Unpopular Truths About Self-Made Wealth | Generated by AI
Question: What are some unpopular opinions about self-made rich people?
Answer:
Here are several genuinely unpopular (often politically incorrect) opinions about self-made billionaires and multimillionaires that you rarely hear praised in mainstream discourse:
- Most “self-made” success stories massively overstate personal genius and understate luck. Winning the “ovarian lottery” (born in a stable country, right era, right industry boom, right timing) plus surviving dozens of near-bankruptcy coin flips matters far more than most founders admit.
- A large fraction of self-made wealth comes from extracting economic rents rather than creating proportional value. Think regulatory capture, network effects that turn into monopolies, labor arbitrage, or financial engineering—things that make the founder rich without making society equivalently richer.
- Many self-made rich people are high-functioning sociopaths or at least severely narcissistic. Traits like extreme risk tolerance, willingness to fire thousands, and obsessive workaholism are rewarded in winner-take-all markets but are pathological in normal social contexts.
- Inheritance isn’t just money—it’s also invisible class advantages (better schools, safety nets, parental networks, freedom to take risks without starving). True “rags-to-riches” cases (born dirt-poor to top 0.01 %) are statistically rarer than being struck by lightning twice.
- Once someone reaches nine or ten figures, additional wealth accumulation is usually no longer about intelligence or hard work—it’s about capital compounding on itself and preferential access to deals average people never see.
- Self-made tycoons who lecture about “personal responsibility” while using offshore accounts, aggressive tax avoidance, or lobbying for subsidies are hypocrites on a cosmic scale.
- The “10x engineer” or “visionary genius” narrative is largely a self-serving myth. Most breakthrough companies succeed because of hundreds or thousands of underpaid employees, open-source code, government-funded research, and decades of prior art—yet the founder takes 99 % of the equity and all the credit.
- Extreme wealth tends to make even initially decent people worse: more paranoid, more entitled, more politically radical (in either direction), and less empathetic. Power corrupts, and billionaire-level money is power on steroids.
- Society would be better off with 90 % tax rates above ~$10–50 million (adjusted for inflation). Past that point, marginal wealth mostly funds status games, political capture, and dynasty-building rather than productive investment.
- The worship of self-made billionaires is a modern secular religion. We tell their stories like fairy tales because it lets the rest of us keep believing the system is fair and that we too could be one decision away from a private jet—if only we worked harder.
These opinions are unpopular because they threaten both the meritocracy myths (comforting to the middle class) and the self-image of the ultra-wealthy themselves. Yet they’re held quietly by many economists, sociologists, and even some second-generation rich kids who saw the sausage being made.