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Comment by lake_vincent | Hacker News Reader

The answer is always classes, folks. Because once you become a millionaire for the first time, you leave the middle class and realize that you are actually quite poor amongst the millionaire class, so you have to keep working to climb through the ranks of millionaires. It's a recursive algorithm, you see.

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That answer seems to fail when you look at 2/3 examples just from the masthead (Musk and Zuckerberg). It's possible you could look at your ability to buy literally anything on the planet and feel jealous someone else's infinity is higher than yours, but that seems unlikely.

Musk isn't really limiting himself to buying things just on this planet.

I am not going to say there isn't some aspect to that but once you get $5,000,000-$10,000,000 in the bank the interest alone will dwarf almost any salary. So you could kick back and let compounding interest do the trick.

In my social circle I know of 3 people in that bracket and all of them are working. It isn't so much for the money they like being mentally and socially engaged while working on problems that interest them. Of these individuals their ages range from mid 40's to mid 50's. All of them had taken breaks from work and found not working to be incredibly boring.

When I worked with a billionaire and several millionaires at a private equity firm, everyone was jealous of and struggling to make it to the next level up. The guy who made $250k and a 200k bonus was jealous of the guy who made a $2million dollar bonus. The $2 million dollar bonus guy was mad he only flew first class and didn't take net jets everywhere like the senior partner. The Senior Partner was annoyed he took net jets instead of having his own jet like the Principal. And the Principal was jealous of another Principal with a bigger jet. There was also a lot of arguing with all of their wives about horses. These people all blew an incredible amount of $$ on horse racing and horses.

If you have enemies in life, consider encouraging them to get really into horses because imo it's the fastest way to drain their time and assets with little return.

> If you have enemies in life, consider encouraging them to get really into horses because imo it's the fastest way to drain their time and assets with little return.

It's up there with owning a megayacht and collecting art.

People in private equity/finance are pretty out there in terms of competitiveness and aggressiveness. I would not use them as a barometer for all millionaires and billionaires and no they don't make up the majority of either of those categories.

This is super true, you graduate from being "rich poor people" to "broke rich people"

It's like the ex CEO of Goldman Sachs who said he doesn't see himself as rich. I guess it's an easy trap to fall into when you live in an apartment block with ten other billionaires.

Maybe that is a motivation for some of them, but not all of them.

It's certainly not a motivation for billionaires like Elon Musk, who seemed singularly driven by his life mission.

that's not actually what classes are. class is not just a braket of incomes, it is a role in economic production. if you get your money by trading your work for it, you're working class. if you get your money by virtue of what you own, you're capitalist. a bit of both is what middle class is.

This is my preferred understanding of class as well, but I've noticed that my conversations are more enjoyable if I don't try to insist others use the term the 'right' way.

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