One the one hand, I understand that folks who have more money than their peers don’t want to be taken advantage of — it’s a real thing and a legitimate concern.

One the one hand, I understand that folks who have more money than their peers don’t want to be taken advantage of — it’s a real thing and a legitimate concern. On the other hand, the example they provided with the software engineer might also be that the person is on the spectrum and doesn’t know better (not unique to having more money) or is just a hyper-logical engineer and wouldn’t think of doing it another way (maybe this is just a nice way to describe autism, but still…). I know plenty of wealthy people who spread their wealth fairly aggressively via things like over-sized tips, pay it forward at drive-throughs, trading buying rounds at a higher ratio, generous but appropriate gifts, throwing nice parties, donations to charity, supporting members of museums, etc. The folks who seem the most paranoid in my experience are the people who inherited it and never bothered to learn anything about money management. Since they don’t know how they got their golden goose, and they don’t know how likely they are to keep it, they just adopt a paranoid stance as a defense.