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They do.

The three faces in the picture at the top of the article are famous billionaire outliers. Plenty of modestly wealthy people (say net worth of >$5M) lead lives of complete leisure.

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Yes. There are likely a ton of people you've never heard of who received a fairly modest inheritance, won the startup lottery, or was just successful at the right Big Tech, finance, or law firm who decided to ride off into the sunset in their 40s. I know some of them. Some are quite well off. Others are just willing to live modestly, perhaps off some sort of early retirement pension.

This article is a jumble of broad strokes of conjecture with effectively zero empirical substance that vaguely alludes the just nature of the "meritocracy"; I have a hard time not interpreting it as a puff piece for the status quo.

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