Those heirs are the richest people in Europe, owning everything from VW and Porsche to BMW and a bunch of other household names. And those few percent are coming off from quite huge figures...
Yeah, the lack of new businesses is a big problem in Europe. Regulations and taxation kill them or drive them out of Europe.
But I was speaking from a US perspective (since I'm from the US and this story is about the US), and our biggest, most profitable businesses are mostly under fifty years old, not over.
It is not regulation nor taxes that make it hard for "tech" start ups in Europe. It is harder access to Venture Capital and smaller adressable markets, overall the European Market is huge, but harder to access due to language barriers.
Yeah those parents are all upper middle class. None of them are at all comparable to the owners of a company like VW, Tesla, or Amazon.
And none of them were "heirs who own the majority of stock" nor support your claim that "just because the companies change doesn't mean the owners do".
Edit to reply: You don't need to tell me about the social mobility of people living in poverty. I was born into a family of construction workers, and escaped poverty by learning to program. I know from experience that new businesses create opportunities to escape poverty, even if that isn't measured or sufficiently weighted by the index you cited.
Zuckerberg went to Phillips Exeter, a high school which costs at least $47,000 a year.
Zuckerberg bought Instagram from Kevin Systrom who went to Middlesex high school, which costs at least $55,000 a year.
At this point it becomes a parlor game of who is rich, and who is "upper middle class", which apparently means spending $55,000+ a year on your kid's high school.
OH 1000000% I mean can you even name a single business that has started in Berlin in the last 25 years? You cant. Because not a single business has started. Taxes have killed all brand new business ideas in the German tech start up scene.
