But your entire net worth is 5% yearly interest on a billion dollars.
It's hard to imagine for regular people just how far a billion dollars is, you're essentially royalty at that point as far access to anything in life is concerned.
I heard it put this way once before and it really stuck with me: the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is a billion dollars. If that doesn't make sense, consider how that is proportionally the same as saying: the difference between one dollar and a thousand dollars is a thousand dollars. One dollar is literally nothing next to a thousand dollars.
If you bought something for $1k and you were overcharged $1, lots of people wouldn't even notice. Of course, someone greedy enough to be a billionaire would probably notice though :P
It's very different than just caring for food and shelter, but at those levels, personal luxury isn't really the most important thing. And really, for many things, even a billion isn't enough. Imagine you wanted to personally make high speed train happen between two US cities. A billion doesn't even begin to fund your real life Sim City project.
(Obviously putting $1b entirely into a savings account is a terrible idea, just making a point)
I mean, you could live off the interest alone in a savings account with $5m (you can easily get 2.5% at the moment.)
For $50 million a year you can run a good few think tanks and make a good few campaign donations.
In other words, the experience of one whose wealth is $2B is not same as the experience of one whose wealthy is $50M plus $1.955B. What one experiences in the world depends on how much weight one puts on everything one is involved in. Poor people give different weightage than rich people. Same event doesn't give the same experience to everyone.
To say they "pass themselves off as" means there is a visible difference in either what they own or how they act. What does that look like? Are you saying they pretend to trust? How is that apparent? I can't figure out what the obvious visible difference would be.
If a millionaire passes themselves off as someone with much less wealth they'll drive an old Corolla instead of a Mercedes. What's that equivalent here?
I think, the root cause is this: just as FAANG engineers's social circle is fellow people working from FAANG, it is the same for wealthy, super, uber wealthy. You don't see a FAANG guy living in a mobile home surrounded by people who work in the blue collar folks.
Some folks don't want to involve in many social activities of the class they belong to, but want to be part of the lower classes. That's what I mean by 'pass themselves off as'.
It’s the difference between $150k, $1.5 million, and $15 million dollars in yearly income. At 5 million you can decide to not work but you are only really able to afford an upper middle class lifestyle. Depending on where you lived that might be a working class income these days. So there is a massive difference across the spectrum of multi-millionaires.
Yes I consider 150k per year upper middle class.
The answer to that is: you have $1m of peace of mind to live your comfortable lifestyle of someone with $2k. Now living the lifestyle of someone woth $2k might not be particularly desirable to most, but living the life of a multi-millionaire with that relatively same level of peace of mind sounds like a crazy nice way to live.
Vast difference in political influence, too.
I have a friend living overseas. His children go to school with a Russian oligarchs kids. Visiting the oligarch's home for a birthday party was wild.
But many of those people take their entire lives to go from "pretty well off" to "technically a multi millionaire, after many years of hard work, and planning" and got there from very reasonable expectations.
Now a billionaire is literally about a thousand* times richer than any of those people. We're talking "I literally make a difference in elections without anyone knowing my name" rich.
Maybe this is a good example of how rich billionaires don't need to be. The mere fact some people can't even imagine the difference between a factor of a literal thousand* (how ironic of me).
That's why I addressed that. Retirement savings and home is a different sort of millionaire than someone with 50 million in the bank. What lifestyle choices are going to be visible in someone with 50 million vs a billion? The number of private jets they own?