If you've got $1000 to blow on a joke, you are more than reasonably comfortable and entering wealthy territory.

$1000 is rent for many people, it's one half to one third of their salary.

I think this is the same concept of establishing wealth as, say, wiping one's own ass with $1 bills.

What was that Steve Martain movie where he is trying to take a woman to a fancy restaurant, so he is having a meeting with the head chef and the banker, and they keep asking him what he will order from the menu "The Duck!? On your salary?"

Yeah, 1000 is going to weed out a number of people but its not unreachable, should be more for 1000 we'll examine your financial situation and then grant you the ability to display the icon.

IIRC the the highest price an app could set at the App Store launch in 2008 was $999 or $999.99.

This was someone putting a drawing in an iPhone app bundle with a funny name and charging the highest price that Apple allowed developers to set.

In other words, art.

It was brilliant. Made even more brilliant when the people who had actually paid for the app went on line, backpedalling, to explain how they had bought it on accident.