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Comment by EForEndeavour | Hacker News Reader

I legitimately can't tell if this is satire, particularly the "self-made" part.

Bezos' parents loaned him a quarter-million dollars in 1995 [1].

Gates' mother, while on the board of directors of United Way, convinced IBM to invest in MS in 1980 [2].

Zuckerberg's parents sent him to the crazy selective and expensive boarding school Philips Exeter Academy and was privately tutored in comp sci before college [3].

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/02/how-jeff-bezos-got-his-paren...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-gates-64-...

[3] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-fa...

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It's a long way from quarter of a million to Amazon.

How many people get quarter of a million in inheritance or have rich parents? It's silly to call out "self made" just because someone got a loan. Bezos did not inherit billions of dollars, he is a billionaire now. By any metric he is a self made billionaire.

It's a lot longer from zero (or negative, in you have student loans) to a quarter million if you're working outside the SV/software engineer salary bubble.

No complaint here. I was referring to calling out Bezos for not being "self made".

The point isn't that it wasn't hard work to grow from $250,000 to billions. The point is that there's a big difference between saying "anyone who works hard can build a company like Amazon" and "anyone who works hard and got $250,000 from their parents can build a company like Amazon."

Anyone who says that (anyone who works had can build a company like Amazon) is a fool. Most likely suffering from survivorship bias.

You cannot. But Bezos did not inherit billions and living on them. He is self made, maybe he did not start at zero, but he did 1000x or 10000x (or even more) what he received. If someone had received a loan of 1000 dollars, I doubt anyone would say he isn't self made when he reached a million.

This is a straw man. Nobody thinks that "self-made" means that you literally had no help whatsoever. Bezos was a hedge-fund SVP before starting Amazon, so it's not as if he was particularly hurting for more funding.

It's not a straw man if the first commenter was intending to use "self-made" to actually mean something to a reader anywhere close to an average reader. To an average reader, even on this website which probably skews American and wealthy, it's just not reasonable to refer to someone as a "self-made billionaire" when they received a loan from their parents that's well over 3 times the median household income in the United States.

Self-made just means that you made the money with your own effort as opposed to inherited it. There's nothing in that comment that attempts to paint them as relatable. If they wanted to do that, they would talk about Bezo's teenage mother and adoptive Cuban-immigrant father. For all we know, that $250,000 could have been money gifted to Bezo's parents while he was employed at DE Shaw.

> Self-made just means that you made the money with your own effort as opposed to inherited it. There's nothing in that comment that attempts to paint them as relatable.

I disagree. The point of the term is not to describe a financial technicality. If someone inherited $900m and worked really hard to earn another $100m, I think most people would be confused to hear them described as a self-made billionaire. On the other hand, of course, people wouldn't tend to be confused if you described some billionaire as self-made if they grew up lower-middle-class and their parents gave them $100 when they turned 18.

So, yes, it's not an "all or nothing" thing, but it is absolutely about conveying relatability to a certain audience. We can reasonably disagree about whether describing Bezos as self-made is appropriate for the HN audience, but I tend to think the $250k "business loan" from his parents should at the bare minimum accompany the inspiring anecdotes about making a desk from a door (which, from what I have read, was literally done to symbolize the imaginary need for extreme frugality).

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