It’s not just old money that this affects - I’ve noticed that new money, once it achieves a certain degree of security (i.e. enough that you don’t have to work, you won’t lose it or find your needs not met bar some catastrophic world-ending or life-ending circumstance), adopts much the same values. I’ve spent most of my life surrounded by wealth and privilege of various different flavours, and you can practically smell the haves and the have-nots - the latter tend to really care, and conspicuously so, about conventional status ladders. The former… give the appearance of not caring about status at all. It isn’t that they don’t, it’s just that they know they’re at the top of the economic tree, and don’t feel the need to compete in that dimension. The well-read/educated thing is more of a status derived from demonstrating how little you care about conventional status ladders, and the less you care, the higher your status, as if you care so little you must be very secure indeed.