The American dream is not dead

Our history is littered with stories of men , often immigrants, who had ideas that would transform society, and they became very rich in the process.

Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish-American industrialist, and philanthropist. Carnegie led the expansion of the American steel industry in the late 19th century and became one of the richest Americans in history. He became a leading philanthropist in the United States and in the British Empire.

During the last 18 years of his life, he gave away $350 million (conservatively $65 billion in 2019 dollars, based on percentage of GDP) to charities, foundations, and universities – almost 90 percent of his fortune. His 1889 article proclaiming "The Gospel of Wealth" called on the rich to use their wealth to improve society, and stimulated a wave of philanthropy.

At the time of his death, he was worth $372 billion in 2014 dollars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Carnegie

Although Andrew and Dale Carnegie were not related, they both shared a desire to help improve the prospects of their fellow man. Although Andrew Carnegie founded numerous charitable organizations, his most lasting legacy is  the Carnegie libraries. Between 1883 and 1929, he used his vast fortune to fund a total of 2509 Carnegie libraries.

Carnegie’s philosophy of life can be summed up by “the Andrew Carnegie Dictum”:

·         To spend the first third of one's life getting all the education one can.

·         To spend the next third making all the money one can.

·         To spend the last third giving it all away for worthwhile causes.

Dale Carnegie was born in rural Missouri in 1888, and was the second son of farmers James Carnegie and his wife Amanda Harbison. His first job after college was selling correspondence courses to ranchers. He moved on to selling bacon, soap, and lard for Armour & Company ^[He was successful to the point of making his sales territory of South Omaha, Nebraska, the national leader for the firm.

After saving $500, Dale Carnegie quit sales in 1911 in order to pursue a lifelong dream of becoming a Chautauqua lecturer. He ended up instead attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, but found little success as an actor, though it is written that he played the role of Dr. Hartley in a road show of Polly of the Circus. When the production ended, he returned to New York, living at the YMCA on 125th Street. There he got the idea to teach public speaking, and he persuaded the YMCA manager to allow him to instruct a class in return for 80% of the net proceeds. In his first session, he had run out of material. Improvising, he suggested that students speak about "something that made them angry", and discovered that the technique made speakers unafraid to address a public audience. From this 1912 debut, the Dale Carnegie Course evolved. Carnegie had tapped into the average American's desire to have more self-confidence, and by 1914, he was earning $500 (about $12800 today) every week. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Carnegie 

William Henry Gates III is an American business magnate, software developer, investor, and philanthropist. He is best known as the co-founder of Microsoft Corporation. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, chief executive officer, president and chief software architect, while also being the largest individual shareholder until May 2014. He is one of the best-known entrepreneurs and pioneers of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. As of 2020, his net worth is $113 billion, which makes him the SECOND richest man in the world, after Jeff Bezos.

  Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, Gates co-founded Microsoft with childhood friend Paul Allen in 1975, in Albuquerque, New Mexico; it went on to become the world's largest personal computer software company. From 1995 to 2017, he held the Forbes title of the richest person in the world all but four of those years. In October 2017, he was surpassed by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who had an estimated net worth of US$90.6 billion compared to Gates's net worth of US$89.9 billion at the time. As of July 2020, Gates had an estimated net worth of US$111.8 billion, making him the second-wealthiest person in the world, behind Bezos.  

^{Looking at the picture shown below (from 1975) it's hard to imagine that the man on the left would one day be the richest man in the world.} 

 

^{Like Andrew Carnegie, Bill Gates believes in philanthropy.}

Later in his career and since leaving day-to-day operations at Microsoft in 2008, Gates has pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors. He has given sizable amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, reported to be the world's largest private charity. In 2009, Gates and Warren Buffett founded The Giving Pledge, whereby they and other billionaires pledge to give at least half of their wealth to philanthropy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates

Jeff Bezos is an American internet entrepreneur, industrialist, media proprietor, and investor. He is best known as the founder, CEO, and president of the multi-national technology company Amazon. The first centi-billionaire on the Forbes wealth index, Bezos has been the world's richest person since 2017 and was named the "richest man in modern history" after his net worth increased to $150 billion in July 2018. In September 2018, Forbes described him as "far richer than anyone else on the planet" as he added $1.8 billion to his net worth when Amazon became the second company in history to reach a market cap of $1 trillion.

Bezos was born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on January 12, 1964, the son of Jacklyn (née Gise) and Ted Jorgensen. At the time of his birth, his mother was a 17-year-old high school student and his father was a bike shop owner. After his parents divorced, his mother married Cuban immigrant Miguel "Mike" Bezos in April 1968. Shortly after the wedding, Mike adopted four-year-old Jorgensen, whose surname was then changed to Bezos.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos

Google was founded in September 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University in California. Together they own about 14 percent of its shares and control 56 percent of the stockholder voting power through supervoting stock. They incorporated Google as a California privately held company on September 4, 1998, in California. Google was then reincorporated in Delaware on October 22, 2002. An initial public offering (IPO) took place on August 19, 2004, and Google moved to its headquarters in Mountain View, California, nicknamed the Googleplex. In August 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its various interests as a conglomerate called Alphabet Inc. Google is Alphabet's leading subsidiary and will continue to be the umbrella company for Alphabet's Internet interests. Sundar Pichai was appointed CEO of Google, replacing Larry Page who became the CEO of Alphabet. It is considered one of the Big Four technology companies, alongside Amazon, Apple and Microsoft.

Larry Page was born in Michigan, but Sergey Brin and his family emigrated from Russia when he was 6. As of 2020, Brin is the 7^th richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of $67.6 billion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google

Apple is now the world’s most valuable publicly traded company, passing Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco. As of close of business Friday, July 31, Apple has a market valuation of $1.84 trillion, while Saudi Aramco’s is $1.76 trillion, according to CNBC. Apple’s stock, which has been on a largely-steady climb since the end of March, closed up more than 10 percent on Friday following the company’s record-breaking third-quarter earnings on Thursday, ending the day at $425.04.

Apple Computer Company was founded on April 1, 1976, by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne as a business partnership.  The company's first product is the Apple I, a computer designed and hand-built entirely by Wozniak . To finance its creation, Jobs sold his only motorized means of transportation, a VW Microbus, for a few hundred dollars, and Wozniak sold his HP-65 calculator for US$500 (equivalent to $2,246 in 2019). Wozniak debuted the first prototype at the Homebrew Computer Club in July 1976 .The Apple I was sold as a motherboard with CPU, RAM, and basic textual-video chips—a base kit concept which would not yet be marketed as a complete personal computer.It went on sale soon after debut for US$666.66 (equivalent to $2,995 in 2019). Wozniak later said he was unaware of the coincidental mark of the beast in the number 666, and that he came up with the price because he liked "repeating digits

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/31/21350154/apple-worlds-most-valuable-company-saudi-aramco

Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, to Abdulfattah Jandali and Joanne Schieble, and was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs (née Hagopian).

His biological father, Abdulfattah "John" (al-)Jandali, grew up in Homs, Syria, and was born into an Arab Muslim household. While an undergraduate at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, he was a student activist and spent time in prison for his political activities He pursued a PhD at the University of Wisconsin, where he met Joanne Carole Schieble, a Catholic of Swiss and German descent As a doctoral candidate, Jandali was a teaching assistant for a course Schieble was taking, although both were the same age. Mona Simpson, 

Jobs's biological sister, notes that her maternal grandparents were not happy that their daughter was dating a Muslim. Walter Isaacson, author of the Steve Jobs biography, additionally states that Schieble's father "threatened to cut Joanne off completely" if she continued the relationship. Jobs’s adoptive father, Paul Reinhold Jobs, was a Coast Guard mechanic. After leaving the Coast Guard, Paul Jobs married Clara Hagopian in 1946. Their attempts to start a family were halted after Clara had an ectopic pregnancy, leading them to consider adoption in 1955. 

 Schieble became pregnant with Jobs in 1954, when she and Jandali spent the summer with his family in Homs, Syria. According to Jandali, Schieble deliberately did not involve him in the process: "without telling me, Joanne upped and left to move to San Francisco to have the baby without anyone knowing, including me."

Schieble gave birth to Jobs on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco and chose an adoptive couple for him that was "Catholic, well-educated, and wealthy, but the couple later changed their mind. Jobs was then placed with Paul and Clara Jobs, neither of whom had a college education, and Schieble refused to sign the adoption papers. She then took the matter to court in an attempt to have her baby placed with a different family, and only consented to releasing the baby to Paul and Clara after the couple pledged to pay for the boy's college education.

YouTube is an American video-sharing platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. Three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—created the service in February 2005. Google bought the site in November 2006 for US$1.65 billion; YouTube now operates as one of Google's subsidiaries.

Chad  Hurley founded YouTube in 2005 with Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. On October 16, 2006, Chen and Hurley sold YouTube to Google Inc. for $1.65 billion. Although Hurley was born in Pennsylvania, Steve Chen was born in Taiwan, and Jawed Karim was born in   East Germany. At the time of the company’s sale to Google, Hurley was 30 years old, Cen was 28, and Karim was 26.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube

Although all of the stories shown above are remarkable, I’m of the opinion that YouTube is the most fantastic. In little more than a year after its founding, the company was sold to Google for $1.65 billion, which instantly made the three founders mulit-bilionaires.


Who said that the American dream is dead?