Sometimes people do make huge fortunes by back stabbing and stepping on people, but I know of several wealthy people that made fortunes because they were at the right place at the right time with the right product or service. Some examples are : I know several accountants that could have been just ordinary pencil pushers but Free Trade made them amazingly wealthy because they were able to help company save huge amounts of money by using the existing law to their advantage. The internet has also made many people wealthy. I know quite a few people that have started out in other fields, yet they made their fortunes from the internet.
There are people that are single minded and selfish and use others to achieve their goals. When they no longer need people they throw them away. Not all fortunes are built this way.
Although I agree with you about being there at the right place and the right time. In Bill Gates case it was a little different,
After reading the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that demonstrated the Altair 8800, Gates contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS),
the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform.[42] In reality,
Gates and Allen did not have an Altair and had not written code for it; they merely wanted to gauge MITS's interest. MITS president Ed Roberts
agreed to meet them for a demo, and over the course of a few weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter.
The demonstration, held at MITS's offices in Albuquerque, was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC.
Paul Allen was hired into MITS,[43] and Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard to work with Allen at MITS in Albuquerque in November 1975.
They named their partnership "Micro-Soft" and had their first office located in Albuquerque.[43] Within a year, the hyphen was dropped,
and on November 26, 1976, the trade name "Microsoft" was registered with the Office of the Secretary of the State of New Mexico.[43]
Gates never returned to Harvard to complete his studies.
Microsoft's BASIC was popular with computer hobbyists, but Gates discovered that a pre-market copy had leaked into the community and was being widely
copied and distributed. In February 1976, Gates wrote an Open Letter to Hobbyists in the MITS newsletter saying that MITS could not continue to produce,
distribute, and maintain high-quality software without payment.[44] This letter was unpopular with many computer hobbyists, but Gates persisted in his belief
that software developers should be able to demand payment. Microsoft became independent of MITS in late 1976, and it continued to develop programming language
software for various systems.[43] The company moved from Albuquerque to its new home in Bellevue, Washington on January 1, 1979.[42]
