Prepare kids to be billionaires?

I get updates of questions from Quora -they are often interesting questions and sometimes the answers are knockout. I found that this question What are good ways to prepare my kids to be billionaires? And it stuck with me. i must confess that some of it was because I was really disturbed by it. I bespoke unaware entitlement (though I may be wrong) and a load of assumptions that really need unpicking.



So I found myself commenting:

Bigger questions: why would you think they would become billionaires?
And what is it about being a billionaire that you covet (for them)? Why
is that the measure of whether you have helped bring a wonderful human
being into the world?



I ask these further question because there are 7bn people on the planet.
Millions of them have the qualities necessary but only a very small
amount of the total potential billionaires have actually achieved that
potential. Why? -we should perhaps recognise that it is mostly good
fortune that makes a billionaire: the good fortune to have social,
financial and political capital that can be leveraged and to be in the
right place at the right time.



Our problem is confirmation bias -we see the already successful but
discount their failures on the way and see them as if their 'success'
was inevitable. We *don't* see the thousands just as 'worthy' who happen
not to have had the happy combination of factors come together for
them. To prepare kids to be billionaires they have to be prepared not to
be: to fail: character  such as humility , empathy, no sense of
entitlement, generosity etc are never going to go wrong.



Also, why would you think that your own efforts to hothouse your
children might not backfire? Better to put more effort into making the
world one where more of the billions can be heirs to a better chance to
make more than a dollar a day. In building a world like that we make a
safer world for all our children.

 What I didn't write because I thought it was even more likely to draw trolls was that, in fact, too often billionaires become rentiers and end up in rent-seeking behaviour; in effect by occupying certain critical/strategic positions in the political-economic complex they accrue money for doing, in actuality, nothing and they accrue money by denuding others of opportunity or  even the means of proper livelihood. To prepare a child to be a billionaire -even if this were a sure thing- must, morally, surely, involve helping them to recognise that they would have huge debts to society and good fortune which should be given back (I'm not saying they don't have some kind of right to enjoy the fruits of their genuine labours). That no-one actually needs (or really deserves) that amount of money and that holding onto it is actually clinging to power to continue to exploit without work or effort -'rent seeking behaviour'.



The obverse of this is to think more about the normal fact of life for 'successful' entrepreneurs: failure is rife before, for a small percentage of them, they get a big break. Commonly this may involve 'betting the farm' on something: it's about risk. So, if we want a society where people can have a go at 'making it big' we need to make sure we have a society which looks out for the losers (some of whom may become 'winners' one day): we need 'safety nets' and the means to put people back on their feet -because not everyone can be billionaires -or the inflation would make the 'admiration' connoted in the term obsolete.



(2) What are good ways to prepare my kids to be billionaires? - Quora: