this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
263 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37747 readers
210 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
He sure is lucky for someone so stupid.
I have to wonder if the entire concept of the business savvy billionaire is just a case of survivorship bias. Not for all of them, but a lot.
I mean, if you get the population of the civilized world together and have them start flipping coins, plenty of people are going to get heads 20 times in a row. Or if they’re from a rich family maybe they only have to get 10 heads in a row.
(Used round numbers for illustration. 20 heads in a row is only about 1 in a million, 10 heads is one in a thousand.)
So much of it is luck, starting from birth onwards.
Yep. I was going to write that maybe somebody like Warren Buffett would stand out as the real deal who is consistent and could do it again. But even if that’s true and he is 100% unique skill, he STILL got very lucky by birth.
He won the birth lottery, as it were
It's more like, it costs a lot of money to get a chance to flip those coins in the first place, so someone who's already rich to begin with will get many more tries.
The world tends to find that having an extraordinarily wealthy parent makes its own luck.