What to make of this? Was it an unintentional slip to call successful Americans “lottery winners,” or was it a window into the President’s worldview on wealth, poverty and injustice? If it’s the latter, we’re in new territory. I don’t recall another American President who had such a sarcastic view of success. President Franklin Roosevelt thought and said that big business and bankers opposing his New Deal were “malefactors of great wealth,” but he stopped short of making snarky comments about successful people being lucky. Woodrow Wilson thought entrepreneurs were a passing fad to be replaced by scientific consortiums of big business and big government. But he didn’t call Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers lottery winners.

Intended or not, President Obama’s use of the words “lottery winners” instead of “winners” was in really poor taste. Bill Gates and Paul Allen were surely lucky to be endowed with the 99.99th percentile IQs they didn’t choose. But they each devoted tens of thousands of hours in applying their smarts to learning about software. Gates forfeited great opportunities by dropping out of an elite college. Both risked potentially lucrative careers to start Microsoft MSFT -1.2%.

Larry Page was the grandson of a Michigan autoworker and the son of a professor of computer science and an instructor of computer programming. His business partner, Sergey Brin, was born into a Jewish family in the anti-Semitic Soviet Union. Both were “lucky” to be endowed with native intelligence and to grow up in families that loved learning. But millions of children around the world are similarly endowed and don’t start Google-like companies.

WhatsApp’s Jan Koum grew up in a single-parent California household that often relied on welfare. Netscape cofounder Jim Clark grew up in Texas panhandle poverty and dropped out of high school at age 16. His cofounder, Marc Andreessen, grew up in a rural Wisconsin family unfamiliar with higher mathematics, computer science or software–or even much logical reasoning.