How Billionaires made their money ?

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 article, 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, healthcare, 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 $300,000 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 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 cents 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 billionaire’s companies, SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity, would have no hope of existing without the government’s absurd $4.9 billion 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 healthcare 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.