Arguably the currently most important people on the political scene in the West are Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Both have a lot in common: they are billionaires, they come from rich families, and they have had more success than their fathers. In addition, they are if not right-leaning then at the very least against wokism. Most importantly, the mainstream media hates them with a passion. Trump Derangement Syndrome is a term that has long been in use but Elon Derangement Syndrome is afflicting more and more journalists. They love to bash these two guys. We hear that they are not “self-made billionaires” or that they “owe everything to daddy”, and other such nonsense. A few days ago I came across a professor from a UK University, I think it she was from Imperial College London, that place that pays Covid-19 fearmonger Neil Ferguson a hefty sinecure. Aforementioned professor claimed that Elon Musk “did not do anything” and was a fraud as all his contributions amount to is spending money and letting other people do the work, or something along the lines. She seems to have deleted that post on LinkedIn. Yet, it is symptomatic of a common attitude. As the leftist scum loves to say, there is a lot to unpack here, so let us do that. [EDIT: I managed to find that message, and added it below.]

Success is never a given. Undoubtedly, if you are the son of a billionaire you have an enormous leg up in the competition. This is even more true for Trump whose father was a successful real-estate developer himself. Donald Trump followed in his father’s footsteps and then branched out. There is some speculation about Trumps net worth but it seems save to say that he managed to multiply the money his father may have provided him with. Of course, with this $TRUMP shitcoin, he apparently made dozens of billions of dollars and probably increased his net worth tenfold. Elon Musk, on the other hand, went into risky ventures. Of course you can say that he got “lucky” as he was at the right place at the right time when he founded PayPal. However, he got lucky many more times, founding one successful company after another. He would be one of the most important entrepreneurs of our generations had he only (co-)founded PayPal, SpaceX, or OpenAI. He was involved in all of these companies, and some more on top. There is absolutely nobody like him. Where is Jeff Bezos’ or Bill Gates’ second home run, for instance? Musk furthermore seems to have a great hand for taking over and building companies. Tesla flourished under his leadership, and he also showed the world that you can run Twitter without several thousand leftist activist on your payroll.

It is very easy for a member of the leftist journo scum to sit in their armchair and think that if they had been given a few billion dollars, or just a few million dollars, they would easily have been able to be one of the world’s richest men. This is absolutely not true. You can see this around you in your social circle: if you are between the ages of 30 and 50 today, you can be considered a success if you manage to get to roughly the same level of economic success as your father. I am not saying this secretly to humblebrag, because I am not: There is no way I am going to be as successful as my father, largely because I did not get any boomer handouts. My dad loves telling me about his milestones, i.e. building a house in his late 20s and paying off the mortgage within a few years, and in his 30s, he felt like treating himself to a nice car so I bought himself a new S-class Mercedes, in cash. It was not that he was rich, but he likes spending money and never saw the need in saving a lot as he grew up in a time of great economic prosperity. He got by swimmingly with this attitude. Meanwhile, I work in a field that is only accessible to the top 2 to 5% in terms of intelligence, there is little job security, and it is not at all unlikely that I will have to move for a new role.

Just staying in place today means that you are successful, and this applies to you no matter where you sit on the totem pole. Even for the son of a billionaire success is not guaranteed. This is not a social class I have access to, but I attended university with a lot of people from very well-off families. Even for these people their careers did not easily lead them to riches. Of course parental wealth gave them a leg up, but they quickly hit a ceiling in their career if they did not have what it takes. To give you simple example, if your daddy is a hot-shot banker or a partner in Big Law you will get internships, even bullshit like a “bespoke summer internship” at Goldman Sachs when you are in high school. To some extent money gets you a place at a selective university but at that point there is a limit already because you are not going to get into PPE at Oxford if you barely pass your A-levels, no matter how rich your daddy is.

My university days are long over, but occasionally I get updates on LinkedIn about people I knew. The pattern seems quite clear: if your parents were very successful, then the most likely outcome for yourself is to regress to the mean. These people are still a lot better off than they arguably would have been without the backing of their family, but very often have I seen career paths that are not overly impressive. This is particularly true for women. Sure, they end up in cushy positions like being a fundraiser at “reputable” university, which they would not have gotten without the influence of their parents, but if your father made $500k/year for a few years at the peak of his career then this is not really a great outcome. In our globalized world, the competition for the really good careers and jobs is a lot more intense than our boomer parents could ever have imagined, so even if you are smarter and more hard-working than your super-successful father was when he was your age, it is quite likely that your competition is multiple times tougher.

In the billionaire and multi-millionaire world, success is likewise not guaranteed. How often do you read of big companies or large regional companies going bankrupt? Whenever this happens, some people are going to lose a lot of money. This is also a prime way of wealthy families losing power and influence. If such a family only owns or co-owns one company, which was their money printer, and that company goes bust, then there is suddenly a lot less money coming in. There is obviously passive investing, in addition to more risky investment strategies, but the increase of your wealth comes if you found and (co-)own a successful business. This is where a guy like Elon Musk comes in. Of course he does not work alone, but he had a very obvious hand in creating over one trillion (!) dollars in market capitalization.

Trump is an even more interesting character than Musk. He managed to not only build a successful real-estate business. Like Musk, he started many ventures. He even managed to turn himself into a media personality. Basically everything he touched worked out at least reasonably well for him: real estate, clubs, golf courses. He even makes money by renting out his name to real-estate developers. On the side, he launched a successful reality TV career, put out a few books with a ghost writer, and was even briefly involved in pro wresting. This guy even founded a modelling agency, probably at least partly with the intention of getting easy access to prime-caliber pussy. On his Wikipedia page, that company is not even mentioned. I would not be surprised if he ran in the 2016 election at first only to get a lot of free media exposure, and when he was doing a lot better than expected, he just rolled with. No matter how you look at it, Trump is an incredibly successful guy. In a sane world, Kamala should have been laughed out of the room when she brought up that she wanted to run for president against Trump as she does not measure up to him anywhere. Sure, she is an Indian black woman, but meeting a diversity quota, being willing to suck dick of every man in power above her, and having an oh-so endearing laughter does not have a lot of currency on the world stage. Did the Democrats think Putin would leave the Ukraine if she offered to blow him? Sometimes you can only marvel at how deluded the left is.

Obviously, economic success should not entail that you cannot criticize someone. This is not the point of this article. Yet, the unsuccessful pretending that it is easy to make millions if you have been given a few dozen millions or perhaps even a billion to start out with is laughable. There is a pretty easy counter-proof for every journalist: they can take all the money they have and attempt to double it via some entrepreneurial activity. They can’t, and they won’t. Yet, they endlessly talk about how easy it is for Trump and Musk to make billions. It is laughable.