Rich Life

 To become truly wealthy, do you need luck?

Do wealthy people's successes stem from chance? A new book with a fresh perspective on how much good luck contributes to large fortunes has recently received attention from the venerable business magazine Fortune.

The authors of this just-released book, The Unfair Advantage: How You Already Have What It Takes to Succeed, Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba, write that questions regarding chance are "right to the foundations of our views about 'deserved-ness' in society."

At first glance, Ali and Kubba seem to be staunch supporters of the luck truly counts viewpoint. In the opening paragraph of their Fortune article, they quote billionaire Warren Buffett as saying, "I've had a lot of luck."

The Sage of Omaha says, "I was born in 1930 with two sisters who have every bit the brains and desire but didn't have the same chances. "My future would have been very different if I had been Black. My future would have been radically different if I had been a woman.

Ali and Kubba remind out that billionaire Bill Gates just so happened to have a mother who was on the board of directors of IBM. Young Bill credits his mother with helping IBM and the then-emerging Microsoft "win the contract that led to a prosperous relationship."

Elon Musk, who is currently the richest person in the world, was born under apartheid in South Africa as the son of an emerald mine owner.

Ali and Kubba then abruptly change their approach. Yes, they contend, wealthy individuals with vast means like Buffett, Gates, and Musk have benefited unfairly on their path to fame and fortune. However, "we all have unfair advantages" of some kind, and even our flaws may work in our favor. Growing up, you didn't have a lot of money? That financial setback "may spur on your inventiveness and creativity."

Now luck may still be a factor, according to Ali and Kubba, and many successful company owners are unaware of how important it can be until they attempt to launch a second or third firm and fail. Only one in 1,000 business owners achieve three or more consecutive entrepreneurial triumphs.

Ali and Kubba are persuaded by that statistic that Elon Musk's success with PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink cannot possibly be the result of chance.

They argue that "four times in a row" is "not that lucky."

With "his seemingly superhuman work ethic, his ability to somehow claw success back from the brink of failure and bankruptcy, to disrupt and change entire trillion-dollar industries, and his uncanny ability to not only predict the future but to make it," Musk must be responsible for his own personal "unfair advantages" in life.

Ali and Kubba conclude, "When you start to perceive it through the prism of unjust benefits, the old debate about hard effort vs. chance takes on a new dimension. Musk merely used it, as all successful people do.

The final line, according to Ali and Kubba, is that our most "successful" people have been able to capitalize on one or more of the "unfair advantages" that every one of us has.

But may other elements possibly play a crucial role? Could our wealthy people, for example, owe significant portions of their wealth to plain ruthlessness?

On the cusp of the twenty-first century, Worth magazine posed that query to a cross-sample of American top one percenters with substantial means who made close to $500,000 annually or had assets worth close to $5 million. Only 2% of the affluent respondents Worth surveyed cited "becoming more ruthless" as an important success factor.

What secrets did these affluent people possess? About 98 percent of them credited "more resolve" with their financial achievement. Nearly the same percentage (95%) connected success to "more skill or aptitude," and 91%) said the wealthy have "higher intelligence."

The rich seem to assume that all of this effort, talent, and intellect add considerably more to financial success than random chance or undesirable character traits.

Wealthy persons surveyed by Worth ranked skill as being twice as significant as "luck" and intellect as being more than twice as essential as "knowing the right people" in terms of earning money.

They asserted that taking chances increases one's likelihood of success in life by four times compared to "being born into affluence." In conclusion, the affluent concur that those earning several million dollars are rated as determined clever, capable, and brave.

but brutal? Nah.

What kind of conduct did Elon Musk exhibit in the early stages of the COVID-19 epidemic, in the opinion of these affluent people? Musk "dared authorities to jail him for restarting production at Tesla's northern California car plant, in defiance of the local shelter-in-place order," according to a Guardian study of those tragic days.

Niraj Chokshi of the New York Times writes that earlier in that first epidemic spring, "everything looked to be going Elon Musk's way." Musk's California plant was "ready to expedite production of a highly anticipated new sport utility vehicle, the Model Y," and his "upstart electric car firm" had suddenly become "worth more than General Motors, Ford Motor, and Fiat Chrysler combined."

That Model Y release would have been in jeopardy had Tesla's Fremont facility in California had a protracted shutdown. Could Musk have instead decided to put workers' lives in danger? Undoubtedly, a lot of the plant's employees felt in danger.

At the time, one of those employees would tell SF Weekly, "This is a life-and-death scenario. "Basically, all you're doing is breathing on each other."

Another employee said that Tesla had pandemic-era personnel working "on top of each other, touching the same equipment" for the news website Electrek, which covers electrical transportation.

Was Musk acting cruelly in this situation, or was he only making use of his own "unfair advantages"?

Was Musk brutal or simply using leverage the year prior, during the pre-pandemic period, when Tesla was receiving more penalties for workplace safety infractions "than its rivals' primary U.S. car facilities in the last half-decade," according to Forbes?

Of course, we can't attribute all of Musk's wealth to his ruthlessness or any other questionable personal actions he may have taken in the past.

What prevents us? Many of the helping hands that Musk received on his path to fame and money belonged to politicians and other public servants. These hands have given Musk a wide range of taxpayer-funded subsidies throughout the years.

The firm Musk owns has profited greatly from "grants, tax incentives, factory development, reduced loans, and environmental credits," according to the Los Angeles Times, in addition to the tax credits and rebates customers receive for purchasing his goods. "Musk's policy of nurturing high-risk, high-tech enterprises with public money" can be seen in all of these subsidies.

Tesla has sold at least $6 billion in government-backed electric car credits in recent years, according to researchers at Grid, who noted this past spring that these sales "have twice in recent years made the difference between the firm declaring a profit instead of a loss."

Hold on a second. Given these details, it's possible that luck completely explains the fates of our most fortunate people. We let someone with deep finances like Musk take us all for a ride. That level of luck is unmatched.

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