alternate theory. people who have money are desperately looking for things with potential for big returns. if you are one of those things or create one of those things there is more money looking for you than has ever looked for anyone in the history of the world.
It's typically easier to make money from concentrations of money (rich individuals and companies), and those tend have more gain opportunities than problems (because they've already monied-away their problems).
The most amazing part of this Q&A to me is that people will go into industry, apparently increase their worth by millions of dollars, and then come back! When you have an opportunity where people are willing to forego that sort of wealth, then it seems to me that you are doing something incredibly right.
I think it's "humans have the drive to do exciting things" regardless of financial status. Add money, and now they can do more expensive exciting things ... like flying small fast planes instead of small fast(-ish) cars.
This scale is not true, nor on an individual nor societal level. Having more makes people bolder in general. See how billionares or VC take huge bets, or how Germany threw all its gains into WWI.
I have to imagine there are simply more people with so much money that they can throw it around easily. Isn't the whole thing that (for example) when a big startup gets bought you suddenly have loads of millionaires with money to burn in their pocket?
I'm not at all surprised by this. A similar phenomenon exists in many other fields and areas of life. Those who have a solid financial support system are simply more likely to be able to commit themselves more deeply to whatever they focus on.
This has been the case for centuries: the wealthy simply have always had more means to do more things.
In my two decades of working Ive only seen people get rich by two things: risk taking and connections. These are real friends and not some media piece.
Risk taking can be bitcoin, deception or leveraged property ownership. Without morals and self doubt you get a way bigger field in the risk taking arena.
Rarely have I seen knowledge as a main factor, because renting knowledge-workers is easy and cheap.
I think it's even more dramatic than that. Wealth conveys the ability to explore alternate experiences with more efficiency.
What I mean by that is the ability to either fund "vicarious" experiences. ("If I worked on this project, I'd do about the same thing as that person, so I'll hire them to do it.") As well as the more conventional kinds of acceleration like finding it easier to more frequently have more peak and different experiences like travel.
ya, I think it is a combo of salary + behaviours that build wealth, combined with having some idea about what you want from your brief time on this planet.
It still confuses me that being part-owner of an old dot-com payment company, part-owner of a mid-sized car company (by number of cars sold), and part-owner of a (very good) rocket company make a person richer than anyone has ever been in the history of the planet, but that's probably because I just haven't looked into it enough.
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