Let me ask you this: How’d Warren Buffet become Warren Buffet? At this point, it’s like asking if King Midas could really turn everything he touched into gold, but do you really know the answer?
If you read Buffet’s Wikipedia page, you’ll find a full-on Horatio Alger rags-to-riches story: As a kid, he sold Coca-Cola, magazines, and chewing gum; worked in his grandfather’s grocery store; and delivered newspapers. He worked at regional stock brokerage, then went on to Wharton. He spent time as a salesperson, a securities analyst, and took a public speaking course, and had a job working for another investor for a salary of $12,000 (around $121,000 today). Then he founded his own company.
Are you hearing anything about privilege? Nope, it’s a story of his hard work and entrepreneurial spirit. Which it would be except for the fact that his father was a four-term congressperson. That’s the thing people always leave out of the story. To Buffet’s credit, he has said he was born at the right time, in the right womb. In 2013, he told journalist Rebecca Jarvis, “The womb from which you emerge determines your fate to an enormous degree for most of the seven billion people in the world.” As Buffet so well knows, the results of our system are extremely asymmetrical.