Quote from: RE on May 06, 2025, 08:31 PMOn the other hand, if you're Elon, you write your bit of code, tell dad about the idea how it will make money.  Dad calls his lawyer, who he has on retainer anyhow.

Oh please. Anyone here can hire a lawyer, I've got one on retainer for my parents estate, YOU were talking about looking for one for your plastic toys, there is zero requirement daddy needs to get involved, or that the lawyer is a shyster out to steal your idea.  You are just filling in the blanks to create a monster out of anyone who succeeds, compared to folks more in the working class.

These entire angle appears to be designed to discount the ability of someone to take an idea, and do exactly what Elon did. He is certainly an anomaly as to the scale of his success, but there are plenty of others, small business folk included, who built good livings for themselves and didn't need generational wealth or rich or powerful friends to get it done. They aren't all Elons, they didn't need to be in some cabal of rich folk to get it done, they did it the usual way. Brains, hard work, certainly sometimes some luck in involved.

Quote from: REPatents filed immediately.  Next call is to another pal who does ventuere capital, enough to get the site up and running.  They get a few dozen users, the lawyer call the investment bankers at Goldman to set up an IPO.  A year later PayPal has 1M users and Elon never needed a dime of the $34K.

That's how the game works.

Your hypothetical game.

And it works except when it isn't even needed. A local oil experienced Harvard grad gets his Harvard lawyer roommate to help him with the legal work of buying a bankrupt drilling company. They hook up with a BCG guy they know, they are in the finance world and find some money from a group of ex-West Pointers looking to do startup after global peak oil hits in 1979.

They buy into the company as part owners.

And then the usual thing happens with well run oil companies and there is no need for more than occasional funding for new acquisitions to grow, and it goes from its first 200 wells for more than 1200 along the way.

While cutesy computer coding has certainly been a thing in the recent past, building an oil company goes ALL the way back under the model I've described. Computer coding in comparison seems more like a get rich quick scheme that is fairly short lived, as the big companies have already invented the entire asshat social media world and the screwed up culture that seems to have grown up with it in the US.

Elon started his journey at the right time, timing is certainly important, and he made something work early that was required for big chunks of the internet world to work. And so between the timing and some pittance from his fsther, he did something with no generational wealth required.

Standard Oil followed a similar model as the oil company I described above. And created generational wealth for its originators, just as Elon and other oligarches are doing in media and mining and all sorts of industries. J.D. Rockefeller was a bookkeeper early on...closer to an example of what Elon has managed than this generational wealth cabal you describe.