The Meritocracy and The Myth of The Self-Made Billionaire

When I was in high school, we had one black kid in our whole class. Let’s name him Jimmy.

Jimmy was the sort of poverty you didn’t have to strain to see. It clung to him like a second skin—threadbare pants that didn’t quite reach his ankles, shoes scuffed down to the sole, and hunger burrowing into the hollows of his cheeks.

We all knew Jimmy didn’t have enough food at home. The lunch ladies, with their hairnets and exhausted hands, gave him additional pieces of greasy cafeteria pizza when they thought no one was watching. Sometimes, we gathered our crumpled dollar notes together to buy him lunch.

This was the 1980s—Reagan's America—when ketchup was deemed a vegetable to squeeze pennies, and “trickle-down economics” was meant to shower wealth. Let’s just say it never rained in Jimmy’s neighborhood.

But Jimmy was intelligent. The type of brilliant that you couldn’t teach, the kind that was born of need and sharpened like a razor.

Jimmy had created an innovative technique to feed himself.

You see, Jimmy sent outraged letters to food producers, alleging he’d discovered all kinds of horrors in their products—a cockroach in his Cheerios, a clump of hair in his potato chips, a rat tail in his Campbell’s soup. Back then, before the internet transformed indignation into white noise, corporations cared. Or at least they cared enough to send apologies and boatloads of complimentary food.

Sure, you may argue that Jimmy lied, and lying is terrible. But I don’t believe Cheerios missed those additional boxes. We all liked Jimmy’s ingenious food hoax. He practically scammed his way into sustenance

I checked in on Jimmy lately. He became a hotshot civil rights attorney. Jimmy made it.

But sometime along the road, America stopped applauding for youngsters like Jimmy. The bootstrap narrative—the one that generated amazement and admiration—has been stolen. Today, the meritocracy, long the beacon of promise for the scrappy and the hungry, has become a punchline to a joke only the rich understand.

The Dystopian Meritocracy

The phrase meritocracy has been popular recently. Originally created by sociologist Michael Young in his 1958 satire The Rise of the Meritocracy, it wasn’t intended to be a praise. Young envisaged a future where society was split into winners and losers, with winners justifying their success by stating they’d “earned” it. Sound familiar?

But here’s the irony: we took Young’s cautionary story and made it our national motto. Work hard, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and voilà—success will come to you. Except, as anybody who’s ever tried pulling themselves up by their bootstraps will tell you, that’s not how physics—or life—works.

Take Jeff Bezos, the patron saint of “self-made” millionaires. Sure, Bezos established Amazon from scratch—in the sense that his parents “scratched” together a $250,000 investment to assist him in getting started. That’s not a bootstrap. That’s a golden parachute disguised as a nudge.

And Elon Musk—the guy who tweets like he created electricity? His dad owned an emerald mine in apartheid-era South Africa.

And the felon-in-chief we just elected? His bootstrap tale includes a $1 million loan from Daddy. Not exactly modest beginnings.

Or consider Larry Page—cofounder of Google. Larry’s father and mother were pioneers in computer programming and science. Page grew up in a highly educated and well-off environment with access to top-tier resources and opportunities. It’s not exactly a “rags-to-riches” narrative when your parents are already well-established in disciplines that helped develop the IT industry.

Now, I am not claiming these millionaires didn’t work hard. They most surely did. But when Cinderella’s narrative doesn’t begin in an ash heap, it’s tougher to grasp a message of hope and endurance. Even when billionaires don’t inherit emerald mines, they inherit mechanisms engineered to hoist them higher than the rest of us can dream of rising.

The Wealth Gap Begins with Education

Remember the 2019 college admissions scandal? Dozens of rich parents were arrested for buying their kids’ way into top institutions. It was like watching a lousy heist movie, only instead of taking jewels, they were stealing slots at Yale.

But the true scandal wasn’t the brazen bribery. It’s about how we normalized the affluent purchasing advantages without violating a single law. Private schools have tuition that equals a small country’s GDP. Admissions coaches make your kid’s B+ essay seem like it was authored by F. Scott Fitzgerald. SAT teachers charge more per hour than a qualified lawyer. And enrichment programs—God forbid tiny Dakota doesn’t spend her summer in a Bolivian jungle constructing houses for endangered sloths.

And while rich parents pay out for these privileges, the rest of us are left trying to find out how to afford the gas to drive our kids to their public school. This isn’t a fair playing field. It’s a rigged game, and the officials are on payroll.

Case in point: A 2023 survey indicated four in ten kids from the wealthiest 0.1% of households attend Ivy League or other prestigious colleges. Four in ten. That’s almost half the places at institutions that are intended to represent the peak of academic accomplishment going to youngsters who began life with every imaginable advantage.

Meanwhile, what happens to the Jimmys of the world? A 2018 research study revealed that in places where the divide between wealthy and poor is largest, affluent parents spend the most attempting to launch their kids into the stratosphere, leaving everyone else in the dust.

And it’s not just college admissions. The whole pipeline—from internships to executive positions—is geared to reward people who already have connections, money, and the flexibility to fail.

This isn’t just unfair—it's a violation of the basic premise that hard effort and skill should be enough. Meritocracy was intended to be a promise: If you’re clever and scrappy, you’ll go far. Instead, it’s become a gatekeeping tool for the privileged.

Meritocracy’s War on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)

Meritocracy's demise is not just attributable to the accumulation of riches. Additionally, it is about the manner in which it is used as a weapon against diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI). The contemporary meritocracy maintains that success is not based on race, gender, or any other kind of prejudice. This is a comforting illusion that allows those who are already at the top to feel justified in their decision to remain there.

When efforts that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) question this narrative, they are accused of lowering the bar, as if the bar would not have been constructed with invisible handrails for the privileged to begin with. By using the phrase "reverse discrimination," critics of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are able to easily ignore the fact that decades of structural inequity did not exactly leave everyone beginning at the same line.

To be honest, I do comprehend a few of the complaints that have been raised about "reverse discrimination." Classism, in conjunction with racism, is a factor that contributes to the exclusion of low-income white children. This is despite the fact that racism and institutional discrimination have undoubtedly resulted in the elevation of obstacles for children of color, such as Jimmy. Children who are born in Appalachia, rural Louisiana, or forgotten regions of the Rust Belt confront many of the same challenges: schools that are underfunded, limited access to healthcare, and a culture that disregards them as "lazy" or "undeserving."

The takeaway is quite clear: if success is entirely dependent on the person, then failure must also be. Never mind the systemic hurdles. You have not put in enough effort if you are not in a position to thrive. It’s your fault.

Meanwhile, the system’s weaknesses are by design. A real meritocracy would scare those clinging to power. Why? Because it would involve removing the mechanisms that maintain their privilege. It’s considerably simpler to keep selling the idea of justice while quietly dragging the ladder up behind them.

Philosopher John Rawls previously claimed that a fair society is one where the least advantaged gain the most. In that sense, America is failing horribly. The middle class is dwindling, the wealth gap is gaping, and the Jimmys of the world—Black, white, or otherwise—are being left behind.

So here’s the challenge: Stop admiring millionaires. Start investing in Jimmys—all of them. Fight for policies that level the playing field, from equal school financing to increased social safety nets. Every Jimmy deserves the opportunity to convert their scrappiness into success—and to remind us that America’s greatness was never about greed.

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