His parents were not all that well off. They invested $300,000 in his new company. That’s within the ability of many middle class workers

His parents were employees, not business owners.

Amazon: people like books; people like next day delivery of stuff; people and companies like making stuff and running stuff in Amazon web services

Minecraft: Marcus Persson owned the game studio (and wrote quite a bit of the game) that made Minecraft, lots of people like it, Microsoft was willing to buy it for billions

Kiran Mazumdan-Shaw made beer, people like beer. They then used beer making processes to make biotech medicines - people like being alive and will pay a lot to stay alive, or even just a bit healthier

There have been a couple (or maybe one or a few) that started with very little. A lot more had a gift or loan from a parent for enough to buy land or start a business, often that was less than $100,000

As much as Musk’s family had money before, his initial big money came from his share of his brother and his city guide software “zip2” which they sold to Compaq for a few hundred million. Lots of people have made more complex or bigger programs with no more wealth than an average middle class family.

Then x.com (the 1999 one, a bank) which became part of PayPal which sold to eBay for $1.5 billion which Musk got a share of

Then he made SpaceX then Tesla* and Tesla made him a billionaire through his ownership of a large part of it

*Tesla was made of Musk’s money and A/C Propulsion electric vehicle conversion system. It was incorporated with SpaceX’s incorporation papers with the company name changed. A/C propulsion’s drivetrain was replaced by a new system after a year of production of the roadster

Having listened to ‘good bad billionaire’ for several episodes the formula is

1. Create or inherit a company
2. Do good at it
3. Float it on the stock exchange
4. Now own the bulk of a company whose stock values it at enough that your share is worth over a billion

Or

1. Make an insanely popular game
2. Sell it to Microsoft

Or

1. Be the child of someone who did one of the above

Index funds are pretty incredibly safe. Pick one of the big US indexes and look at the graph since before the global financial crisis

I live in a suburb in a town designed as a car based place. We have a parkway, even.

We do have local shops - I’m about as far from one as you can be, so I have two in opposite directions each 20 minutes walk away

The local government is trying to densify the suburbs and allow us to build multiple residences on our block, but they limit the number of residences by the size of the block

So even though some houses right by the shops got rebuilt recently they are each 2 individual residences, where that place and its public transport links could easily support as many as would fit

If they really wanted us to increase density they’d let those people build four or five floors of apartments, they’d let me build a quadplex

Booze can be nice after a disturbed night

A disturbed night can follow booze

Are you talking Not Just Bikes? If so, I agree

I’m reading the Robert Caro biography of Robert Moses - the New York highway builder. By 1950 newspapers were saying “building these highways is a terrible idea, we need mass transit to move all the people that need to be moved unless you paved the entire city so no one could live here”

English has so many dick words

Your bracketed comment: that is the normal way of comment boards, I like intensifier comments like this. It’s the “yes and” of the internet

Nebula

Fun thing about that service is that it was started by a group of YouTube creators who started by making an advertising service that was designed to share profit fairly (as opposed to their competition which aimed to extract as much money from advertisers and as much as they could from YouTube channels)

After the adpocalypse they started a competing video service with similar ethics (Nebula)

If Simon Whistler put his channels on nebula, I’d hardly use YouTube for anything but music

This is the Wendover video on the subject

It’s off to the side of the very specific sign

Australian here, I’m happy for America to call pickup trucks “trucks”. They’re closer to a light commercial vehicle than they are to a ute.

Aside from all that, EN.US is their language. They can use it how they like. It’s just a shame their culture is so dominant that it can’t leave EN.AU alone

It’s a common rock pun, saying granite instead of granted.

And that’s the other part. In defining us as woke, they define themselves as sleepwalking

He didn’t create Eden for his future humans

A check list, if you wish

I’m sure it wasn’t made to control people, I think it was made to explain stuff they didn’t understand and became a tool of control later

The story reads like a near miss for the protagonist as a volcano wiped out a town, plus many years of improvements to the story

I’m not planning on watching your video, but I’m sure they found a pillar of salt and generically tested it to find it was actually a god-scorned woman /s