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Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

It’s totally false even ignoring extreme outliers like Tim Cook. The reason there are so many angel investors in the Bay Area is because of the feedback loop of ipos giving regular employees 1-5M pretty often (and 5-50M+ less often). It’s also part of the reason a pretty unremarkable and small home on the peninsula costs $3M.

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You don't have to be Tim Cook for the usual "save/invest x% of your take-home income" advice to pay dividends. A 22-year starting a job in investment banking or Big 4 management consulting will do just fine without needing to start their own business.

I wouldn't call a top engineer at a top company a "regular employee". Anyone with $1M+/yr in stock from their company is also a fringe outlier. Top talent at medium-sized companies are not making that, and regular rank-and-file at FAANG is not making that. I think the "NEVER" in the article is really a "statistically never". Yes, you can be pedantic (welcome to HN) and point out a few outliers, but it's still "never," in the sense of I'll Never hit the lottery.

But by definition everyone who’s rich is an outlier. :)

The question is, are more of them rich from salary, from capital ownership, or from inherited wealth?

In the US, the broad “rich”—about the top 1% by income—overwhelmingly make their income from salaries and wages (https://www.cnbc.com/2015/04/09/where-the-rich-make-their-in...). However, the ultrarich—say, the top 0.1%—tend to make it from capital and inheritance.

Assuming financial gurus are trying to give feasible advice for how to become comfortably rich, the safest bet with the highest expected value is probably something like “get an elite professional education and find a spot in the elite managerial/professional class.” I.e., banker, MBA, corporate lawyer, or (for all the HN readers) FAANG engineer.

If you get rich from incentive stock options you have technically been working for yourself.

The underlying gist of “You’ll NEVER get rich by working for someone else” is that you should look for opportunities to build wealth that’s not tied to hour-by-hour labor. You can do this by owning your own business, or by looking for ways to own equity in valuable assets beyond your regular job.

I agree with your main point that you want a job where your compensation is not directly correlated to hours worked. I'd still argue that that's a very different argument than "you can't work for someone else and get rich" or that getting paid in stock options, as an employee with a boss, is really "working for yourself".

I mean, enterprise software sales folks can get rich being paid on commission, "influencers" can get rich being paid by affiliate links, and none of them have any ownership in the business.

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