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Comment by sebastien_b | Hacker News Reader

People being “down on their luck” is usually through something else than “bad luck” - it’s far more often because of systemic problems (like how Black people have historically been marginalized, and continue to be).

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So then people who have built wealth completely on their own (self-made) and built great US companies did so because they were not marginalized? That's nonsense.

LOLs way to twist my words out of context.

I was specifically referring to people less fortunate, usually given far less opportunities, often due to their race, religion or something similar.

And if you don’t believe that’s true, then that is nonsense.

No one has “built wealth completely on their own”. Every rich person, in every country on earth, has in some way been assisted in building their wealth, whether that’s directly, like Bezos getting $250k from his parents (nearly half a million in 2020 dollars), or indirectly, like Buffet building a substantial amount of his holdings on monopolies in an era when the federal government was aggresively downsizing its anti-trust investigation and enforcement efforts, or the modern internet giants building fortunes on the bones of the federal and state research that created and maintain the physical infrastructre of the web.

No one builds wealth entirely on their own. And the people who are the most "self-made", as in were born into poverty and ended up in upper middle class or higher income levels, the numbers of people like that are so low that they fall into the noise you'd see in any random distribution. There's no difference between these people and millions of others, other than just getting lucky.

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