The Myth Of The "Self-Made" Billionaire

[Music] this episode and others like it are made possible by the generous support of my patrons on patreon if you'd like to help support this channel and get early access to every video consider becoming a patron at patreon.com second thought big news on rihanna the superstar singer and entrepreneur gaining a new title billionaire chief business correspondent rebecca jarvis joins us with more on the talented media moguls incredible journey good morning rebecca good morning robin yeah this is a great story a fun one women entrepreneurs and founders business leaders they are moguls they are creating businesses they are disrupting industries and rihanna is among them she can now add billionaire to the top of her titles list here in the united states we'll often hear stories like these it's no secret that americans love to hear about billionaires you'll find them everywhere they're on the news have their own tv shows movies and even make their way into elected office specifically we consistently give massive audiences to self-made billionaires the people who unlike the aristocrats and monarchs of yore didn't simply inherit their wealth in this episode we're talking about the obsession with so-called self-made billionaires how misleading that term can be and everything wrong with the myth of the self-made person at the heart of every favorable depiction of a billionaire is this idea that they have earned their success and their wealth the most compelling stories are those of billionaires who through sheer hard work and grit so we're told have conquered the american dream and made a better life for themselves those around them and our society as a whole but there are a number of reasons this is simply incorrect we'll get to exactly how this idea is wrong in a second but first we should talk about why the myth of self-made billionaires is such a problem for starters vanishingly few people ever become billionaires in the u.s it's around 600 people or 0.0002 percent of the population perversely however the myth of the self-made billionaire tries to trick you into believing that anybody yes even you dear viewer could one day be just like them after all if they can do it so can you you already know how they attempt to sell this falsehood it's always so incredibly simple they tell you they started from nothing that they were once just like you they too had a 9-5 job that they hated they too had trouble paying their bills but instead of complaining they just worked harder and eventually after 100 hour work weeks they were able to lift themselves up by their bootstraps and just look at them now here's where the problems start if they can successfully convince you that one they have earned their wealth and two that you can do it too they can use those two assumptions to convince you of some far more nefarious things for starters they can convince you to act against your own self-interest and the interest of the vast majority of americans the most obvious example of this is making it seem like it would be better for everyone if billionaires paid less in taxes if we just got the government out of the way of these people who have proven to us that they are visionaries that they alone know how to manage money to be clear the ultra-rich already have a good way of avoiding taxes you can see exactly how they do it in our video how billionaires pay less in taxes than you but of course that doesn't matter since they'll always try to lower that number further and further the more they do the less money goes towards things that actually affect your day-to-day life roads public services health care education the more they keep of the wealth they have no intention of spending in the first place the worse off we all are they'll convince you that that might be you someday that when you're in their shoes you'll want the same thing after all what's the government ever done for you we'll get to just how much it's done for them but first let's get back to the self-made story in some cases that story is simply a blatant lie take elon musk and jeff bezos the last decade's favorite billionaire duo loves to weave a compelling story of their 100 american-made success jeff bezos likes to tell this story of a young guy who built a strong work ethic at his mcdonald's job he loves to emphasize how it was his hard work that eventually landed him a spot at princeton then on wall street and finally pushed him to one day risk it all on the crazy idea of selling books on the internet his story reaches a dramatic pause when he starts amazon out of a garage with nothing but a dream and it resumes satisfyingly when his company becomes the internet giant it is today elon musk tells a very similar story that of an industrious kid bullied for being too nerdy and into science fiction who climbed out of adversity and overcame the all too common american hurdles of student loan debt and people not believing in him with the sheer ingenuity of his entrepreneurship these stories are of course embellished and while individual elements of them may not be false the overall image they're trying to sell you is a lie because it wasn't the novelty of amazon alone that catapulted it to the center of the internet so much as the absurd head start that an initial three hundred thousand dollar investment that jeff's parents gave him and although musk likes to play up his version of the everyman story too his family is most infamously known for his father's ownership of a lucrative emerald mine and role as a property developer in apartheid south africa these people didn't start from nothing it wasn't just hard work billionaires never get there alone they get there in any combination of three ways one family wealth and privilege two labor exploitation and three government help let's start with number one family wealth and privilege explains the success of a lot of the billionaires that sit at the top of our social hierarchy we've already seen how much of a role family wealth played in the success of even the quote self-made celebrity billionaires like musk and bezos so it should come as no surprise that the great majority of billionaires have similarly favorable advantages the racial and gender makeup of the billionaire class is not an accident it is no surprise then that the people who face the fewest societal hurdles white men overwhelmingly dominate the forbes rankings while women and people from racial minority groups only make up a fraction but privilege doesn't explain every single billionaire's climb to the top exploitation however does what do we mean when we say exploitation those familiar with marxist literature will already know that exploitation is the expropriation of surplus value from labor by capital okay but what does that mean it's actually very simple according to marx society is divided into two classes the owner class the bourgeoisie and the working class the proletariat i promise i'll make this quick the owner class people who own businesses factories farms and so on offer a deal to the working class work or starve as you already know just about every single one of us takes that deal so what do the owner class say they say that for x amount of hours worked workers will be paid y amount of money in order for that deal to be profitable for the owner class they need to pay workers less money than the value they actually produce that difference is what marx calls surplus value the money that you make for the company will always be more than the money the business puts back into your hands in the form of a paycheck otherwise it has no money to give the people who own the company the stakeholders who may never have even stepped foot on the premises if you want an idea of just how much value business owners steal from their workers just look at this ohio pizza shop where for one day the owner decided not to siphon off that surplus value and instead put it back into the hands of the workers the result employees made 78 dollars an hour that's the marxist definition of exploitation and every single capitalist business in the world relies on it whether they want to or not the most egregious examples of course are those we see with billionaires companies in which figureheads who no longer work on or only ever held stock in the company walk away with hundreds of millions of dollars a year but even with a more relaxed definition of exploitation we see this kind of behavior playing a massive role in billionaires wealth you may have recently heard of exploitation occurring in newly minted billionaire rihanna's fenty beauty factories or beyonce's ivy park sweatshops it's immediately obvious to us how sweatshop labor is clearly exploitative when workers often children make mere sense for each grueling hour spent in unsafe conditions compare that to the billionaire status of those at the top and it's impossible not to see something deeply wrong and exploitative in the working arrangements they have created while rihanna and beyonce might be the face of the club this week they are no more or less culpable than their mega wealthy peers those whose less glamorous companies manage to avoid the spotlight once again how does this kind of behavior make a person self-made that brings us to point number three government help here the conservative and libertarian views of the world's billionaires are the most evidently hypocritical elon musk is probably one of the biggest offenders so let's come back to him for a second musk often talks about the government in very disfavorable terms he regularly decries government regulation does everything he can to avoid taxation and fiercely defends the belief that markets should be free that said the billionaires companies spacex tesla and solarcity would have no hope of existing without the government's absurd 4.9 billion dollars in loans and tax breaks we're using musk as a flagrant example here but the nature of our current economy is that throughout the entirety of the chain of production government subsidies are granted from public money only for the profits to be privatized by people who hoard wealth at a level we haven't seen since the gilded age pharmaceutical research is another classic example of this phenomenon where large amounts of government funds produce the innovations needed for life-saving medication only to eventually be appropriated by the private sector where profits stay squarely within the hands of a few executives who jack up prices and strand countless americans without access to the health care they need this is not the vision free market proponents are selling us where their ludicrous profits are justified by all the risks that innovation entails in reality they benefit from the largest public money safety nets in our society billionaires receive the government help most analogous to socialism of anyone but fiercely get in the way of the rest of us enjoying the same privileges so that they can pocket more money than entire nations no billionaire has ever gotten to their status by ethical means and to revere them as icons of self-made success is to give them a pass for their selfish parasitic behavior we can dream of success without them we can achieve greatness without them we can let go of the myth of self-made billionaires imagine for a moment a world without billionaires imagine that world where you could actually get the full value of your work like those pizza shop workers with their 78 an hour wage how much less stressful would your life become how much more pleasant and fair would it all be were it not for someone at the top hoarding far more than their share hundreds of millions of lives would be improved in an instant at the end of the day we produce enough for everyone let's stop pretending it makes sense for so much of it to be in the hands of so few people i mentioned at the beginning of this video that this kind of content is made possible by my patrons on patreon when i decided to make the shift from general interest stuff to more radical political content i knew i ran the risk of syncing my channel and losing my ad revenue and sponsors these days it's pretty hard to get a sponsor on my videos i have one reliable one and they're great but for the most part i'm having to rely on the generous support of viewers like you if you appreciate the work i'm doing and you're able to chip in even a dollar a month i would greatly appreciate the support as a little show of that appreciation every patron regardless of donation amount gets early access to every video as well as access to our patrons only discord server it's a great place to hang out chat with other like-minded people or learn about socialist theory in our book club i'm also pretty active in the server so you're always welcome to ping me to ask a question or just say hi you can find my patreon join our growing discord server and get early access to every video at patreon.com second thought if you enjoyed this video consider dropping a like if you hated it a thumbs down you can check out my previous videos by clicking the links on your screen thanks for watching and i'll see you next week [Music] you

Channel: Second Thought

Views: 1,824,061

Keywords: Second thought, second thought channel, facts about, facts you didn’t know, things you didn’t know, billionaires, self-made, billionaire, self-made billionaires, self-made millionaire, the myth, the myth of self-made man, capitalism, socialism, learning, education, educational videos

Id: 316nOvHUS8A

Length: 12min 59sec (779 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Huneycombe]

Saving this one for dinner. I feel like a lot of people miss the fact that generational wealth has produced most of today’s top billionaires, and this video will help me see if that’s fact or not.

Edit: was able to watch this last night, and it’s a good introduction to a topic that requires more research.

[u/who519]

The smartest thing the elite did was convince us that it is right vs. left and not rich vs. poor. We revolted against monarchies only to be ruled by the same kings and queens dressed in different clothes.

edit: grammar bad!

[u/kruecab]

I wasted about 7 minutes of my life watching the first half of this. Zero external references cited, zero first-hand research or footage - this is purely an opinion piece. If you agree with the opinion, you’ll love the video. If you don’t agree, you won’t like it. Is this what qualifies as a documentary?

Maybe someone should make a documentary on internet documentaries… take a popular idea, grab a bunch of stock footage, and narrate over it for 15 minutes. Particularly good topics include: how the rich are screwing the rest of us over, the planet is going to die and no one cares - basically anything most people can agree with but nobody actually cares to do anything about. Then collect likes, views, and YouTube ad revenue.

Ironically, it’s a good thing some internet billionaires created the platforms these folks make money off of…

[u/RayTheSlayer]

I can agree with the self made billion part, but that pizza story is cheery picked as fuck. If you do some research you will realize that the owner gave the workers the total sales of the day not substracting any expanses from it. He also announced it to the community, so it was like a special event where more people showed up than usual. A lot of people tend to not understand that revenue /= profit.

[u/Aurum_MrBangs]

I wonder who's is a true self made billionaire. Kanye?, the guy from snapchat? Zuckerberg?

Also, at what point do you stop being self made, even if your parent's are millionaires a billion is still orders of magnitude bigger.

If you make $100k and your parent's made $50k combined then you could argue that your less self made than most billionaires. Though I guess that's the point, everyone needs some help to succeed, especially if you are beating massive odds.

In general people should be more aware of how much their success/lack of success is out of their control. Hopefully leading to more kindness and better social services to give everyone a more even playing field.

[u/thebrando987]

Also, read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.

[u/so555]

Same with pro athletes. 99% of them could not play professionally without a lot of sacrifices from their families

[u/AddSugarForSparks]

Love how no one can ever pronounce Rhianna how the singer herself pronounces it: re-ann-nuh. Not the fancy way like the news correspondents do.

This is just a "for-clicks" echo-chamber-appealing video, not a documentary. Wrong sub.

[u/ansofteng]

LOL @ 300k being an "absurd head start" for starting amazon. Many startups gets that in inflation adjusted (pre)seed VC rounds these days. While that is a good advantage, it is by no means "absurd" or even rare.