While that's true, people who do end up being millionaires or even billionaires almost never come from any other background. Rich parents seem to be a prerequisite for starting successful businesses - and in several of these cases, having the extra spare funds to turn an initally stagnant business into a success.

Having a wealthy family helps you in a few different ways:

- Fallback scenario. Wordt case they can go home, or they have a heritage at one point.

- Environment. Probably a more stable environment / background.

- Network. Network to customers, capital, pr.

- Access to capital. Easier today.

Especially the fallback scenario is almost always overlooked. Most people who claim to have risked it all and were "living on the streets", always had some fallback in forms of well off parents (or simply stable parents).

It's just like the starving artist syndrome, where most of these "starving artists" actually have a huge fallback, but they simply don't want to use it. But just by being there it helps a lot.

Free climbing is a lot different than climbing with ropes. Even if you didn't need to use them.

Don’t think of it as a Boolean requirement but rather changing the difficulty factor, with key thresholds for going to the next level: it’s much harder for a poor kid to reach middle class stability than for a kid from a $1M-ish family to hit $10M. Having a high-status education, access to their parents’ social network, familiarity with banking and finance, and the ability to know that taking a chance and failing means that you get a “boring” upper middle class life rather than being on the streets all make it much easier for someone to even try something ambitious.

> people born with family whealth (sic)

Most successful Phillips Exeter graduate doesn't quite have that ring for the Horatio Alger idea that is being pushed.