People give far too much credit to the wealthy--only a very small percentage of people with -real- money actually -earned- it. Most people who have -real- money (And I'm not talking about people with a million to their name -- I'm talking about the people who can afford to buy oh, say, a Mustang (of either color
) were either lucky, had rich parents, lied and cheated, or some combination thereof. A small percentage of those people started small and worked hard to make their money. A slightly larger percentage were intelligent enough to start small and make intelligent choices in life.
About zero of them came to any of their businesses with the "If so and so says jump, I say how high" attitude. There's nothing wrong with that attitude when you're doing unskilled labor, but professionals
should generally earn more respect (And carry themselves with more self-respect).
(And professionals in any capacity should earn more than $30k, regardless of how 'young' they are)
Anyway, I guess I'm rambling a bit here. I'm not trying to imply that the wealthy don't deserve their money -- far from it -- but I have found that people who claim to have 'earned' their fortunes either inherited, had parents that put them through an MBA program (cough, stanford, cough) designed to ease them into the Executive Class (... and then inherited), or they simply got lucky. (Right place, right time; good-but-unskilled choice; high-yield industry in a high-yield period, etc)
That doesn't really deserve the deference that people seem to grant. They're just people, and should be judged on their merits, not their net worth... just like everyone else.
~Fox