The Bill Gates Fantasy

(CALGARY, Alberta) – There are two main ways to become really rich. The first involves luck—e.g. win a big lottery. The second involves being born on third base (and growing up believing you hit a triple)…hmmm…also luck. Is this a contradiction? Let us explore further.

The richest person in the world today, outside of middle-eastern autocrats, is William Henry “Bill” Gates III, with a net worth in the ethereal neighborhood of $66,000,000,000 ($66 billion). If he were to spend $1 million a day, it would take him 180 years to spend it all. (Actually, this would only be the case if he kept the money underneath an oversized mattress so that it did not continue to increase through interest or stock growth as he was spending it.)

Question: Did Bill Gates actually earn any of this fortune or was it just luck on his part? Let us find out.

From the colonial era forward all successful American businessmen came from privileged backgrounds. There was one exceptional period, the 1850s. As sociologist C. Wright Mills observed: “The best time during the history of the United States for the poor boy ambitious for high business success to have been born was around the year 1835.”

Historians have compiled a list of the 75 richest individuals in history, going all the way back to Cleopatra. One incredible fact about the list is that fourteen of those (20%) were Americans, born within nine years of each other in the mid-nineteenth century.

This anomalous event occurred because in the last third of the 19th century, American society had began a major transformation. Railroads were being built, oil was being discovered and mining expanded apace; Wall Street was emerging and industrial manufacturing began in earnest. All the rules from the old economy were being broken and remade. The list above is of men (except Green) who were in their twenties and thirties when the Civil War ended. Born a decade before or after 1835, and they were too young or too old (mentally) to take advantage of the economically unique, expanding opportunities.

If we jump ahead to the last quarter of the twentieth century, we find the same process occurring again.

January 1975 is recognized as the beginning of the microcomputer revolution: The Altair 8800 was offered to hobbyists and a few, like Bill Gates and Paul Allen (co-founders of Microsoft) jumped on it like a lion encountering a wandering stray antelope.

It was, like the 1850s—a matter of being psychologically ready or not. As long-time senior Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold said

“If you’re too old in 1975 then you’d already have a job at IBM out of college, and once people started at IBM, they had a real hard time making the transition to the new world. You had this multibillion dollar business making mainframes, and if you were part of that, you’d think, Why screw around with these little pathetic computers? That was the computer industry to those people, and it had nothing to do with this new revolution. They were blinded by that being the only vision of computing. They made a nice living. It’s just that there was no opportunity to become a zillionaire and make an impact on the world.”

Anyone more than a few years out of college by 1975 was already part of the old paradigm. An equivalent computer-people date of birth list: Read Full Article