General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: There are exactly two ways to get rich [View all]enlightenment
(8,830 posts)Bill Gates was never middle class. Middle class people don't send their kids to exclusive (and expensive) private schools.
Sam Walton's father made enough money to loan Sam $25,000 to buy a Ben Franklin franchise in 1945. Today that loan would be around a quarter-million. How many middle-class families can drop that kind of cash as seed money?
Bill Bowerman - one half of the Nike founders - was the son of the governor of Oregon. After college he moved into an officer's job in the Army and from there into a successful career as an athletic director. The other half of the team, Phil Knight, was the son of a lawyer/legislator/newspaper publisher - not exactly a middle class upbringing, either.
The closest you could come on this is Steve Jobs - and let's face it, Apple was invented by Wozniak - and his dad was an electrical engineer at Lockheed (my uncle was a structural engineer at Lockheed at the same time; his salary was rather exceptional as I recall).
Yes, a large and well-educated middle-class is important to a nation's success - but suggesting that these are good examples is pushing the idea of how "middle-class" is defined.