The rich are different from you and me

The title of this post is, of course, from The Great Gatsby.  That is a phenomenally succinct way to sum it up.  Life is not the same as scaling with respect to incomes.  The rich lead lives that are simply way different from yours and mine.

I have no hassles at all that there are rich people.  We need more of them.  But, it does make for interesting conversations and humor and, sometimes, schadenfreude too, like in this Zuckerberg wealth-o-meter from the Wall Street Journal :)




Forbes has always had a running list of big losers and winners--"real time billionaires"  I have often wondered when a typical billionaire loses sleep: is it when they lose 300 million versus losing only 10 million?  Do they simply ignore the daily fluctuations in their wealth?  Or, win or lose, like Scrooge McDuck, do they go into the vault and roll around in their gold coins? :)

But, of course, all rich are not created equal.  Some are more rich than others, and the difference is as significant (or even more, perhaps?) than the difference between the rich and me.

With two wonderfully informative charts, this Atlantic post notes

Forget gold. If Scrooge McDuck were around today, he'd be diving into a big pile of capital gains. Okay, and maybe some dividends too.

They don't seem to work for salaries, as much as how money works for them!