In my experience in Silicon Valley it’s more like drive the Ferrari on weekends. One weekend a coworker at Sun invited me to come up to sears point raceway and

In my experience in Silicon Valley it’s more like drive the Ferrari on weekends. One weekend a coworker at Sun invited me to come up to sears point raceway and drive my rx7 on the track. I showed up and there were a handful of people, turns out the coworker had rented the whole track (and skid pad) for the weekend for “trying out” different driving moves. I expect it cost them less than $100,000 for the weekend. But the engineer in question here probably had a net worth of more than $50M and yet they came into work every day and built cool stuff. Now the Sun case was more “typical” of the valley at the time where a company goes public and now there are lots of millionaires in the ranks. Same thing at Google when they went public, and Facebook. In my experience it is the unusual case that the newly wealthy person quits work and pursues a life of idle hedonism. Not saying that it doesn’t happen, just saying that there is an alternative response to being wealthy.