If you come from a wealthy background, you get the really depressing version: the school bully who loved ICP posts about how they got a new job with McKinsey, the slimy moron who used to spread shit about you is the CEO of a up-and-coming startup, and the guy who was too dumb to understand how truly dumb he was is now at a senior position in a thinktank.
A more positive one would be those people actually got better at their skills and improved as people. I'd like to think I'm a better person than I was in high school.
But if you're constantly exposed to their social feeds, you would have the data and probably know better. :)
I guess from plain statistics, you could say that the number of talented people from wealthy backgrounds is roughly the same as talented people generally, so my feeling is that there is a sizable slice of jobs where you just secure rents through connections and you don't actually need to be talented.
From my observations, some industries (film, for instance) will give people a chance, then get rid of them if they don't work out - so a lot of people I vaguely knew had very brief acting careers.
Other companies seem to trundle along with really dysfunctional leadership, for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, I suspect it's because the explicit aim of the company (say, mining) is not what the company is actually doing (say, some kind of rent extraction) so it doesn't matter that the CEO has no skills to speak of.
Also, when you know the people, and you see like an interview they've given, you can usually tell if they're bullshitting.
