this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2024
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Or Luck/right place right time.
Ground floor entry on Bitcoin, Tesla, Amazon, whatever gave mad returns
To be completely fair that's not pure luck. Those people took risks, why don't you invest in new startups? Because it's risky.
But yes out of the people brave enough to invest, it's mostly luck they picked the right startup
They took a risk and millions took risks in millions of other stocks and failed. So yea it's luck.
Billions didn't take any risks by not investing in startups. That's a zero chance, everyone else is a non zero chance.
Billions weren't lucky enough to be born in a class where they COULD afford to save / set aside enough money to invest in startups. The people who struck gold by happening to invest money into startups had to have had capital to begin with (or had to be in a family with capital), and compared to the billions on this planet, those people are in the 10%~1%.
They had no option to "take the risk" in the first place, they had to worry about basic necessities. Meanwhile the people who "get rich" off of start-up investments had a significant amount of wealth to spare after necessities. It's pretty hard for people who aren't relatively well-off to even have access to the means to invest, for example most brokerages require you to make a minimum deposit of multiple thousands of dollars to use them, and it's not even close to the amount that you actually need to realistically make meaningful money unless you're unbelievably lucky and get the next Tesla or something.
You're assuming you can only invest if you're born into money. This is not a binary
That's like the actual definition of gambling
I know, my point still stands.
It's not lucky that they decided to gamble.
They bought the lottery ticket and won, not everyone buys tickets.
Even aside from the obvious point that the outcome of this gamble is luck, there's another more subtle point that I think is more important: For people will significant wealth and resources, it is very cheap to take gambles like this. For some people, dropping $10k into some high-risk gamble is just a bit of fun, but for other people that's their entire savings; and for other other people - they'd never be able to afford to do that even if they were starving themselves to save money.
How do people get into that kind of position of privilege and power in the first place? ... the luck of where they were born.
You're right, one thing I didn't consider is the vast majority of people investing are probably already significantly wealthy. Birth lottery is by far the largest contributor to chance of future wealth.
Makes you realise how many moving parts there are to this conversation. It's undeniable that those ones who were born lucky were not all gamblers though. I was born into a western family which isn't in poverty and I've never invested in a nothing company.
This is a silly distinction you are trying to make and it serves no purpose. And I don't even agree it is a real distinction... The act of deciding to gamble doesn't in any way mean the payoff or losses are anything but luck.
You think the choice of deciding to play the lottery doesnt change your chances at winning it?
If you truly think that you're even more lost than I thought you were, not worth my time
"than I thought you were"? I'm not the person you were talking to before.
What is your actual point? Why do you think it is important for you to argue that "actually gambling isn't pure luck"? And what, in your estimation, is "pure luck"?
The way I see it people are talking about specific phenomenon, and how they have entirely luck based outcomes (ex like the lottery), and you are trying to increase the scope of the context of the discussion to, in this example, include people who do not participate in the lottery, to try and argue that phenomenon does not have entirely luck based outcomes. But you haven't proven your point, you've been socially obtuse and attempted to derail the conversation from where it was because you have a bizarre point you want to make.
I like that downvoted comments are no longer hidden but Pareto would like to tell you the ratio is 80:20.
4 in 5 people pick the wrong start-up and lose everything.
The remainder are busy rationalizing their luck as skill.
You're right. They also had to have had the resources to blow on a pipe dream that blew up by chance.
So it's luck, privilege, and thrn more luck on top of if.
Or they could be employed at those places and get stock as a benefit. My current job is that way. It is still risky to keep a lot of eggs in one basket, but it can pay off if your employer is a newer publicly traded company.
Could be