Why Don’t Rich People Just Stop Working?
Why Don’t Rich People Just Stop Working?
Are the wealthy addicted to money, competition, or just feeling important? Yes.
CreditCreditJupiterimages/Getty Images
By Alex Williams
“Senator Sanders is right,” said Tom Steyer, a businessman from California who happened to be the only billionaire onstage that night (as far as we know).
“No one on this stage wants to protect billionaires — not even the billionaire wants to protect billionaires,” noted Senator Amy Klobuchar.
It’s an idea that’s going around. Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder who is worth close to $70 billion, is apparently open to it. “I don’t know that I have an exact threshold on what amount of money someone should have,” he said in live-streamed question-and-answer session with company employees in early October. “But on some level, no one deserves to have that much money.”
10th year of an extremely top-heavy economic boom in which the 1 percenters, by all statistical measures, have won, creating the greatest wealth disparity since the Jazz Age. This era, in length and gains, dwarfs the “greed is good” 1980s, that era of yellow ties, nigiri rolls and designer espresso machines that has come to symbolize gilded excess in popular imagination.
And yet the only thing we know in this casino-like economy — a casino that may, in fact, soon be shuttered — is that for those at the top, too much is never enough.
Many normal, non-billionaire people wonder: why is that?
Studies over the years have indicated that the rich, unlike the leisured gentry of old, tend to work longer hours and spend less time socializing. Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, whose worth has been estimated in the hundreds of millions, has said that he wakes up at 3:45 a.m. to mount his daily assault on his corporate rivals. Elon Musk, the man behind Tesla and SpaceX, is worth some $23 billion but nevertheless considers it a victory that he dialed back his “bonkers” 120-hour workweeks to a more “manageable” 80 or 90.
And they continue to diversify. Lady Gaga makes a reported $1 million per show in her residency at the Park MGM in Las Vegas, and has evolved from pop music to conquer film — but still also recently unveiled a cosmetics venture with Amazon.
Almost everything rich people touch makes money, but this current financial inferno has meant little for the bottom 50 percent of earners in the United States, who have 32 percent less wealth than they did in 2003.
85 percent of their net worth tied up in investments like stocks, bonds and private equity, where value has exploded. According to Redfin, the average sale price of properties in the top 5 percent are up 43 percent nationally over the past decade, and up even more in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Fine vintage watches, which have become a must-have for the young male money class, are exploding in value, with prices on certain five-figure models of Rolexes doubling in just a few years.
Gold, once derided as a relic, is up 40 percent in the past few years.
What’s happening?
Mark ZuckerbergCreditAmy Osborne/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
No One Has a Retirement Number These Days
“What’s your number?” asked anyone caught up in the dot-com boom of the 1990s.
Could you retire to Napa with $5 million? $20 million?
Some hit their number and some went bust, but Silicon Valley is more than ever a showcase for the unfettered capitalism of 2019.
Yet no one seems to talk about their number anymore, said Antonio García Martínez, who sold a start-up to Twitter and served as a Facebook product manager before publishing his memoir, “Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley,” in 2016.
Yesterday’s big score is just seed capital for tomorrow’s bigger one.
“There’s never some omega point,” Mr. García Martínez, 43, said. “People who get to that point don’t stop once they get there.”
“People say, ‘Why don’t you develop a hobby, or do philanthropy?’” Mr. García Martínez said. “But for many, they simply can’t stop doing it. They derive transcendent meaning from capitalism. Without their money, what else would they have?”
At a time of low taxes, friendly interest rates and torrents of venture capital available to would-be moguls, it’s a historic moment in the quest for more among the entrepreneurial class.
Tim Ferriss, the life-hacking author and podcast star who was an angel investor in Silicon Valley for nearly a decade, wrote in an email that many of these people have been “navigating work and life in sixth gear for decades.”
Without Constant Work, We Must Face the Nature of Existence
“Once they have no financial need to work — are ‘post-economic,’ as some say in San Francisco — they have trouble shifting into lower gears,” Mr. Ferriss wrote. “They’re like drag racers who now have to learn to navigate the turns and intersections of neighborhoods at 30 miles per hour.”
“Without ambitious projects to fill space,” he added, “there is often a void that makes some of the bigger questions hard to avoid. The things you neglected are no longer drowned out by noise; they are the signal. It’s like facing the Ghost of Christmas Past.”
In a sense, it has been going on in this country for two and a half centuries. “We are a nation founded on the overthrow of kings and the idle rich, so the hustle is deeply baked into mainstream notions of what it means to be American,” said Margaret O’Mara, a history professor at the University of Washington who is a New York Times opinion contributor.
And today’s competitive personality types are unable to slow down, in part because they fear slipping from their lofty perches.
“Driven people are just driven,” said Maria Bartiromo, the Fox Business anchor. “They want to stay fresh and relevant, and to do that, it requires consistent practice. If you want to win, you need to be all in.” And winning can be collecting the most cash — pressing the excitement pedal over and over again, like so many exhausted rats in a cage.
Rich People Know Too Many Rich People
With the number of Americans making $1 million or more spiking by 40 percent between 2010 and 2016, according to the Internal Revenue Service, you may think that the rich are finally feeling flush enough to ease up, kick back, chill out.
recent Harvard survey of 4,000 millionaires found that people worth $8 million or more were scarcely happier than those worth $1 million.
In a widely cited 2006 study, rich people reported that they spend more time doing things they were required to do.
Why do they want to do this to themselves?
The fact that there are more rich people who are, in fact, richer than ever may be part of the reason.
Sociologists have long talked about “relative income hypothesis.” We tend to measure material satisfaction by those around us — not in absolute terms.
“For most people, enough is enough,” said Robert Frank, the wealth editor for CNBC and the author of the 2007 book “Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich,” who has interviewed many plutocrats. “But there is another group of people, no matter what they have, they have to keep going. I call them ‘scorekeepers.’ They’re truly driven by competitive zeal.”
Take Larry Ellison, the billionaire co-founder of Oracle. Mr. Ellison always felt competitive with Bill Gates and Paul Allen of Microsoft, Mr. Frank said. “So when Paul Allen built his 400-foot boat, Larry Ellison waited until it was done and built a 450-foot boat. Larry Ellison would never be happy until he was No. 1.”
Edward Wolff, a professor of economics at New York University who studies wealth and disparity.
“Among the rarefied group of the extreme rich, social status depends on net worth,” Dr. Wolff wrote in an email. “Their enhanced wealth allows them to make substantial charitable contributions to institutions like museums and concert halls, that may lead to having a building or the like named after them. Think of the Koch brothers and the New York City Ballet. This is only possible if they can stay ahead of the pack and out-contribute their peers.”
Social sampling leads the rich toward a blinkered view that society as a whole is more well-off than it is, feeding their unending need — particularly as wealth becomes geographically dense. Nearly 20 percent of the world’s ultra-high-net-worth individuals — with assets of $30 million or more — live in just 10 cities around the globe, by one tally. Six of those cities are in the United States.
Why Don’t Rich People Just Stop Working?
Are the wealthy addicted to money, competition, or just feeling important? Yes.
CreditCreditJupiterimages/Getty Images
By Alex Williams
- Published Oct. 17, 2019Updated Oct. 18, 2019
“Senator Sanders is right,” said Tom Steyer, a businessman from California who happened to be the only billionaire onstage that night (as far as we know).
“No one on this stage wants to protect billionaires — not even the billionaire wants to protect billionaires,” noted Senator Amy Klobuchar.
It’s an idea that’s going around. Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder who is worth close to $70 billion, is apparently open to it. “I don’t know that I have an exact threshold on what amount of money someone should have,” he said in live-streamed question-and-answer session with company employees in early October. “But on some level, no one deserves to have that much money.”
10th year of an extremely top-heavy economic boom in which the 1 percenters, by all statistical measures, have won, creating the greatest wealth disparity since the Jazz Age. This era, in length and gains, dwarfs the “greed is good” 1980s, that era of yellow ties, nigiri rolls and designer espresso machines that has come to symbolize gilded excess in popular imagination.
And yet the only thing we know in this casino-like economy — a casino that may, in fact, soon be shuttered — is that for those at the top, too much is never enough.
Many normal, non-billionaire people wonder: why is that?
Studies over the years have indicated that the rich, unlike the leisured gentry of old, tend to work longer hours and spend less time socializing. Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, whose worth has been estimated in the hundreds of millions, has said that he wakes up at 3:45 a.m. to mount his daily assault on his corporate rivals. Elon Musk, the man behind Tesla and SpaceX, is worth some $23 billion but nevertheless considers it a victory that he dialed back his “bonkers” 120-hour workweeks to a more “manageable” 80 or 90.
And they continue to diversify. Lady Gaga makes a reported $1 million per show in her residency at the Park MGM in Las Vegas, and has evolved from pop music to conquer film — but still also recently unveiled a cosmetics venture with Amazon.
Almost everything rich people touch makes money, but this current financial inferno has meant little for the bottom 50 percent of earners in the United States, who have 32 percent less wealth than they did in 2003.
85 percent of their net worth tied up in investments like stocks, bonds and private equity, where value has exploded. According to Redfin, the average sale price of properties in the top 5 percent are up 43 percent nationally over the past decade, and up even more in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Fine vintage watches, which have become a must-have for the young male money class, are exploding in value, with prices on certain five-figure models of Rolexes doubling in just a few years.
Gold, once derided as a relic, is up 40 percent in the past few years.
What’s happening?
Mark ZuckerbergCreditAmy Osborne/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
No One Has a Retirement Number These Days
“What’s your number?” asked anyone caught up in the dot-com boom of the 1990s.
Could you retire to Napa with $5 million? $20 million?
Some hit their number and some went bust, but Silicon Valley is more than ever a showcase for the unfettered capitalism of 2019.
Yet no one seems to talk about their number anymore, said Antonio García Martínez, who sold a start-up to Twitter and served as a Facebook product manager before publishing his memoir, “Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley,” in 2016.
Yesterday’s big score is just seed capital for tomorrow’s bigger one.
“There’s never some omega point,” Mr. García Martínez, 43, said. “People who get to that point don’t stop once they get there.”
“People say, ‘Why don’t you develop a hobby, or do philanthropy?’” Mr. García Martínez said. “But for many, they simply can’t stop doing it. They derive transcendent meaning from capitalism. Without their money, what else would they have?”
At a time of low taxes, friendly interest rates and torrents of venture capital available to would-be moguls, it’s a historic moment in the quest for more among the entrepreneurial class.
Tim Ferriss, the life-hacking author and podcast star who was an angel investor in Silicon Valley for nearly a decade, wrote in an email that many of these people have been “navigating work and life in sixth gear for decades.”
Without Constant Work, We Must Face the Nature of Existence
“Once they have no financial need to work — are ‘post-economic,’ as some say in San Francisco — they have trouble shifting into lower gears,” Mr. Ferriss wrote. “They’re like drag racers who now have to learn to navigate the turns and intersections of neighborhoods at 30 miles per hour.”
“Without ambitious projects to fill space,” he added, “there is often a void that makes some of the bigger questions hard to avoid. The things you neglected are no longer drowned out by noise; they are the signal. It’s like facing the Ghost of Christmas Past.”
In a sense, it has been going on in this country for two and a half centuries. “We are a nation founded on the overthrow of kings and the idle rich, so the hustle is deeply baked into mainstream notions of what it means to be American,” said Margaret O’Mara, a history professor at the University of Washington who is a New York Times opinion contributor.
And today’s competitive personality types are unable to slow down, in part because they fear slipping from their lofty perches.
“Driven people are just driven,” said Maria Bartiromo, the Fox Business anchor. “They want to stay fresh and relevant, and to do that, it requires consistent practice. If you want to win, you need to be all in.” And winning can be collecting the most cash — pressing the excitement pedal over and over again, like so many exhausted rats in a cage.
Rich People Know Too Many Rich People
With the number of Americans making $1 million or more spiking by 40 percent between 2010 and 2016, according to the Internal Revenue Service, you may think that the rich are finally feeling flush enough to ease up, kick back, chill out.
recent Harvard survey of 4,000 millionaires found that people worth $8 million or more were scarcely happier than those worth $1 million.
In a widely cited 2006 study, rich people reported that they spend more time doing things they were required to do.
Why do they want to do this to themselves?
The fact that there are more rich people who are, in fact, richer than ever may be part of the reason.
Sociologists have long talked about “relative income hypothesis.” We tend to measure material satisfaction by those around us — not in absolute terms.
“For most people, enough is enough,” said Robert Frank, the wealth editor for CNBC and the author of the 2007 book “Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich,” who has interviewed many plutocrats. “But there is another group of people, no matter what they have, they have to keep going. I call them ‘scorekeepers.’ They’re truly driven by competitive zeal.”
Take Larry Ellison, the billionaire co-founder of Oracle. Mr. Ellison always felt competitive with Bill Gates and Paul Allen of Microsoft, Mr. Frank said. “So when Paul Allen built his 400-foot boat, Larry Ellison waited until it was done and built a 450-foot boat. Larry Ellison would never be happy until he was No. 1.”
Edward Wolff, a professor of economics at New York University who studies wealth and disparity.
“Among the rarefied group of the extreme rich, social status depends on net worth,” Dr. Wolff wrote in an email. “Their enhanced wealth allows them to make substantial charitable contributions to institutions like museums and concert halls, that may lead to having a building or the like named after them. Think of the Koch brothers and the New York City Ballet. This is only possible if they can stay ahead of the pack and out-contribute their peers.”
Social sampling leads the rich toward a blinkered view that society as a whole is more well-off than it is, feeding their unending need — particularly as wealth becomes geographically dense. Nearly 20 percent of the world’s ultra-high-net-worth individuals — with assets of $30 million or more — live in just 10 cities around the globe, by one tally. Six of those cities are in the United States.
