He was referring to the Hacker News demographic, where these places are not such an outlier, and whether or not living in a place like San Francisco puts you in an elite class you still could not reasonably afford both a nice place to live and a Tesla there on $100k, which was my original point.

But I don't really understand why living in an expensive urban area automatically puts one in an elite class. The standard of living is not much better than other places for one thing--what you gain in diversity is lost in housing conditions. Also, it's not like $100k wages there are super rare. You don't need to be a 4.0 Ivy League graduate to score a livable wage in San Francisco. That's the starting salary for a lot of professions in cities like that, not just software developers. Police officers in the SFPD can make as much as a Twitter engineer fresh out of Stanford: http://www.sf-police.org/index.aspx?page=1655

Very good point. I would, however, write that as 0.15%.