Perhaps my sample pool is skewed, but the billionaires and centimillionaires I know live pretty modest lives in general - yes, they fly first class, stay in the best hotels, and all that jazz, but they’re unpretentious, and you wouldn’t know them from the upper middle class family sat at the next table. In fact, one I know regularly gets weird looks because he’ll be in some elite country club in his coffee-stained slacks and threadbare jumper - but there’s the rub - he doesn’t care. The guy who looks rich is probably up to his eyeballs in debt. The guy who looks like the janitor probably owns the place.

I think the single biggest thing wealth buys is not giving a shit what other people think. You don’t have to play status games when you know you’re the big dog in the room, even if nobody else knows it. I mean, I take perverse joy in showing up at places looking like I just crawled out of a gutter, because I know it doesn’t matter - my money is good.

I'm not your level wealthy, but I don't work, live comfortably, and I'm happy.

I prefer not to eat at expensive restaurants, but I enjoy restaurants that serve good food. I don't really want to fly to an expensive city and spend lots of money. I'd rather spend time in nature, hike, try to ID plants, and spend time with my wife and our animals.

This is so strangely true.

I arranged a dad's dinner once, and we had a drug dealer there. Stereotypical hard man, wife dressed in branded clothes, fancy car, very obviously not in the line of business that he pretended. Trying extremely hard to flash how he used the private airport.

Seated with him was an actual billionaire, one whose family made their money a while back so you wouldn't know if you hadn't come across it before, like me. This guy just behaved like a normal middle class dad. Dressed like everyone else, ordinary SUV. No flashy moves.

Other two I know in that class are also just ordinary. No supercar, just a Merc or upper end car. They send their kids to private schools that ordinary top 5% people can afford, but no big arm movements.

> I am only marginally wealthy, high 7/low 8 figures

We must have a very different definition of "accessibility"

Let's say you make 100k a year in Berlin, you're already in the top 1% so "accessibility" is out of the equation at that point, that's 4.8k net. Let's say you manage to invest ~60% of your salary, that's about 3k a month, 36k a year. Now let's say you get 8% return per year (which you won't), you're barely above 500k after 10 years.

So yeah sure, if you're in the top 1% to begin with, and live on what basically amounts to your local minimum wage while investing everything else, you can get to 1 million after 15 years or so...

Ah, and don't forget the tax man, he'll take his 20-30% cut on your million.

Well first off £100 != $100 != €100

Sorry but you're completely delusional if you think literally "anyone on a programmer's salary" can make 1 million in 10 years. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I'm not saying you didn't do it, I'm just saying it's not "accessible", nor the norm, nor representative of the vast majority of devs.

https://www.levels.fyi/heatmap/europe/

The median software engineer salary in Europe is under 60k euros, which is £50k. Show me how you make 1m on a 60k euros salary in 10 years, even if you paid 0 income tax and invested every single cent with an average 8% annual return you'd still be under 1m.

> Anyway, stay poor, I literally don't care.

Looks like you can't buy your way out of arrogance

If you can guarantee 20-200% of return per year consistently over 10-20 years go to wall street they'll pay you millionS per year to work for them

There is a big gap between "I'm in the top 1% earners and lucked out in the market" and "Literally every software engineer can make 1m in 10 years".

Most people aren’t wealthy because they don’t even try, and instead run on a treadmill until they drop dead.

I have no interest in going to work on Wall Street or anything similar.

My entire investing philosophy is basically based on this site. There is constant signal here on what will be big in 5-10 years, and all that’s required is that you get in before the press start talking about it, too.

A $10k investment in NVDA 10 years ago is worth $2.6M now - and if you were paying attention 10 years ago, when CUDA was fairly new and shiny and rapidly gaining mindshare, you would have noticed that they were inevitably going to own the ML/AI space, and that this shit was going to be huge.

This is also why I said $1M, not $100k - because I have managed exceptional returns - but with 10x the starting capital even moderately good returns can grow rapidly. I’ve also bet on some absolute lemons where I’ve lost every last red cent.

Either way, it seems that many would sooner be bitter than do something to improve their situation, which is sadly very common, and again, why not everybody is a millionaire.

Also, edited nitrogen fixers. Haber-Bosch is going to be hard to sustain with environmental targets.

Oh, and DRI, same kind of reason, as coking coal is likewise going to fall foul.

I could be totally wrong, but that’s seemingly the drift of things, and where I have lately been placing my chips.

Went long on nuclear power as soon as AI started to take off, and there’s still ample headroom there too.

As ever, only invest that which you can afford to lose.

That said I'm not sure I'd recommend it. It can pay off for some, but the future is unknown. I've been to funerals for several people who didn't live to 65. Your body starts declining as you get older so a lot of active things really need to be done young if you do them at all. Maxing a 401k seems like a good plan and then spend the rest today - you should still have a nice retirement if you live that long, but you can enjoy life now.

If you don't like the above, religion offers an afterlife if you choose the right one. However they agree choosing the wrong one won't... Good luck choosing.