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this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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Technology
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I have to wonder if the entire concept of the business savvy billionaire is just a case of survivorship bias. Not for all of them, but a lot.
I mean, if you get the population of the civilized world together and have them start flipping coins, plenty of people are going to get heads 20 times in a row. Or if they’re from a rich family maybe they only have to get 10 heads in a row.
(Used round numbers for illustration. 20 heads in a row is only about 1 in a million, 10 heads is one in a thousand.)
So much of it is luck, starting from birth onwards.
Yep. I was going to write that maybe somebody like Warren Buffett would stand out as the real deal who is consistent and could do it again. But even if that’s true and he is 100% unique skill, he STILL got very lucky by birth.
He won the birth lottery, as it were
It's more like, it costs a lot of money to get a chance to flip those coins in the first place, so someone who's already rich to begin with will get many more tries.