k of capital in 2025 dollars from his parents.

  5. Larry Page: college professor parents. High status summer schools. Got some seed funding for basic equipment and then managed to attract bigger investors with demos of the technology.

I don't really think that any of these people were only in a position to take risks from having millions already. Bezos is probably the closest thing to this given the size of the investment his parents put in (although it's a mystery to me where they got that money from in the first place). The most you can say for the rest of these is that their lives wouldn't have been over had their businesses not succeeded and they could have moved in with their parents or something - but that goes for a lot of people, not just multi millionaires.

I think he meant it more in the way that you can't swing for the fences on day one. You have to aim for millions before you get to billions.

I think he meant it more in the way that you can't swing for the fences on day one. You have to aim for millions before you get to billions.

Looks like that's not true, at least if you're doing it by founding a company -- Ellison, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Page all did it in one shot.

Bezos was already rich by normal-person standards after four years at DE Shaw, during which he was promoted unusually rapidly so was presumably a high performer. (Incidentally, I think this answers the question about where Bezos Sr got the $600k from - a lot of it was Jeff's own money but in the 1990's startup culture daddy was a better story).

Maybe he was full of shit on that one, then. I'm not a billionaire, so it's hard to speak from experience.

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