‘Nepo babies’
Most of us mortgaged the house, cut everything to the bone, learned to sell at the kitchen table, or scraped to hire our first junior.
Meanwhile, this week ‘nepo babies’ have been in the news:
Lachlan Murdoch has just come out on top of a billion-dollar family settlement that sees Rupert hand him effective control of one of the most powerful media empires in the world. Three of his siblings reportedly took roughly $1.1bn each to step aside.
And across town, David Ellison is building a media play big enough to stitch together major studios and streaming services, with rumours of an acquisition of Warner Bros by Paramount. The plan is bankrolled by his father Larry’s capital, part of a pattern of hugely expensive personal investments by father in son. And if current trends continue, Larry could soon become the richest man in the world.
I say this not to rage against billionaires for the sake of it. I say it because the contrast feels instructive. Most of us get help along the way: a mentor, a small loan from a relative, a first client who believed in us. That help is real and meaningful. But it is not the same thing as being born into a balance sheet that buys you studios, islands, or the keys to a legacy trust.
The people I know and the leaders I work with are overwhelmingly self-made. They have scars from late-night client pitches, from firing a toxic hire, from a cashflow month that nearly broke them. Those scars teach muscle memory few inheritances can buy. They teach:
• Resilience — knowing how to get up after repeated rejections.
• Credibility — the kind that emerges when your team knows you’ve shared the same risk.
• Operational fluency — the instincts that come from running payroll on a bad month.
• Empathy and culture — the skills to recruit people who stay when things get hard.
• Managing up — the awkward, political work of getting sponsors, board members, or clients to back you when nothing about your plan is proven.
Privilege buys options. It rarely buys those muscles. And in the long run, leaders with the muscles win consistently. They build teams that can outlast a founder, they make decisions under pressure, and they produce companies that other people actually want to join or buy.
If you’re checking the scoreboard and feel that the game’s rigged, you’re not wrong. But if you’re building leadership muscles now, you’re investing in something that money alone won’t buy later. That’s the edge I care about helping leaders keep and scale.