>This story is isn't really a story. The "evidence" the author cites that older billionaires are interesting is that William Buffet great up poor and had a paper route. Extrapolating from this, apparently, the author comes to the conclusion that other billionaires must be interesting.

While that is certainly arguable there is a bit of truth there. Many of the billionaires/venture capital types got lucky. They were in the right place at the right time to leverage their private education and college education (in most cases anyway, sure some came from nothing) to develop an app or website that they sold for a mint then shotgunned little bits of their money at many other similar types making even more money off of a small percentage.

Most of them lack any 'real-world' experience. They've never wondered how to pay the light bill, they've never had to file personal bankruptcy, they've never worked manual labor jobs, many of them have probably never worked retail jobs. Most have never lost a parent in their youth or had a parent forced into retirement early via a disability, or had a disability themselves.

There's a lot of diversity that is missing from the money-holders in the Bay Area and similar locations. Don't get me wrong, some are doing awesome stuff through things like Effective Altruism but they are severely limited on their experiences.

I've dug graves for a living, my father died 12 days before my 13th birthday, my single mother had to retire early from disability after battling thyroid cancer and then having bone deterioration issues shortly thereafter. I was delivering papers 3 cents a piece around age 10 and working as many hours as I legally could by 16. Post my bankruptcy I was working as much as 90 hours a week some weeks for the better part of a year and didn't even break a gross of 6-figures. I have a vastly different set of experiences than Altman or Zuckerberg or Moskovitz and I still do, I make 32k a year after 12 years on the job, if you look at the S&P 500 returns since December of 09 someone with 3 million invested in any one of those years in a fund has made anywhere from 1.29x to 30.36x my annual gross income. I still have to worry about every cent I make, with a fraction of their wealth they can return from a fraction of their net worth. They live in an entirely different world than I do.

Hell if one of them had 10 million in SPYD the quarterly dividend last month would have grossed them 3.11x my annual gross income. When you have that much money, you have no real fears. You don't have to worry about saving for your future, you don't have to worry about the fact you might have to work until the day you die, you don't have to worry about what happens if you get sick and it ends up costing more than insurance will cover, you don't have the fear of 'how am I going to keep a roof over my head and eat' nagging at your heels.

When you never need to work another day in your life, I imagine it's pretty damn easy to settle into complacency and get boring. When you've never had the experience of hardship, you probably don't even think about such things. You worry about which charity you're going to give all your money to when you take the Bill & Melinda gates challenge. You look for the next Uber or chat app to throw a bunch of money at instead of thinking about ways you can make massive change in your life and those close to you.

I absolutely get where the article is coming from. A lack of experience of hardships can easily make you boring because you don't know what risk actually is.

Edit:

I'd even add that I think anyone that wants to make a difference in the world, that has a net worth at or exceeding say 15 million+ should hire personal advisors from various income brackets and backgrounds. Say someone on disability (compensated with a livable wage which would exceed ant disability benefit), someone right at the poverty line, someone lower middle class. The rest they're already surrounded by, solid middle class and higher.

I think they should regularly bounce ideas off of these people and every 5-10 years replace them with new individuals with more recent experiences. Use diversity and hardship as a way to improve your ability to influence the world for the better both through your personal and business endeavors.