The others are misleading you with very limited perspectives. Are you comparing yourself to the father and the kid together or just the kid? The kid is using the parents' space. And while house prices have shot up recently pricing out the current generation, the parents are obviously not of the current generation. Housing in that part of New Jersey used to be quite cheap. They might be doing fairly well, but nothing he's done requires it. Frankly, a lot of what he's done suggests more blue collar access to tools, a truck, and ability to work with your hands fixing things.
The article says the microscope was $1k. That's about 750 GBP. The kid didn't make the purchase at the market rate when he just happpened to feel like it. He jumped at the right point when an opportunity presented itself. Everyone immersed in some hobby dealing with old equipment comes across such opportunities now and then.
The big dark areas are just fluid. He had some kind of shunt to drain fluid from his brain as a child because of too much pressure. And sometime in the next 30 years there was a problem with the shunt failing, which caused fluid to back up. And the reservoirs of fliud known as ventricles basically grew extremely large from the increasing pressure and squashed his brain.
I had something like this happen becasue I was logging in to some microsoft service, and thought I was supposed to be giving them my microsoft account password but apparently they wanted my gmail password for whatever they were up to. And doing a password reset on this microsoft service actually reset my stupid gmail account. Then once I figured out what happened, google wouldn't let me use an old password to set it back.
Wechat does this to me just to use the app. They keep making me play stupid recaptcha games and do verification codes then ultimately block me anyway. I finally gave up on using it.
Well if you choose passion over money, it's not really luck anymore when someone has more money than you. An engineering undergrad can probably earn more in a summer internship than your stipend pays in a year.
I hate to say it, but I can imagine that a group of engineres with a manager nipping at the heels can be much more valuable in total to a company than a group of engineers left to their own devices. Some may be great at being independently productive but most probably are not.
Of course some random idiot nagging the engineers won't be worth much, they need to be experts at the specific business and domain to bring value in this situation. Which also makes them harder to replace.
Certainly, companies with engineers who are capable and independet problem-solvers, and who are experts at the company's needs and the domain it operates in, are the most valuable. These are not uncommon either. But a fast-growing company in a fast-growing industry has zero chance of solely hiring such people. They need to widen their net to people that require managing.
Well that goalpost sure made a leap. Spread it out over six years and imagine the kid is pulling in real cash with a youtube channel showcasing his projects.
The article says the microscope was $1k. That's about 750 GBP. The kid didn't make the purchase at the market rate when he just happpened to feel like it. He jumped at the right point when an opportunity presented itself. Everyone immersed in some hobby dealing with old equipment comes across such opportunities now and then.