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I've been having some thoughts recently about the billionaires among us, some opinions, some takes even. My politics on this has evolved over time; at one point they were admirable titans of industry, then they were capitalist parasitic ticks, then they were a necessary part of the incentive structure that drives to economy, and now they are a bloated level of inefficiency preventing the market from functioning efficiently.
But over all this time, I've kinda synthesized a superstructure that I don't think is gonna change, that I think is not on the left right axis, but on another mysterious plane: I'm jealous of china. I think we're gonna have to steven universe meme one of these guys. I don't even really care who, and I don't care who does it. It could be Il Duce Trump, it could be General Secretary Mamdani, it could be some boring centrist whose name we don't know.
Anyone who imposes consequences on or limits the behaviors of the managing class would win my instant approval. This could just be because of my space autism getting triggered unimaginably by space-x getting fucking shackled to a corpse right before IPO/ Artemis being a big fucking waste of time and money* / Boeing doing boeing stuff, it could be the long 2008 hangover, it could be a thousand things.
I guess I'm just kinda over us deciding that once you reach a certain net worth, you are some sort of luminous being. You can go to pedo island and it's fine, you can do drugs that normies go to prison for an it's fine, you can fuck up critical national infrastructure and it's fine, you have infinite money when it's time to do what you want but somehow you have no money (or negative money!) when it's time to contribute to the public good.
I recall Luigi, and I recall the polling: people old enough to have been adults when a the post FDR wealth redistribution program was still around were very unfavorable; people who came into consciousness as the program was being fully unwound in the late 80s and 90s were split 50/50, and people who never experienced that social milieu were yelling "BASED BASED BASED!"
I really think that unless the uniparty plays it's cards right, the next realignment is not gonna be pretty for anyone. We need another FDR type to head that shit off like it's vanguardist communism in the 1930s, and at this point I don't think I care if they are left or right, they just need to be for the bottom and middle and even most of the top, and against the peak.
*Yes I know about pork. Pork can at least do something! highways can get build, parks are nice, and if we need to build bombs somewhere to it might as well be in bumfuck nowhere to give the nowhereians something to do other than meth.
In my own life experience, I think I have a lot more distaste for the "mere millionaires" than the billionaires. Maybe it's because I've met a bunch of people in the 10 - 50 million dollar net worth range and only one billionaire.
Nonetheless, every single person I know who is worth more than $10 million reached that position through inheritance or marriage.
They don't work, and seem to flutter through life thinking they'll become an Expert at Something, but usually get bored before they actually get anywhere. The most dedicated of them might get another degree, but it seems to stop there.
Beyond that, they're insulated from consequences in a way that warps their minds. Most of them think they're quite brilliant investors, for example. Unlike me, they're able to afford big, risky bets that I can't take unless I want to stake my entire future on it. They'll then crow about their enormous unrealized gains on their portfolio, failing to note that every single investment they've made other than Nvidia is down 10 - 50%. They could have literally made more money investing in a basic-bitch whole market fund. It doesn't matter though, because they've staked enough of it as collateral for tax-free loans that they're set for life.
They frequently don't even realize what is realistic or not. I was talking about burnout once with one of them, and he gave me his sure-fire stress solution: just take a year off and go to Europe. I didn't have the heart to tell him that even if I could afford to take a whole year off work and start the job hunt when I got back, I still didn't have a family chalet that I could use rent free during my visit.
The one billionaire I have met, however, was sharp as hell. He clearly knew both his industry and finance inside and out, and simultaneously had the self-awareness to realize that he was not normal. He knew he had a lot of help getting to the point where his wealth could really snowball, and he recognized that luck was involved. Someone asked if he had advice on becoming a billionaire. The answer was long, but one of the most important things he said was that you can't do it without taking risks. He also made it clear that you aren't going to even be able to take those risks unless you're a multi millionaire first. It was a very different conversation compared to people who fell into money.
$10 million isn’t that stratospheric, likely many older Mottizens already have that and many young Mottizens someday will.
$10 million can be attainable with boringly grinding it away at a high-paying but fairly normal W2 job trajectory. If you start with year 1 putting $50K into basic bitch equity funds, increasing by $10K each year, you’ll have $10 million pre-cap gains tax after year 26 assuming an 8% annual rate of return (historical US market returns have been 9-10%). More than half of that coming from investment returns.
Someone's age in relation to their net worth is also important to take into consideration. Based on birb's description of his interactions with these people, it's likely they are 35 or younger. Having $10 million in net worth at 35 or younger is the top 0.1% of people in that bracket. He also said they aren't working, if true, would be a different class of people than the people who build up their wealth by grinding away at a top 1% income job.
Like you said I do think a $10million net worth is within the realm of possibility for the average Mottizen. It would also entail never really spending the money that's compounding on anything until you reach near retirement age unless the income is much greater than is needed to achieve the investment value you indicated and I think most people would rather have that money go towards something like a home and creating memories than towards accumulating wealth just so you can say you are worth 8 figures.
To be able to reach $10million in net worth and also have a standard of living similar to people within that asset range would require even more income When you factor in how taxes have the function of lowering the amount of money you actually keep the more you earn, and that states where you can find these top 1% income jobs also tend to have state level income taxes, the amount of money you need to actually be earning starts to reach like half a million dollars. That's anything but normal. That's saying to be rich you just need to make a lot of money, or to be in the top 1% net worth of people you just need to make a top 1% income.
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My salary year 1 was rather less than that; I think it was Year 4 or 5 before I made that much. And it was a good salary for the time. Having an extra $50K to put away in year 1 would be very unusual even today. If you get a job at a FAANG out of college you can (maybe year 2 if you've got student debt), but in recent years your best bet there would have been to hold on to your RSUs -- but people who are old today didn't have that possibility.
A $10M net worth is a little bit more than the top 1% in the US.
I meant Year 1 as any arbitrary first year where someone has a decent chunk of change to save, not necessary first year out of undergraduate (or first full comp. cycle, treating the stub year as Year 0). Since one may do graduate school and/or have student loan debt, post-undergraduate ramp up times can vary.
Even if we start Year 1 at $10,000 positions and cap the eventual annual savings amount at a terminal $200,000, one can hit still $10,000,000 after 30 years given an 8% annual investment return.
My point is that your numbers are unrealistic for the past 30 years. Making enough to save $10,000/year 30 years ago (when median household income before taxes was $35,492, top quintile was $78,324) would have been quite difficult, especially when you consider the person would be no later than early-mid career. Making enough to save $200,000 takes a phenomenal salary -- top 20% in 2024 was $219,281.
Realistically, if you want to get to $10M you need to do better with investments, or have an extremely high salary early on.
My first role out of undergrad, the TC was about twice the US median household income at the time. It was on the high-paying side but unremarkably so. It allowed me to invest an amount that easily cleared well above $10,000 (in 1996 dollars, 30 years ago from today).
I still self-identify as young, but I’ve been yeeting six figures annually at index funds for years now, and I’ve had plenty of similarly-aged male friends and acquaintances who have been working higher-paying jobs, have seen faster career progression than I have at their jobs, or have been working higher-paying jobs and seen faster career progression than I have. Benchmarking off the median isn’t that relevant for a group of people disportionately composed of those from high-paying professions.
Making twice the US median HHI straight out of undergrad 30 years ago would in fact have been quite remarkable. It's pretty remarkable now, in fact. Sure, there's a few roles where you can do it; big tech (at least if they start hiring again), some of finance, biglaw. But very few.
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I’ve met quite a number of multi-millionaires. Generally the spouses don’t have productive waged jobs, lots of unpaid but productive jobs at the local food bank/charitable fundraising aggregator/whatever. Lots of wife stores and that sort of thing. The men tend to be smart, personable, and reasonable, but the women cover the usual spectrum. Typically older, and without the time to take a summer off in Europe- but they all have a condo at a nearby beach, or a lake house, or a country club membership, or all three. Red money is notably nicer to the help than blue money, but that’s partly by the latter making things awkward from being uncomfortable with class differences. Both tend to be capable of being cultured, but they might not prefer eg the symphony to popular music from when they were teenagers(which is usually a while ago).
Rich people’s servants, on the other hand, are uniformly awful to deal with.
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I know you're talking about specific people who've inherited their money, so I'm not calling your post wrong, but I've noticed that rich people very often have this kind of breezy, spontaneous, ultra-low-anxiety personality even before they get rich, or during periods of time when they're poor.
This attitude seeps through Musk's biography in a way that's impossible to miss. You see it in him at all stages of his life, like when he is couch surfing after arriving in the U.S. with very little money and a strained relationship with his family back home. You see it in his ancestors, his college roommates, and his early business partners, many of whom were undistinguished at first but slowly rose to eminence.
In my own life, I've found that you eventually get to a level in the startup scene where you're surrounded by these kinds of elites at company events, and everyone's backstory is like they studied Korean language in college, circumnavigated the globe on a cheap boat, and then started a rodeo business before discovering a passion for databases--and you feel distinctly out of place if your reaction to "spend a year in a foreign country with no money" is an anxious, "well obviously I can't do that."
Of course, it's also true that one strengthens this "everything will work out" attitude through collecting repeated evidence that it actually does, and that requires high and consistent competence. So I remain a bit torn on whether success or confidence comes first.
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I guess I know a different crowd (American, here), but I know a few folks in that scale, all of whom are retired, married professionals (doctors, medium-tier business executives, engineers) that spent within their means and lived comparatively modestly and drive Toyotas. Maybe they inherited some of it, but it wasn't the majority of their income. But you also probably wouldn't know those details unless you were close to them: the millionaire-next-door types don't tend to talk much about money.
Also American. The people I know who meet that kind of millionaire next door criteria (eg: frugal, older) tend to not get into the eight figure range. It could be a regional thing: I'm in a pretty LCoL area. The people who I'm describing all ended up here because of the nearby college.
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I wonder how true this is. Looking at the richest men in America:
Musk: Started his first company in 1995 with about $60k of capital in 2026 dollars and seemed to just bootstrap his success from that. His dad famously owned an emerald mine, but there's conflicting reports about how much money that actually brought in and he was estranged from his dad.
Larry Ellison: mildly shitty childhood, raised by aunt and uncle, started his business with $11k starting capital in 2025 dollars, of which he personally invested about $6k. Not a multimillionaire and didn't come from money as far as I can tell.
Zucc: professional parents, high status schools, probably UMC or LUC. It's not clear how much starting capital Facebook requires from a cursory skim, but I can't imagine it was a lot considering its humble beginnings. He had a parental safety net, but certainly wasn't a multi millionaire.
Jeff Bezos: born to a teenage mother (high school student) and father (an alcoholic "Danish unicyclist"). Later adopted by a Cuban stepfather (petroleum engineer). I guess his mom's dad was a regional director of the atomic energy commission? Bezos had a successful professional career after college and started Amazon with $600k of capital in 2025 dollars from his parents.
Larry Page: college professor parents. High status summer schools. Got some seed funding for basic equipment and then managed to attract bigger investors with demos of the technology.
I don't really think that any of these people were only in a position to take risks from having millions already. Bezos is probably the closest thing to this given the size of the investment his parents put in (although it's a mystery to me where they got that money from in the first place). The most you can say for the rest of these is that their lives wouldn't have been over had their businesses not succeeded and they could have moved in with their parents or something - but that goes for a lot of people, not just multi millionaires.
I think he meant it more in the way that you can't swing for the fences on day one. You have to aim for millions before you get to billions.
Looks like that's not true, at least if you're doing it by founding a company -- Ellison, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Page all did it in one shot.
Bezos was already rich by normal-person standards after four years at DE Shaw, during which he was promoted unusually rapidly so was presumably a high performer. (Incidentally, I think this answers the question about where Bezos Sr got the $600k from - a lot of it was Jeff's own money but in the 1990's startup culture daddy was a better story).
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Maybe he was full of shit on that one, then. I'm not a billionaire, so it's hard to speak from experience.
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