The tech is very volatile and rewards for being in the right place at the right time can be staggering. Even allowing for a certain amount of genius, there is an awful lot of luck involved. I am not denying that there is skill and hard work involved in starting a tech business, but variations in those just do not explain the magnitude of differences in rewards.
So you end up with a near random cross section of dumbasses who were the smart one in high school and now think they have been proven right once and for all.
At least most PowerBall winners realize that it could have been anyone.
This is a plausible future but it’s not in the past. The contract contains the billion-dollar penalty, but so far, Twitter has been trying to force Musk to fulfill the contract, not break it.
Musk is weaseling around, either because he realizes he’s set far more than a single billion dollars on fire by buying Twitter in the first place or for the lulz, but officially the deal is still on.
This is a good analysis, I think. It’s also about being in position to take advantage of opportunity. To leverage it, you have to have access to huge sums of capital on relatively short notice, and shitty white dudes from wealthy families already spoiled by wealth are the ones in our society who do.
Take Facebook, for example. When a little university website created to creep on co-eds started to take off, Zuck was able to raise funding from friends of family to scale it quickly and dominate this new space of “social media”. If a woman of colour had created something similar*, she would have no such access, and the idea would have died on the vine. Thus we have no billionaire women of colour.
*Not to creep on co-eds of course, but you know what I mean
Another example is Bill Gates. He was born into a pretty wealthy family and crucially the parents at his private school donated computer access for students at a time when that was both highly unusual and hideously expensive. Again, that’s not to deny any of his real achievements, but there were few people in the world better positioned to take advantage of the microcomputer boom of the seventies and everything that followed.
