Twitter debunks billionaires’ ‘rags to riches’ tales—reveals privilege behind success

Everyone loves a good rags-to-riches story. These tales give us hope, something to aspire to, and the belief that if we just worked hard enough—kept our heads down, pushed through the burnout, took calculated risks—then maybe we, too, could achieve extraordinary wealth. Pop culture and news outlets often glorify the narratives of the world's wealthiest and most powerful people, framing their success as the result of hard work, grit, and unyielding determination.

However, the reality is often far less romantic. Many of these individuals didn’t rise from humble beginnings but instead started from a place of privilege. Whether it was family wealth, elite connections, or access to resources most people can only dream of, they had significant help along the way. While their achievements might still require effort and vision, the playing field was anything but even.

X user Aidan Smith made this point in a series of tweets where he unraveled how Jeff Bezos and some of his equally rich peers reached where they are today. Reacting to Jon Erlichman's tweet about how Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in his garage, Smith wrote: "Cute propaganda. In reality, Bezos's mommy and daddy gave him $245,573 to stop Amazon from failing in 1995, but you'd never know it from listening to our right-wing mainstream media that blames poverty on personal failure and attributes wealth to personal virtue."

"You can find this in the backstory of almost every billionaire. The story of Bill Gates is told as if he was a normal guy who dropped out of college to pursue his dream when in reality his mom Mary Gates, the president of United Way, convinced IBM to hire Microsoft to build an OS," Smith continued. "Gates is a talented individual but his career break wouldn’t have happened if he wasn’t the child of wealthy, well-connected parents who were able to convince IBM to hire the-then obscure Microsoft to build an OS. He likely wouldn’t be a billionaire if he was born working-class."

"Even if you're not born to mega-celebrities it really can't be stressed enough how much a leg up children of the wealthy get even indirectly. Mark Zuckerberg's wealthy parents sent him to Phillips Exeter Academy (tuition: almost $57,000 for boarding) and got software developer David Newman to give him private tutoring in computer science before he even entered college. Zuckerberg, is, like others mentioned, an intelligent individual in his own right, but if he was born into a working-class family he simply wouldn't have had the same opportunities as he did," he pointed out.

"Remember: People took such an interest in Zuckerberg to begin with because he already entered college with the reputation as a computing prodigy, which, again, couldn't have happened if his parents didn't hire a software developer to tutor him. The benefits of having wealthy parents, even if they don't give you a 1/4 million as Bezos' did, can't be underestimated. There is no fair playing field," Smith tweeted. Speaking to Bored Panda, he explained that Americans aren't the only ones to believe such myths about businessmen while the truth is a mere Google search away.

"It's far from a U.S.-exclusive phenomenon, but in America, it's easier for most people to imagine becoming a billionaire themselves than it is to imagine an economic order in which a handful of people own half the world’s wealth. Social mobility from working-class to middle-class is increasingly out of reach and the illusion that one can conceivably amass a net worth of over a billion dollars is a comforting fantasy for many people," he said, before explaining why this belief that certain famous billionaires are self-made when they really aren't is harmful to a variety of reasons. "For one, even in the rare cases in which people from working-class backgrounds amass exorbitant wealth, it's still not 'self-made' given that amassing wealth on that scale will always have come from ruthless exploitation of others," he said.

This article originally appeared 3 years ago.