Self made people are almost never self made.

[Wakinyan]

@Martin_Hyde

I think watching Downton Abbey has really helped me come to understand this issue better, as obviously I did not grow up in a society with such strictly defined classes. [Not claiming America is a classless society, but it’s not so clear cut as it was in the UK with a landed nobility.]

In one of the seasons of Downton Abbey, the Lord Grantham’s eldest daughter is engaged to a man who runs a newspaper empire. There is a scene where the newspaper publisher tells her, “I’m not ashamed of being a self-made man. I’m proud of it.”

It’s an important scene because it really distinguishes what differentiates self-made versus not self-made.

I come to think about my uncle who, if not “wealthy” was quite successful, and yes self made, but he never really got into the right circles because he didn’t have old money. This plagued a little bit, I think, because he enjoyed to climb the ladder, but hit a roof and there was nothing he could do about it.

[Sauron]

This discussion reminds me of a joke:

Humankind has decided they know everything there is to know, and no longer need God. So a scientist is dispatched to tell God this.

“We can do everything you can do,” the scientist says to God. “We have unlocked all the mysteries of the universe. You are not necessary any more.”

“Hmm,” God says. “Can you heal the sick and the lame?”

“Yes,” the scientist says. “Our medical technology allows us to cure any disease and repair any infirmity.”

“Okay, can you turn water into wine?” God asks.

“Yes,” the scientist says. “We have unlocked the secret of molecular manipulation, and we can easily modify the atomic sequence of water to make it wine.”

“You HAVE advanced,” God says. “Last question - can you make a human out of dust, as I did when I created Adam?”

“Yes,” the scientist says. “Through gene sequencing and DNA splicing techniques, we can pull the necessary components for a human from dirt and clone a living person.”

“I’d like to see that,” God says. “If you can do that, I’ll admit you don’t need Me any longer.”

“Okay,” the scientist says, and bends down to gather up a handful of dirt.

“Hold on there!” God says. “You have to make your own dirt first.”

[BrotherCadfael]

@msmith537

My great grandfather is a self made man. Wanting a fresh start away from the restrictions of his Irish/Italian upbringing, he bashed himself in the head with a shillelagh so as to forget the education he had received from his upper-middle class upbringing. He then built a ship with his own two hands and sailed across the Atlantic, where landed on a little undiscovered island off the coast of New England. He was a proud man and wouldn’t accept handouts, so he proceeded to murder every single person or creature living on the island, so as not to be tempted. Then he burnt all the vegetation, just to make sure he was starting with a clean slate. After a few lean years of living off fish he caught with his bare hands (he would not accept the use of any technology he didn’t invent), he was able to create a thriving farm growing nothing but crops from species of plants he had discovered himself.

He went on to form several thriving business. However his one regret was that he never considered himself a “self made man” since he was unable to invent the technology to either genetically engineer himself or travel back in time and impregnate his own mother.

@msmith537

Really the OP has a bit of a sour grapes tone to it. “I too could have achieved a meteoric rise to the middle if I had all the benefits my peers were given.” While it is true that no one grows up in a vacuum (except my great grandfather…who literally grew up in a vacuum), some people manage to create something extraordinary with the tools they were given while others produce jack shit even with all the advantages you could imagine.

Your grandfather’s name wasn’t Stonebender, was it?

[Dangerosa]

BTW, Larry Ellison seems pretty self made. Unless white guy (he is a Jewish white guy) is an automatic disqualification. If that is an automatic disqualification, Oprah Winfrey may be the only self made human in the world.

[Martin_Hyde]

@Dangerosa

BTW, Larry Ellison seems pretty self made. Unless white guy (he is a Jewish white guy) is an automatic disqualification. If that is an automatic disqualification, Oprah Winfrey may be the only self made human in the world.

Yeah, I didn’t know his history til I just looked it up but he’s not even one of the marginal cases. Born to an unwed mother, she gave him to her aunt and uncle as a kid because she couldn’t raise him. They were very middle class, he grew up in a two-bedroom apartment and attended regular public school in Chicago. He went to college but dropped out, then had a few different jobs and got into computer design and read some interesting papers on relational databases. This made him decide to start his own company with two other partners for $2,000 total investment (of which $1,200 came from his own savings and the rest from his two partners.) Through his management of the company Oracle then went on to become a monster in the database world and he’s worth just under $50bn through the growth of his original ownership and exercising of massive amounts of stock options for some 15+ years.

Some of the things that I think make someone more “marginal” for people are:

-Initial capital for investment came from family loans/gifts
-Family was well connected politically/in business and that allowed for early business success
-Family was wealthy and that had some general positive contribution to this person becoming wealthy, even if the family’s wealth wasn’t directly used to start the “self made man’s” fortune

I’d argue even those marginal cases (guys like Buffett and Gates fall in this category) are still self-made, their fortunes are the product of their own efforts. They were not made wealthy by inheritance or gift. [There is a persistent myth that Gates was granted a $1m trust fund as a kid from his wealthy grandfather, but to my knowledge this has been debunked.]

[Malthus]

To my mind, those claiming there are no “self-made” people are taking an absurdly straw-man approach to the term. Sure, nobody ever gave birth to themselves, but that isn’t how the term is really used!

What it usually means, is someone growing up in one walk of life, who through an apparent effort of will (no doubt helped along by dollops of good luck) changes their path into another and wealthier or more socially lauded path, making a noteworthy leap that few of his or her contemporaries could manage.

Anecdotally, my paternal grandfather is an example - he went from growing up dirt poor as the son of a farming family in Nova Scotia, worked in logging camps to earn the money to educate himself during the Great Depression, ended up a university professor and founder of a forest management institute.