One of the things that was interesting about reaching this level of wealth is having personal relationships with people at these companies before they became ri

One of the things that was interesting about reaching this level of wealth is having personal relationships with people at these companies before they became rich, and then seeing what they did after they became rich. A few, many in senior management, live for the thrill of the hunt. They want to find their competitor, beat the crap of them, watch them slowly die, bury them, and then dig up the corpse and do it again just to make sure their competitor is really dead. I get why these people stay in the game. Getting a metric ton of money is just a by-product of the hunt. They reminded me of this Conan [1] clip. Some of them, like me, just decided that they had enough and wandered off the ranch and did their own thing. Some of them, as you point out, just have a lifestyle expectation that requires a large amount of income. This prevents them from accumulating the capital to become financially independent. This describes a lot of the people I know. They were dealt cards that would have allowed them to escape the matrix, but didn’t care about escape or didn’t understand the game. I think a few just wouldn’t know what to do if they left the ranch. One guy I knew who was in the first twenty or so employees at one of my employers that made it big, who is probably worth $50M or more, just keeps going back to his cube every day writing software. He drives a Volkswagen and lives in a modest house. Why he’s still there is beyond my capacity to understand. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo9buo9Mtos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo9buo9Mtos