[gremlinunderway]

I wouldn't put so much stock in these kinds of historic anecdotes about "self-made" or rags-to-riches people. Most of them are rose tinted recollections given by the person themselves in an interview with a journalist writing a puff piece without actual background checking.

It's really easy to hide privilege and connections by leveraging people's bias. For example, this guys' wiki says his parents were "dairy farmers" which immediately evokes some kind of small family subsistence farm. But maybe what it actually was is they owned half a State's worth of mechanized dairy farms and were multi-millionaires who had never milked a cow in their life.

People love to say the same thing about Bill Gates, how he was this rags to riches story even though his family was both well off enough to put him into one of the few high schools in the country to have computers at the time and his mother worked on the Seattle health board and handled IBMs contracts for computing.

Don't put stock into these propaganda pieces.