Oh, fully agreed that cash rarely comprises the majority of wealthy people's income - but my point is that most of the tech wealthy in the SFBA comes from FAANG equity wealth, not startup equity wealth.
Startups exits sometimes make a handful of people mega-rich, but as this thread has revealed, making ordinary employees rich is quite rare. Not so rare are the people who hang out at FAANGs, collecting large amounts of equity, and riding the industry up. And yeah, the wealth in this case is typically not of the level to buy $10M homes, but $2M homes?
Once in a while you have a founder who strikes it rich, but that effect is overwhelmed by the more numerous folks just riding $GOOG, $AAPL, $FB, etc. to multi/deci-millionaire status.