The meritocracy in action
By 
This really deserves its own post.
After Stephen Ross got major blowback for organizing and hosting a $250K a plate fundraiser for Donald Trump, he released this statement.
Ross’s claim that he “started his business with nothing” omits the potentially relevant detail that his uncle, Max Fisher, was one of the richest men in America (At the end of his life, Fisher was the oldest person on the Forbes 400 list, with a net worth $775 million).
I think it’s fair to say that “nothing” here is what lawyers would call a term of art.
All the reminds me of Lauren Rivera’s comment that when researching her book Pedigree, people would say to her things like “I came from nothing,” and it would turn out that the person’s parents were both tenured university professors. But this version of “nothing” seems a bit more extreme than that.
. . . Memories of Stephen Ross’s hardscrabble beginnings:
Ross spent the first two years of his collegiate career at the University of Florida, improved his grades, and then transferred to Michigan to begin his junior year. He graduated in 1962 with a degree in business administration before attending law school at Wayne State University, where he earned a juris doctorate in 1965. He then set his sights on a master’s of law in taxation at New York University. There was just one problem: He couldn’t afford the tuition. Enter Uncle Max, who loaned him the money and sent him on his way. . .
The move to New York was far from a panacea for Ross — at least not right away. By the end of 1970 he’d already been fired from his second job on Wall Street, in the corporate finance department at Bear Stearns, and had arrived at another critical juncture in his life. “I thought I was unemployable, and I didn’t want to start interviewing for another job because I’d already had two jobs in New York in a short period of time.”
Instead, Ross sought a loan from another family member. This time it was his mother, and he asked for $10,000. [Ed.: This is equivalent to $65,000 in 2019 money] “She had confidence in me,” he says. “I mean, I had three degrees at that point in time. I told her I didn’t want to go out and get another job. I wanted to try and set up my own business.”
Using the loan to live on, Ross finalized a business plan for a novel idea he’d been working on: Applying his knowledge of federal tax law to finance and develop government-assisted, multifamily housing for long-term investment. [Ed.:The free market at work folks!] He started his company, Related Housing Cos., and soon after clients bought in to his idea and his gamble paid off. “I was earning $25,000 as a salary when I was working on Wall Street,” [$160,000 in 2019$] Ross says, “and I went to $150,000 in that first year. And then I probably made over $500,000 the next year.” [Three million in 2019$].