Luck vs. Strategy: The Billionaire Myth Exposed
- Connor Banks
- May 22
- 2 min read
“Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.”
Honoré de Balzac
We love a good billionaire origin story. From garages in Silicon Valley to Ivy League dorm rooms, the narrative goes like this: brilliance, hustle, and vision made it all happen. But let’s be honest, becoming a billionaire today is less about strategy and more about being lucky in a rigged system.
It’s time we stopped mythologising billionaires and started questioning the system that enables them.
The Myth of Strategic Genius
Popular culture tells us billionaires are master strategists. We’re supposed to admire Elon Musk’s risk-taking or Jeff Bezos’s long-term vision. But scratch beneath the surface and you’ll see a pattern: they weren’t just smart. They were absurdly lucky.
For every tech founder who made it, thousands of equally smart people didn’t. What separated them wasn’t strategy; it was timing, connections, and family backing.
Born Into Advantage
Many billionaires didn’t start from scratch, they started from privilege.
Whether it’s inherited wealth, elite education, or access to capital, they entered the game already ahead. Even so-called “self-made” billionaires like Kylie Jenner leveraged massive platforms others could only dream of. That’s not entrepreneurial grit, it’s economic jet fuel.
Timing Is Everything
Some people invested in crypto at the right time. Others launched startups during an economic boom. Timing is often the X-factor in billionaire stories, not visionary leadership or superhuman intelligence.
If you launched Amazon in 2023 instead of 1995, would you be a billionaire today? Probably not.
Survivorship Bias: The False Lesson
We celebrate the few who made it and ignore the millions who didn’t. This is survivorship bias, and it warps our understanding of success. The odds of becoming a billionaire are astronomically small, and yet we treat these outliers as if they offer a roadmap.
They don’t. They’re exceptions, not examples.
Billionaires Aren’t Necessary
No one works a billion times harder than a nurse, a teacher, or a delivery driver. Billionaire wealth is built not on labour, but on extraction, of underpaid work, under-taxed capital, and under-regulated markets.
If we taxed extreme wealth fairly and reinvested it, we'd have stronger schools, safer cities, and a healthier economy. We don’t need billionaires, we need balance.
Final Thought: It Was Mostly Luck
Next time you hear a billionaire talk about their “grind,” remember:
Yes, they worked hard.
Yes, they made decisions.
But they also got incredibly lucky, in a world that rewards capital over contribution.
And that's not something to idolise.
It's something to rethink.
