You'd have to be an idiot to think otherwise.

I look at the ultra-wealthy make a diagnosis of obsessive compulsive disorder

Also, $7.5m is still low enough to be threatened by healthcare costs and end-of-life care and such (x2 for a couple, plus if a kid gets very sick before they're out, or even after but you don't want them to be ruined by it, et c). Not enough to wipe it out, probably, but enough to diminish it substantially if you get a bad roll of the dice. I wouldn't even need that much to stop having any motivation to try to make more, if I lived somewhere with decent universal healthcare where having your savings eaten by the healthcare/hospice-care industry is practically unheard of.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/c....

Apples and oranges. Most of the wealth is not most of the wealthy people.

Theranos

ZERA food recycler

Nikola electric truck

What are your favourites?

His observation was that a "normal" person has to work hard to find ways to make money. A person with lots of money to spend has people queuing at their door, offering ways to make even more money. It becomes a case of picking the best opportunities from the menu.

Well, apparently they did know, how to increase their avaiable money. And this is what matters to most people, not solving real problems. The problem seems, that those 2 things are not really aligned often.

Any schmo can open a Wealthfront account with no minimum balance that returns somewhere in the realm of retail investment returns, but only people with obscene amounts of money can go invest in the real estate firms like the one I referenced, which return many times more to the investors than anything in retail would. That firm was returning many multiples above anything you could invest in on the retail side. So having a million dollars to put into these kinds of firms winds up making so much more percentage-wise than the tens of thousands that I can put into my retirement account. It's a self-perpetuating system that allows the wealthy to continue out-earning everyone else. That's how wealth inequality works in a nutshell.

I could give you the name of the firm so you too would know how to make that kind of money. Only, you wouldn't be able to without being able to make the minimum required investment. It's not that they have some secret knowledge about making money, it's that they can buy access to the high-return investment firms that you and I just can't.

So true. My rich uncle once told me "The hardest million I made was my first million". Then you look at how the banking system works: the more money you have in the bank, the more money the bank pays you. But if you don't have enough money in the bank, then the bank charges you. So it's actually more expensive to be poor than it is to be rich, and the richer you are, the faster you become richer.

It's as if you're first place in Mario Kart, and all you get are stars, while the last place car keeps getting banana peels that they then slip on. Not a very fun game, but that's life.

Not only banking, everything is more expensive, when you are poor.

Miss a payment, because the money was gone before the end of month? You still have to pay it fully, plus fees.

Can only afford a old car? Pay more with repairs and tax.

You need money but have low bank reputation? Pay way higher interest rate - if you are lucky to even get the loan.

You get screwed over, but cannot afford a lawyer? Bad luck.

Etc. etc.

... ish?

Generally speaking, rich people may not be smarter than anyone else but they probably aren't dumber. In other words, they are likely to be making fewer mistakes and taking more favourable risks, even if they aren't particularly any more likely to spot an extraordinary opportunity.

You're kind of proving my point here though by making the argument that rich people probably just make better decisions than the working class. It's not really about making better decisions as it is about having access to better financial opportunities that others don't have. As I stated elsewhere, the real estate firm I described offered massive returns that you could not dream of getting in retail investment situation, but it required a minimum $1M investment, which obviously excludes most people.

I could give you the name of the firm so you too could know how to make that crazy money, but if you don't have the million, you're SOL. It has nothing to do with how smart you are, it has everything to do with how much money you have.

The products worked great so nobody cared. Nor should they.

To be clear, the companies started as AI. They just pivoted until they found a market and product that matched.

Isn't that the smartest possible way to deal with investors who demand AI?