There is NO Self-Made BS!
Every billionaire autobiography reads like the same bedtime story:
A lone genius. A rags-to-riches dreamer. A visionary who “built it all themselves.”
It’s the capitalist fairy tale equivalent of the tooth fairy — sweet, magical, and completely fake. And just like the tooth fairy, it only works if we don’t look under the pillow.
Because the truth is, there is no such thing as a self-made billionaire.
The Myth They Sell
The “self-made” myth hides the ocean of society that keeps billionaires from sinking.
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Public Infrastructure: Roads, ports, satellites, and schools — all paid for by the rest of us.
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Labor of Millions: Miners, truck drivers, coders, janitors, nurses, and every consumer who actually buys the product.
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Capital Systems: Banks, subsidies, and tax laws that grow fortunes faster for the rich while the rest pay full price.
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Collective Consumption: Without a trained, housed, and connected population, there’s no one to sell to.
Strip those away, and a so-called “billionaire genius” has the same fortune as a man in a suit stranded on a barren island: none.
How Billionaires Actually Do It
Here’s the not-so-magical trick: billionaires don’t get rich by being smarter or working harder. They get rich by using leverage.
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Labor Leverage: Profiting from the hours of thousands.
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Capital Leverage: Sleeping while money multiplies itself.
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System Leverage: Subsidies for them, austerity for you.
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Narrative Leverage: Selling the fairy tale that they did it all alone.
That’s the BS translation of “self-made.”
Why It Matters
If people believe the story, they accept billionaire privilege as deserved. They nod when a man who made billions on public infrastructure insists taxes would be “punishing success.”
But when the mask slips — when people see that billionaire wealth is collective wealth skimmed by one individual — the fairy tale collapses. Society doesn’t owe billionaires gratitude. Billionaires owe society a refund.
The Core of BS and SRL
This is why the Billionaire System (BS) project and the System Resistance League (SRL) exist.
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BS Translation: “Self-made billionaire” actually means “society-made wealth, privatized by one.”
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SRL Standpoint: Our resistance begins by myth-busting. Power built on fiction is fragile. Pop the bubble, and the emperor isn’t just naked — he’s stranded, waiting for a fairy tale to save him.
✨ Closing Punch
There is NO self-made BS. Every billionaire fortune is the product of millions of unseen hands, billions in public investment, and oceans of collective effort. Alone, stripped of society, they’re just suits on empty islands — waiting for a fairy that will never come.
References
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Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State (2013).
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Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014).
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Emmanuel Saez & Gabriel Zucman, The Triumph of Injustice (2019).
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Tony Seba & James Arbib, Rethinking Humanity (RethinkX, 2020).
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Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality (2012).
This way the fairy + island imagery is woven all the way through: introduced early, reinforced mid-way, and returned to at the close.