If you got that off of Google, via one of the celebrity net worth sites, you can almost entirely disregard it. They have no private knowledge of his worth, and commonly do a sloppy job of putting it all together. They're SEO spam sites designed for bulk to capture all the people searching for "kim kardashian net worth" or "how rich is kim kardashian?" etc.

His co-owner stake in id Software alone was likely worth $40 million (not after taxes of course) or more (ZeniMax raised an extra $105m for the purchase), and he had earned a fortune prior to that courtesy of 20 years of high selling games and relatively small development costs (some of which was burned on Armadillo Aerospace, perhaps up to $10 million total based on what Carmack has publicly said about the cost of operating it).

The high-priced buyout by Facebook likely increased Carmack's network significantly. $40m would be just 2% equivalent of the Facebook acquisition price. I wouldn't be surprised if Carmack owned 2% of Oculus.

I'm obviously not in the know, but I think his liquid assets were low (for a software legend) before the Oculus sale. He mentioned selling his cars to help fund Armadillo at one of his Quakecon talks.

Above say, 5M does it matter? At that point you don't have to work another day in your life if you don't want to.

Yes. For about a decade Carmack funded a significant amateur space rocket effort -- Armadillo Aerospace. That shut down because of lack of money to devote to the project. See http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/08/john-carmacks-8m-pipe... He reached $8 million put in before reaching the decision that was too expensive for a hobby.

Good point, thanks for reminding me about Armadillo.

It certainly does.

With 5M I would probably play it fairly safe, keep my money in a diversified portfolio weighted towards high dividend stocks and try to live a modest upper-middle/upper class lifestyle, with the exception that I would travel quite a lot. I would probably run a small consulting firm just to stay engaged.

With 40M, I would probably have 2-4 teams of people simultaneously working on business projects. That much money lets you take risks, because even if everything goes wrong, as long as you're not retarded you can just liquidate and still have enough left to play out the 5M scenario.

If you read around the threshold is 12-15M, though that doesn't affect the validity of your point.

Best way to make a million dollars in rocketry? Start with a billion...