The biggest start-up successes - from Henry Ford to Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg - were pioneered by people from solidly middle-class backgrounds. These founders were not wealthy when they began. They were hungry for success, but knew they had a solid support system to fall back on if they failed.
I had elements that were much more than what Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates had. If I work according to their methods, what will I create? All of this was in my head when I was young.
The next Bill Gates will not start an operating system. The next Larry Page won't start a search engine. The next Mark Zuckerberg won't start a social network company. If you are copying these people, you are not learning from them.
Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs did not start out wealthy, and actually added to income inequality, but we all benefit from their creative effort.
Amazons Jeff Bezos, Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs did not start out wealthy, and actually added to income inequality, but we all benefit from their creative effort.
America is an enormous country with enormous resources. The basic American spirit creates the Wright Brothers and Henry Ford and Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. Once we start rolling, we're pretty formidable. And the incompetence of the government is so massive that even a moderately good executive could regain much ground pretty rapidly. Donald Trump is a very good executive.
merica was middle-class for the very start - the people who came first were hyper-strivers from England. There were no vested interests, no ranks, no classes, it was very lightly populated, there were unlimited natural resources - for free essentially - if you failed, you could always start over.
The earthquake in Haiti was a class-based catastrophe. It didn't much harm the wealthy elite up in the hills, they were shaken but not destroyed. On the other hand the people who were living in the miserable urban slums, huge numbers of them, they were devastated. Maybe a couple hundred thousand were killed. How come they were living there? They were living there because of-it goes back to the French colonial system-but in the past century, they were living there because of US policies, consistent policies.
If you look back in history, as the barbarians were invading the gates of Rome, people were consulting fortunetellers and worrying about the end of the world and all sorts of other apocalyptic notions. When the tsars were finally overthrown, they were all reading tarot cards even as the revolutionaries were banging at the gates.
The Spartans were a paradoxical people. They were the biggest slave owners in Greece. But at the same time, Spartan women had an unusual level of rights. It's a paradox that they were a bunch of people who in many ways were fascist, but they were the bulwark against the fall of democracy.
In the '70s, the newspaper guild managed to get people paid what they were worth, but the reporters suddenly became middle class. It's much more respectable, more uptight, and everyone speaks in guarded tones. And the writing isn't as good. We always had guys who were failed poets and failed novelists who did it to eat.
Congress had the opportunity to extend tax relief to working families without increasing the deficit. Instead, we were handed a bill that favors the wealthy and eliminates deductions that benefit the middle class.
40 percent of people who come to visit America on a visa overstay their visa and we have no idea where they are. On 9/11, at least 2 of the hijackers were here on visa. They were traveling back and forth to the Middle East. And we really had no idea where they were or what they were doing. And they were overstaying their visa. So there are problems I think in the immigration system that need to be fixed for our safety.
[Sport officials] blocked their support of us. But those individuals [ Muhammad Ali, the Jim Browns, the Bill Russells, Kareem Abdul Jabbar ] were old enough, they were wise enough, and they knew their history and this is why they came out in support of us, because they knew that we had our finger on the right move.
Rob Kalin, Etsy's founder, never finished college. Evan Williams, Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey - the founders of Twitter - are not college graduates. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, is another dropout. And, of course, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.
There was a Yale even before Larry [Kramer] and I got there, and there were three designations of students: "white shoe," "brown shoe," and "black shoe." "White shoe" people were kind of the ur-preppies from high-class backgrounds. "Brown shoe" people were kind of the high school student-council presidents who were snatched up and brushed up a little bit to be sent out into the world. "Black shoe" people were beyond the pale. They were chemistry majors and things like that.