> What more money buys you, now and in 1916, is social status.
It goes well beyond that. With more money, I can pay someone to keep my house clean and maintain my yard, own a more reliable car, buy and eat better quality/healthier food. I don't have to care about how much it costs me to go to the dentist, nor how much I have to pay to vacation for two weeks in South America.
You can exercise money to buy social status, but at the heart of it, money buys ease of life. I bet Bill Gates very rarely thinks about how much money he has or how much something will cost him; your housekeeper thinks about that much, much more often.