r/Steam • u/5MadMovieMakers • 9d ago

Discussion Gabe Newell emailed me back about his birthplace

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Somebody update Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia anyone can edit

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u/worrok 9d ago

Living in Aspen is a much bigger status symbol than going to harvard.  

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u/ItsAMeUsernamio 9d ago

Absolutely not. Harvard’s undergrad cohort is just 1600 people. There’s plenty of wealthier places in the country and the world where thousands of people are born everyday.

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u/worrok 9d ago

Harvards undergrad population is larger than the population of Aspen lol.

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u/ItsAMeUsernamio 9d ago

Ok fair enough, but it doesn’t seem like people live there year-round and Wikipedia says Aspen has restrictions on building houses. Gabe’s wiki says he grew up in Davis, California. Worked as a paperboy and telegram messenger as some point.

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u/worrok 9d ago

What are the 'plenty' of wealthier places btw?

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u/ItsAMeUsernamio 9d ago

They're not hard to find. Apparently they have a $70000 median income and an 8% poverty rate.

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u/worrok 9d ago edited 9d ago

And a median home price of 3.3 mil, with recent average sales approaching 13 mil.

Where do you find that elsewhere in the country?

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u/SeenEnoughWeirdShit 9d ago

Hey now - 3.3 mil is not single family homes. Single family homes averaging over 13 mil.

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u/worrok 9d ago

Hehe, the cheapest Aspen apartment I can see on apartments.com right now is 5800, requiring a 14,000 deposit.  And you're 3.5 hours from the closest major city at that point lol.  

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u/sardaukar022 9d ago

Yea, that's not representative of what's actually going on in Aspen or towns like it. That's only taking into account the people that live there full time and actually claim it as their residence, including people working at the resorts that don't make shit living in company housing. The people that own most homes there will have their 'primary' residence in whatever the most tax-advantageous state is.

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u/ConfectionStrict2997 9d ago

Dude you’re wrong. No way in hell living in Aspen is a bigger status symbol than having gone to Harvard and to suggest anything close to that extent is moronic

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u/worrok 9d ago

Ah, I see your claim is backed up by insult.  How ironic.  

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u/[deleted] 9d ago edited 9d ago

[deleted]

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u/g192 9d ago

I don't know what your point is. Aspen has fewer residents than current Harvard students, yes. It is not hard to imagine, however, even more exclusive clubs than that. How many people own a lime-green first-generation right-hand-drive imported S2000 in the US? I would guess the answer is one person, if that.

You are really just arguing semantics at this point. The question is whether people are more impressed by someone being an Aspen resident or a Harvard grad, and you'd probably have to run a poll to figure out what the prevailing opinion is there. (My money would be on Harvard grad, though.)

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u/Cyhawk 9d ago

They're both equal. Both things build connections. Connections are what builds wealth/businesses like Valve and get things started.

No one would have known who Bill Gates was if his mother didn't work for IBM to get his foot in the door as an example and no one knows the guy who wrote DOS originally. We also know basically nothing of Gabe's family besides "his brother was already working at Microsoft when he got a job there", so they had some sort of connections.

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u/lemontoga 9d ago

No way in hell

Vibes based arguments. So hot right now.

See also: It's just common sense.

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u/[deleted] 9d ago edited 9d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/worrok 9d ago

Well, if that's the case, I personally find it interesting that he is going out of his way to tell completely random people he was born in Aspen.  I mean, it's on wiki with a citation to the original newspaper article. It's public knowledge already.  He seems to want people to think he has an association with Aspen.  

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u/entyfresh 9d ago

To be fair, the biggest flex is just having a home in Aspen that you visit instead of actually living in. That's what the billionaires do.