In some ways, it's great to live in the age of the nerd. And it’s tough to mourn the decline of Wall Street-style corporate machismo. But a poor kid growing up today may find it much harder to emulate the life path of someone like Zuckerberg, who coded an instant messaging system before hitting puberty, than that of even Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who grew up in Brooklyn housing projects and at one point served concessions at Yankee Stadium to earn extra money.
Statistically as well as anecdotally, true American rags-to-riches stories are getting rarer. Class mobility, as defined by the percentage of children who earn more than their parents, has been in a state of mostly uninterrupted decline since the 1940s. Economist Raj Chetty found that only about half of the children born in 1980 have surpassed their parents’ income. In 1940, that number exceeded 90 percent.
Of course, most successful entrepreneurs have earnings that vastly outstrip their parents’. In fact, they outstrip the earnings of nearly every human in history. In by-now-familiar statistics, the rate of income growth at the top levels of earning in the U.S. have far outpaced growth at the bottom segments (in the 1980s, it was the other way around, according to research by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman). Last year Oxfam International found that more than 80 percent of earnings went to the top 1 percent of the world population.
That so many of today’s new billionaires mostly come comfortable backgrounds is emblematic of a broader concentrating of wealth in the U.S. According to recent Federal Reserve data, the median family's net worth had not recovered its pre-recession value by 2016, while the top 10 percent gained double digits since 2007.
Of course, you can still find evidence of rough patches and plenty of hard work in the early childhoods of today's wealthiest tech luminaries. Elon Musk, 47, an immigrant from South Africa, came from wealth, but was bullied as a kid before moving to Canada alone at just 17, where he enrolled in Queens University and transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, before eventually dropping out of a Stanford University PhD program. Jeff Bezos, 54, was born when his mother was 16 years old, and was adopted by her second husband, a Cuban immigrant and an engineer. And Sergey Brin, 44, came to the U.S. as a six-year-old, when his parents traded the anti-Semitic backdrop of Moscow academia for a new life in the U.S.
But even these founders, who all had at least one parent with a science background, stand in contrast to an earlier era. According to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, the second-oldest self-made American billionaire is Amway’s Richard DeVos, born in 1926. DeVos was a boy when his father lost his job as an electrician during the Great Depression, and the family moved in with his grandparents. He remembered stuffing a baseball with fabric and tying it together because he and his friends couldn’t afford a new one. As a sophomore, he was labeled “not college material,” sent to trade school, and had to work to pay his way back into the local Christian high school.
Ted Lerner, who at 92 is the oldest self-made man on the Bloomberg index, is the son of a clothing salesman from Palestine. He grew up in an immigrant community in Washington, and recalled to a local paper, “I remember chickens being plucked and koshered on Georgia Avenue.” Casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, 84, now a controversial figure in U.S. politics, grew up in a working-class Boston neighborhood as the son of a taxi driver. Eli Broad, born in 1933, is the son of a Lithuanian house painter, went on to become the only man to found two Fortune 500 companies in two different industries: housing and financial services.
It is, of course, not the fault of tech's young luminaries that the economy has shifted toward technological skills. Even as it's boosted Americans’ standard of living, the rapid pace of innovation has made education an increasingly important factor in determining income, a trend that in turn has exacerbated rising inequality. Overall educational attainment in the U.S. is rising, but nearly 70 percent of the adult population has still never graduated from college. That's even though higher education has increasingly become a prerequisite for white-collar work. The college wage premium, or what bachelor’s degree holders make compared to high school graduates, has skyrocketed since the 1970s and now hovers at about 50 percent, near-record levels.
The so-called "digital divide" between rich and poor households, has reinforced the gap between haves and have-nots. Despite the pervasiveness of personal computing, poor kids today are less likely to have access to the programs that could help them develop early coding genius. According to Pew Research Center data, 87 percent of households with an income of $75,000 or higher use broadband at home. But for households making less than $30,000, it's only 45 percent.
That inequality of opportunity is rising is hardly a matter of debate. What's still unclear, though, is the eventual result. Besides barring the path for talented people of limited means, a widening chasm between the rich and everyone else also presents political problems. Witness mounting anger at tech companies in cities like San Francisco and Seattle. The Seattle city council voted to levy a punitive per-worker tax on Amazon and other large employers in response to the area's growing homelessness problem. Seattle officials relented, but tensions still simmer beneath the surface nationwide, threatening to boil over in unpredictable ways.
And unlike yesterday's titans, the newest of generation billionaires don’t have histories likely to assuage popular resentment. The three youngest self-made billionaires on Bloomberg's index are all Facebook cofounders. Their story is legend: After Zuckerberg's auspicious beginnings in Dobbs Ferry, he created a hotness-ranking tool called Facemash before he and his friends dropped out to found Thefacebook.com. Just above them on the list in age is Sean Parker, now 38, who took up programming early and interned at Zynga while he was still in high school.
This is not a lamentation of the comfortable childhoods of corporate leaders. In some ways, the American myth of the up-from-nothing elite was always mostly imagined. The likelihood that a child today will rise from the lowest to the highest quintile of earnings, is less than 10 percent. That’s low compared to other rich countries, according to Chetty’s data, but it’s not much changed since the 1970s.
The American Dream has always been a story we told ourselves, bolstered by the hardscrabble tales of men who rose from nothing to become magnates. Today, Zuckerberg is a moral leader—a family man, and a donor to noble causes. But those looking to follow in his footsteps will cast an eye back to his early days: To the comfortable Westchester upbringing, the fencing club captainship at an elite prep school, the insouciant Harvard days, and to Facemash. American youth may aspire to climb the same ladder. They’re likely to find it’s missing some rungs.