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> I might get downvoted for saying this, but rich people aren't necessarily smarter than anyone else. They're just richer.

You'd have to be an idiot to think otherwise.

I look at how the ultra-wealthy are lionized in the US and genuinely wonder sometimes. It's amazing what we'll let those people get away with because we too want to join the exclusive club of high net worth individuals.

I mean here we are on a message board that is the vanity project of an investment firm catering to highly skilled technicians.

> I look at how the ultra-wealthy are lionized in the US and...

I look at the ultra-wealthy make a diagnosis of obsessive compulsive disorder

I sometimes wonder how much the fact that I'd stop trying to make more money at like $25m savings—and maybe sooner—is a factor in my not having that much money in the first place. Like I'm not saying that's all or even most of the reason, but I do wonder if the running-up-the-score attitude is itself valuable for making any decent amount of money in the first place.

what do u need 25mil for? Seems arbitrary. With 7.5m u can have 300k/y income from stock invested without lowering your net worth. Seems more than enough for anyone

Yeah that's why I threw in "maybe sooner". $25m is a bit arbitrary but is also somewhere around the point at which I'd have to start trying to waste money before I'd risk touching principal. That's "never think about money again, even a little" territory, for me (but then I don't want a yacht or any of that), so at the top end of the range in which I could see myself deciding never to work again.

Also, $7.5m is still low enough to be threatened by healthcare costs and end-of-life care and such (x2 for a couple, plus if a kid gets very sick before they're out, or even after but you don't want them to be ruined by it, et c). Not enough to wipe it out, probably, but enough to diminish it substantially if you get a bad roll of the dice. I wouldn't even need that much to stop having any motivation to try to make more, if I lived somewhere with decent universal healthcare where having your savings eaten by the healthcare/hospice-care industry is practically unheard of.

Interestingly, when I look at the top 5 richest people on the planet, I don't think any are optimizing for wealth.

They are not optimizing for wealth... anymore. It's easy to shift your priorities once you are overwhelmed with a resource you could not possibly use all of.

I think I would describe Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk etc... as optimizing for making their companies succeed in the end, not optimizing for wealth.

If you did intelligence tests on 1000 American centi-millionaires and 1000 randomly selected Americans, do you think the difference in scores would be undetectable?

Yes, because a tremendous amount of wealth is inherited. The idea that the vast majority of wealthy Americans are self-made is a myth.

80% of US millionaires are first generation.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/c....

Big difference between millionaire and centi-millionaire or billionaire though. You can save a million dollars just by making the median American salary and making large contributions to your 401k over 40 years, due to the power of compound interest.

> 80% of US millionaires are first generation.

Apples and oranges. Most of the wealth is not most of the wealthy people.

Inheritance doesn't start and stop at money. There are other inherited traits that may influence the scores of the people in the study.

Intelligence is hereditary too, in large part, so that would lead to the opposite conclusion right?

You're literally on the "rich people are better than" site

The majority of people world wide are, by that definition, idiots.

Juicero

Theranos

ZERA food recycler

Nikola electric truck

What are your favourites?

Re: Theranos - to give Henry Kissinger and the other very old rich guys the benefit of the doubt, perhaps Elizabeth Holmes is just a Bene Gesserit using the Voice to get them to hand over their money?

Honestly I can't even fathom trusting my hard earned money to a person that doesn't blink.

I once worked with someone who went from "not rich" to "rich", who also ending up in a senior position at Cisco where he had the authority to spend lots of money.

His observation was that a "normal" person has to work hard to find ways to make money. A person with lots of money to spend has people queuing at their door, offering ways to make even more money. It becomes a case of picking the best opportunities from the menu.

"I will never again assume that just because someone has a ton of money knows anything about they're talking about."

Well, apparently they did know, how to increase their avaiable money. And this is what matters to most people, not solving real problems. The problem seems, that those 2 things are not really aligned often.

The thing is that it's so much easier to make money when you have it. It's not even necessarily that rich people just know innately how to make money, it's more like they just have access to many more people who do know how to invest.

Any schmo can open a Wealthfront account with no minimum balance that returns somewhere in the realm of retail investment returns, but only people with obscene amounts of money can go invest in the real estate firms like the one I referenced, which return many times more to the investors than anything in retail would. That firm was returning many multiples above anything you could invest in on the retail side. So having a million dollars to put into these kinds of firms winds up making so much more percentage-wise than the tens of thousands that I can put into my retirement account. It's a self-perpetuating system that allows the wealthy to continue out-earning everyone else. That's how wealth inequality works in a nutshell.

I could give you the name of the firm so you too would know how to make that kind of money. Only, you wouldn't be able to without being able to make the minimum required investment. It's not that they have some secret knowledge about making money, it's that they can buy access to the high-return investment firms that you and I just can't.

> The thing is that it's so much easier to make money when you have it.

So true. My rich uncle once told me "The hardest million I made was my first million". Then you look at how the banking system works: the more money you have in the bank, the more money the bank pays you. But if you don't have enough money in the bank, then the bank charges you. So it's actually more expensive to be poor than it is to be rich, and the richer you are, the faster you become richer.

It's as if you're first place in Mario Kart, and all you get are stars, while the last place car keeps getting banana peels that they then slip on. Not a very fun game, but that's life.

"But if you don't have enough money in the bank, then the bank charges you. So it's actually more expensive to be poor than it is to be rich, and the richer you are, the faster you become richer."

Not only banking, everything is more expensive, when you are poor.

Miss a payment, because the money was gone before the end of month? You still have to pay it fully, plus fees.

Can only afford a old car? Pay more with repairs and tax.

You need money but have low bank reputation? Pay way higher interest rate - if you are lucky to even get the loan.

You get screwed over, but cannot afford a lawyer? Bad luck.

Etc. etc.

I am unable to talk about specifics - but I can 100% endorse this comment. Would add management consultants to the list as well.

> I might get downvoted for saying this, but rich people aren't necessarily smarter than anyone else. They're just richer.

... ish?

Generally speaking, rich people may not be smarter than anyone else but they probably aren't dumber. In other words, they are likely to be making fewer mistakes and taking more favourable risks, even if they aren't particularly any more likely to spot an extraordinary opportunity.

> Generally speaking, rich people may not be smarter than anyone else but they probably aren't dumber.

You're kind of proving my point here though by making the argument that rich people probably just make better decisions than the working class. It's not really about making better decisions as it is about having access to better financial opportunities that others don't have. As I stated elsewhere, the real estate firm I described offered massive returns that you could not dream of getting in retail investment situation, but it required a minimum $1M investment, which obviously excludes most people.

I could give you the name of the firm so you too could know how to make that crazy money, but if you don't have the million, you're SOL. It has nothing to do with how smart you are, it has everything to do with how much money you have.

That’s hilarious … I worked for a company (several, really) that bragged about being AI but where really just conventional business logic.

The products worked great so nobody cared. Nor should they.

To be clear, the companies started as AI. They just pivoted until they found a market and product that matched.

> It wasn't AI of any kind, it was just a dashboard that pulled data from various real estate APIs for things like walkability score, etc. But they showed their investors and called it "AI"

Isn't that the smartest possible way to deal with investors who demand AI?

Does it matter what it was if it helped them pick good real estate investments?

If it becomes a bad choice you can blame the AI not yourself. That's the whole point.