Yeah, from shoestring to millionaire, right? Not so much.
Bill Gates was born into an already very wealthy family. He enjoyed an top notch education, had access to promising early technology and - maybe most important, had connections through his friends and family that he could leverage.
His most important deal he didn't make because he creating a unique value, but because of - some might argue - somewhat shady business practices, where he ripped off the value created by someone else.
He made money by arbitration of value. That is not the same as creating that value.
I doubt that there was anything uniquely special of value created by Bill Gates that justifies him having access to a million times the resources that an everyday citizen has.
I don't doubt that he's a hard and dedicated worker. But I've already made the argument that this is not the factor deciding whether you get rich or not.
Luck, preparation, luck, endurance, luck, risk-taking and luck are. By being rich, you can make sure you have the preparation, the endurance and the capacity for risk-taking. You still need luck.
You seem to have got stranded down the wrong path. I'm not talking about "Yeah, from shoestring to millionaire, right?"
It doesn't matter if someone was a millionaire and took a risk and made loads of money, or whether Bill Gates worked hard or not. When they made that new money, they did so by creating value, because people paid them for their product or service.
When it comes to Bill Gates, Microsoft made and supplied the software that has computerised almost all businesses worldwide and home computers for decades. That is obvious, and enormous, value.
It makes sense in the conclusion. I don't think I agree with the premises.
None of the products that Bill Gates made himself were uniquely brilliant. He did not make money by himself writing software that provided unique value. He made a very good Basic compiler, but that's not where his wealth comes from.
His breakthrough deal with was with IBM, where he arbitrated between IBM and Tim Patterson - without either party knowing of the other. That's not value he created, that's value he arbitrated.
Now, you might say, but that is the value he provided, the arbitration. But that is not value created by any means and it's not necessarily a function of ingenuity or hard work or perseverance, but it's a function of well-connectedness, of knowing-the-right-people, of moving-in-the-right circles.
And that again are areas where being wealthy and connected, going to the right schools, speaking the right lingo and knowing the right people will give you an invaluable advantage.
The value created is in what his customers paid for: computers that worked for them in business and in their homes.
Things don't have to be unique to create value. They just have to be worth their price. And if you charge people a price and they pay it, you can be pretty sure you created value for them. And so if someone like that is super rich, you can be sure they likely created a lot of value.
You still seem stuck on "it's easier for some people than others to create value", which is still not relevant to this point.
In this particular example, the value was not created by Bill Gates or Microsoft, he only leveraged his connected position to sell IBM somebody else's product. The value was created by someone else.
So no, I'm not stuck on the position "it's easier for some people than others to create value", I'm stuck on the "arbitrage is not creating value" position.
I'm not saying that Bill Gates wrote, maintained, upgraded, marketed, sold, etc Microsoft software all by himself. I'm saying that he created value for his customers, and so they paid him.
He did that via a series of voluntary (again, this is the private sector, where you have to make a voluntary agreement with someone - you can't just throw them in jail if they don't pay you the taxes you decided you want) agreements with other businesses, and with employees, and with customers.
As I wrote before; I don't think that arbitrage and gatekeeping are the same as creating value. It's capturing the differences in the perceptions of value of two parties. But it's not creating said value.
Let's once again go back to the Microsoft/IBM deal; what value exactly would have Bill Gates able to "create" for IBM, if not for the exiting work of 86-DOS?
Nothing. Because in this case there was no value created by him. He would have had to write he required software to actually deliver the value instead.
And that's the case in many of such dealings. You could get rid of all the gatekeepers and arbitrage-takers and there would still be value to be sold. But get rid of the value-creators and the gatekeepers and arbitrage-takers don't have anything to work with.
Gatekeeping and leveraging of existing value is just another form of market failure.
Free markets operate under the assumption that all the market participants have total knowledge about the various offers at hand. If they don't know the various offers, then they cannot make an informed decision; the market fails. Gatekeepers and arbitrage benefit from this market failure.
Bill Gates was born into an already very wealthy family. He enjoyed an top notch education, had access to promising early technology and - maybe most important, had connections through his friends and family that he could leverage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#IBM_partnership
His most important deal he didn't make because he creating a unique value, but because of - some might argue - somewhat shady business practices, where he ripped off the value created by someone else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS#Creation_of_PC_DOS
He made money by arbitration of value. That is not the same as creating that value.
I doubt that there was anything uniquely special of value created by Bill Gates that justifies him having access to a million times the resources that an everyday citizen has.
I don't doubt that he's a hard and dedicated worker. But I've already made the argument that this is not the factor deciding whether you get rich or not.
Luck, preparation, luck, endurance, luck, risk-taking and luck are. By being rich, you can make sure you have the preparation, the endurance and the capacity for risk-taking. You still need luck.