We live in an age of contradictions. Social mobility exists—people do climb ladders, cross borders, and transform their circumstances. A software engineer in Bangalore can earn more than their parents dreamed possible. A first-generation college student can become a doctor. These stories are real, and they matter.But here’s what we don’t talk about enough: the people at the very apex of wealth and power? They’re often not there because they’re exceptional. They’re there because they started on third base and convinced everyone they hit a triple.
The Spoiled Brat Phenomenon
Look at the billionaire class that dominates our cultural imagination. Bill Gates—son of a prominent lawyer and banking executive, attended an elite private school that happened to have a computer terminal in 1968. Elon Musk—grew up in apartheid South Africa with family wealth from an emerald mine, able to absorb failures that would destroy ordinary entrepreneurs. Even Jeff Bezos received a quarter-million-dollar investment from his parents when starting Amazon.
These aren’t rags-to-riches stories. They’re riches-to-more-riches stories with good marketing.The problem isn’t that these individuals had advantages. The problem is that we’ve constructed an entire mythology pretending they didn’t. We celebrate their “genius” and “work ethic” while conveniently forgetting the safety nets, seed capital, elite educations, and networks that made their risks possible. For every Musk or Gates, there are thousands of equally talented people whose ventures failed because they couldn’t afford a single mistake.
Why This Matters More Than You Think
This isn’t just about fairness or hurt feelings. The worship of mediocre elites creates cascading problems throughout society.
First, it misallocates our admiration and attention. When we hold up someone who had every advantage as the pinnacle of achievement, we teach people that success is about individual brilliance rather than systems, opportunities, and yes, luck. This makes us worse at solving problems because we’re looking for genius saviors instead of building better structures.
Second, it perpetuates itself. When the spoiled children of privilege are held up as paragons of merit, they naturally assume they deserve their position. This breeds entitlement masquerading as vision. We end up with leaders who think their wealth proves their wisdom, making pronouncements on education, politics, and social policy with the confidence of people who’ve never truly faced consequences.
Third, and perhaps most insidiously, it crushes the aspirations of people who actually do climb from nothing. When you’re told the system is meritocratic, but you watch mediocre elites fail upward while you struggle despite genuine excellence, you don’t just feel disappointed. You feel gaslit.
The First World Problem
This dynamic is particularly acute in wealthy nations. In developing economies, the gap between privilege and poverty is often so stark that nobody seriously pretends the system is fair. But in places like the United States, we’ve crafted an elaborate fiction of meritocracy that makes the reality even more toxic.
We celebrate “self-made” billionaires while ignoring that being born in a stable democracy with property rights, educated parents, and access to capital markets is itself an enormous privilege. We treat minor setbacks in privileged lives as evidence of resilience while dismissing the genuine struggles of those born without advantages.
The result? A culture that confuses wealth with wisdom, inheritance with innovation, and access with achievement.
What Actual Excellence Looks Like
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the most talented people in any society are probably not at the top of the wealth pyramid. They’re scattered throughout—some successful, many not, their potential often wasted by systems that reward the already-advantaged.
Real excellence is the single mother working two jobs while getting a nursing degree. It’s the immigrant who learns a new language and starts over in their forties. It’s the researcher grinding away at an unglamorous problem that won’t make them rich but might save lives.
These people don’t get TED talks or magazine covers. They don’t get to cosplay as visionaries on Twitter while their companies burn through other people’s money. They just do the work, often brilliantly, and remain invisible.
Moving Forward
I’m not arguing against wealth or success. I’m arguing against the delusion that our current distribution of either represents a meritocracy. Until we can honestly acknowledge that the billionaire class is mostly a privileged club reproducing itself across generations, we’ll keep making bad decisions about who to listen to and how to structure opportunity.
We need to stop worshipping mediocrity in expensive suits. We need to recognize that someone’s bank account tells you more about their starting position than their talent. And we need to build systems that genuinely reward excellence rather than inheritance.
The real tragedy isn’t just that spoiled brats end up running things. It’s that we’ve all agreed to pretend they earned it.