I mean here we are on a message board that is the vanity project of an investment firm catering to highly skilled technicians.

> I look at how the ultra-wealthy are lionized in the US and...

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

I sometimes wonder how much the fact that I'd stop trying to make more money at like $25m savings—and maybe sooner—is a factor in my not having that much money in the first place. Like I'm not saying that's all or even most of the reason, but I do wonder if the running-up-the-score attitude is itself valuable for making any decent amount of money in the first place.

what do u need 25mil for? Seems arbitrary. With 7.5m u can have 300k/y income from stock invested without lowering your net worth. Seems more than enough for anyone

Yeah that's why I threw in "maybe sooner". $25m is a bit arbitrary but is also somewhere around the point at which I'd have to start trying to waste money before I'd risk touching principal. That's "never think about money again, even a little" territory, for me (but then I don't want a yacht or any of that), so at the top end of the range in which I could see myself deciding never to work again.

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.

Interestingly, when I look at the top 5 richest people on the planet, I don't think any are optimizing for wealth.

They are not optimizing for wealth... anymore. It's easy to shift your priorities once you are overwhelmed with a resource you could not possibly use all of.

I think I would describe Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk etc... as optimizing for making their companies succeed in the end, not optimizing for wealth.