Are you suggesting his privilege wrote his software for him? Much less had the vision to start a software company in the 1970s - which his parents thought was a bad idea. They did not like the idea of him dropping out, he did it anyway.
Paul Allen didn't come from any kind of privilege. So is the theory that he should be robbed of his amazing success and effort also, by association with Gates' association with his father and his father's association with Gates' grandfather? He did go to the same school as Gates after all.
Where I live, the wife of an oil & gas billionaire recently started up a donut shop. As for the location of her shop, she casually chose a quaint little shopping center in the heart of the most expensive and historically rich neighborhood in the entire surrounding metropolitan area and possibly the whole state. While having a shop in this area would be a dream for most, for her it was a given.
It's been a nice little success. It might be the most successful independently owned donut shop in the area.
But we all know that her donut shop, despite the significant amount of cash necessary to purchase the building and jumpstart the business, is just a hobby for her, the same way sewing quilts is a hobby to my mom. My mom doesn't fret about the few hundred bucks she may put into her quilts, even if she doesn't make a dime off of them. And the billionaire's wife won't fret if the hundreds of thousands of dollars necessary to even test the business all go to waste because nobody buys their donuts. They will barely notice the money has been spent. If my mom wanted to just start up a donut shop here for fun, well, that would be absolutely impossible--it wouldn't even be an option.
Why do I bring any of this up? Because context matters. Bill Gates is self-made, yes, but you have to interpret "self-made" in context. His little jumpstart, which appears minor in the shadow of Microsoft, constituted more success than most people in America will ever enjoy over the course of their lifetimes.
The privilege of having a well-to-do family gives you the ability to take more risks, knowing that if they fail you have a cushion to fall on.
I worked with someone who failed businesses over and over, each time going back to live off his family's wealth for a bit until trying the next businesses, until finally one of them hit and made tons of money. If you ask him, he'll tell you he didn't inherit a cent, and was a self-made millionaire. Technically accurate, but doesn't tell the full story.
Many people wrote software in the 1970s and started software companies in the 1970s.
He is not suggesting his privilege wrote Gates software for him, but that privilege gave Gates a substantial advantage over the large number of other people writing software and starting software companies at the same time.
His privilege is unlikely to have been a sufficient condition to explain his success, but it is also entirely unrealistic to assume that his privileged background did not provide him with a number of benefits, down to even basic stuff like growing up in an environment where success and ambition is expected and normal.
Something I think often is left out of success accounting is an advantage almost everyone born in a large, well-functioning society enjoys: access to a large, well-functioning society.
If the civilization into which Bill Gates sold software were 1/10th the size, it would have generated 1/10th the value with almost the identical amount of work on his part. There's an enormous lift given to fortunes just by the fact that they are built in the context of a civilization which is large enough to support them.
None of that is to say that either specific inherited status or personal hard work aren't huge contributors to success as well, but it takes an enormous amount of work and attention to make sure that a large, well-functioning civilization remains large and well-functioning, and that's an oft-neglected factor in how big these large fortunes become.
I think you miscategorize the opposition here. The argument isn't that Gates didn't work hard. The issue is that by din of his family's socioeconomic status, he was presented with opportunities that most people didn't have.
If you want to put it in numerical terms: going from 100M to 100B is arguably easier than going from -10K to +100M (even though there is less money involved)
Everyone has unique opportunities. We'll never have perfect equality of opportunity or social connections. Buffett and Gates weren't born into the lower strata of society, but nor were they born into the very upper elite. How many of Gates's classmates at his prep school or at Harvard did nearly as well as he? How often do children of congressmen/women become multibillionaires? We can divy up privilege endlessly (for having a lawyer dad, for having decent parents at all, for being born in the first world, for surviving infancy), but the only point of the article was to show whose wealth was inherited and whose was not.
What was the unique opportunity of that kid some streets down here that got gunned down when he was 10 years old?
What was the unique opportunity of the record amount of slaves worldwide? (by the way, did you knew the world has more "traditional" slaves now than any other time in history?)
Or... what is my unique opportunity? Being in debt? Not having a single important connection? Going to shitty university? Yes, I am intelligent, I make games, but I see lots of people with less skill than me earning millions, just because they were friends of someone somewhere or their dad was the minister of something in the government. Ultimate example: Eike Batista, that CLEARLY is incompetent, since none of the business he started on his own had profits, yet his father that was the mining minister obviously had a hand in Eike 90% accuracy in finding minerals in areas previously surveyed by the goverment during his father tenure while this information is "secret" and private companies should not know, and the government recently happily handed him billions and kicked out thousands of people from their homes so he could make his lastest failure project.
Sure, but the fact that only a tiny minority of highly privileged people have the skill and extraordinary drive to move into the stratosphere doesn't change the fact that people like Gates[1] took advantage of opportunities that don't remotely resemble the opportunities that normal people get. Their billions may be self made in the sense they were unlikely to have been achieved by anyone else in their position, but not in the sense that they were likely to have had comparable success in any position but the one they found themselves in.
[1]and perhaps others like Zuckerberg more so than Buffet, who could probably have somewhat more slowly honed his investment skills and found patrons whilst working the sort of day job people with ordinary middle class backgrounds can easily get.
I don't know, I think the point of the article was to show that the uber-wealthy of America is more of a meritocracy than most think.
While that's somewhat true, the fact remains that almost all of the people on that list might not be there if they weren't born into at least the upper middle class. They took advantage of the privileges given to them, so it's not like they don't deserve it. But there are likely those from poverty and the lower middle class who work their ass off setting up businesses in things they have access to, mainly restaurants/stores, and only ever move into the upper middle class as hard as they try and as gifted/intelligent as they may be.
