Comment by jborichevskiy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jborichevskiy | Hacker News Reader

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Good analysis, I think.

> And really what is the practical difference between having $20m and $2b? Sure you'll have nicer houses and more of them. You may well have a super-yacht at that point. But who cares? I know I don't.

I found this Reddit comment [1] insightful on that front. Don't know to its validity but have seen it linked to in a few different places.

> $1billion

> I am going to exclude the $10b+ crowd, because they live a head-of-state life. But at $1b, life changes. You can buy anything. ANYTHING. In broad terms, this is what you can buy:

> Access. You now can just ask your staff to contact anyone and you will get a call back. I have seen this first hand and it is mind-blowing the level of access and respect $1 billion+ gets you. In this case, I wanted to speak with a very well-known billionaire businessman (call him billionaire #1 for a project that interested billionaire #2. I mentioned that it would be good to talk to billionaire #1 and B2 told me that he didn't know him. But he called his assistant in. "Get me the xxxgolf club directory. Call B1 at home and tell him I want to talk to him." Within 60 minutes, we had a call back. I was in B1's home talking to him the next day. B2's opinion commanded that kind of respect from a peer. Mind blowing. The same is true with access to almost any Senator/Governor of a billionaires party (because in most cases, he is a significant donor). You meet on an occassional basis with heads-of-state and have real conversations with them. Which leads to ... influence ... (continued)

[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2s9u0s/what_do_i...

Even just in terms of money. $20 million invested is--depending upon your assumptions--something like $1 million/year ~risk-free without touching the principle. (OK, a diversified portfolio is probably going to do better than that but that gives something of a baseline.)

Obviously that's a pretty nice passive income stream. But it's not really have a couple nice homes in prime locations, hire full-time assistants, fly private jets everywhere, etc. sort of money.

$1 million/year without working is very rich. You could definitely have multiple houses and full time assistants. I have two houses and part-time assistants at an income of $300k. And most of my time is dedicated to work at someone else's company, owning all of your own time makes them much more wealthy than me.

I'm not really arguing with that. But there's a difference between being very comfortable and money basically being a non-factor even for expenses that the typical person would consider a complete extravagance/unaffordable and cost basically being completely irrelevant.

1 million per year is a fat budget. You can get close enough to that lifestyle by renting slices of the components on-demand and being more efficient from wasteful (and preyed upon) apex lifestyle.

For instance: private air travel in USA. Find some friends with aligned lifestyles and together buy a high performance twin engine propeller passenger plane that seats 8 people for about 5 million.

There are agencies who will take care of all of the complexities of owning and operating this aircraft and renting it out while you’re not using it. With careful decision making you can bring the aircraft to close to net zero steady state operating cost as the revenue flights paying for maintenance, storage, liability etc. You also get access to a stream of excellent pilots on demand.

These agencies can also book you on a larger plane in their portfolio when you want to go further and for some reason aren’t willing/can’t fly first class commercial.

Real estate is much simpler—tons of fabulous rentals all over the world. And an assistant surely could be hired somewhere for 100k or less annually.

> ... buy a high performance twin engine propeller passenger plane that seats 8 people for about 5 million.

There's an 'aviation YouTuber' who owns a private jet (through his medical supply company?) and puts up videos of his travels:

* https://www.youtube.com/user/gregmink/videos

I worked for a small fin tech firm in NYC, saw some high profile people from gov and biz come to the office to meet the owner, who was very rich.

Honestly, I found many of them condescending and unpleasant. Money can absolutely get influence and access, but a good heart? Maybe not

In fairness, I suspect that they're cold and unpleasant because of all the vultures that constantly circle them.

When you're being constantly hounded by people that believe that you being wealthy means they inherently deserves a share of it, that'll probably distort your worldview real quick.

They are nice party tricks but add negligible value to your life. Money at those levels is mostly useful to project power, if you don't care about that then I don't see the point. There is a reason many billionaires live relatively normal lives without any of the things mentioned in that post.

Interesting reddit article, I have only spent time with aone billionaire, and while his home was amazing, you would never know he was that rich. Very kind and honest person who does not spend much money at all. He would fix his clothes rather than buy new but ALWAYS pick up the tab at dinner. Not all 1B+ people fit into that description.

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