Nobody at $10 Million

The NYT plays to its base with an article about Silicon Valley's "working class millionaires." Bits and pieces:

I know people looking in from the outside will ask why someone like me keeps working so hard..But a few million doesn’t go as far as it used to. Maybe in the ’70s, a few million bucks meant ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,’ or Richie Rich living in a big house with a butler. But not anymore.”

“Everyone around here looks at the people above them....It’s just like Wall Street, where there are all these financial guys worth $7 million wondering what’s so special about them when there are all these guys worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars....You’re nobody here at $10 million.”

“People around here, if they have 2 or 3 million dollars, they don’t feel secure.”

That is one big difference between these working-class millionaires and the country’s wealthiest tycoons, who tend to see themselves as pillars of the community worthy of the hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps billions, they now possess.

“I always ask myself, ‘Do I deserve it?’ ” she said. “It never feels like you do, because that’s a lot of money.”

“I’d be rich in Kansas City,” he said. “People would seek me out for boards. But here I’m a dime a dozen.”

"Here, the top 1 percent chases the top one-tenth of 1 percent, and the top one-tenth of 1 percent chases the top one-one-hundredth of 1 percent.”

“You try not to get caught up in it,” he added, “but it’s hard not to.” --Guy with a very cool Italian name who finds his huge house a bit of an albatross but will not sell because it would be "admitting defeat.

How's that song by that guy from New Jersey go?

Then there's this.