I don't know if I'm under estimating it, I've been researching different ways to quantify it a bit more though.

But I think more importantly we need to differentiate a bit between rich and wealthy. If you want to pick some number and say "that is rich" (which is often the case with 'fuck you' money type statements, that is fine. However I define it a bit differently. Do you own your home outright? Are your kids undergraduate college funds funded so they don't need to take loans to get a degree? Do you have enough money in the bank to pay for food and utilities for the rest of your natural life time? I think of that as "wealthy", you have lots of choices. That number though is a lot lower than the number that typically people use.

For me, when having these discussions it helps to understand the 'expectations'. The number of people who own their own jets, multiple vacation houses, and have paid staff to manage their affairs? Yeah, that is a pretty high level of extreme wealth that you're extremely unlikely to achieve, however I would estimate that every one of the first 2500 employees at Google, NetApp, Sun, Oracle, HP, CA Associates, Electronic Arts, Ebay, Netscape, Amazon, Zappos, hell even pets.com had an option at one point to buy their own mortgage. So were they "rich" by your definition?

And its fair to say "gee Chuck but yeah looking back its easy to see companies that did well, what about these days?" and the answer is really that you only know by looking backward, if you could predict the winners the world wouldn't work quite the way it does.

This the following statement however, deserves special attention.

> But most of the people I know who match the profile
> you describe (i.e. worked at a few startups as a
> not-super-early employee, of which some succeeded),
> are doing okay, but are nowhere near retirement,
> and certainly nowhere near fuck-you levels of
> wealth. The expected value of the lottery seems to
> be something like a few years of market-rate
> salary at a big company.

This hints at what I think of as the unreal expectation, that you will come out of college, join a startup, make enough money in equity to pay all your current and future bills, and then go on to a life of partying or something.

No one should expect that any more than they should believe that buying one lottery ticket will solve all their financial problems.

However what many have been able to do, is work in technology for 15 - 20 years and get enough money to cover a comfortable existence, save for their kids college, and buy some property. The result of which means that the last third of their life will likely be as comfortable as the middle third.

Certainly some of the current unicorns will likely become non-unicorns at some point by going public or by merging with a public company. At which point some of the illiquid wealth of some of your acquaintances will unlock.

> What you're seeing in the bay area is the legacy of
> decades of this kind of wealth accumulation.

Yes, and while it might not be what folks are hoping for, if you aren't at this level of wealth right now, this process is going to take decades (like two of them, maybe three) and when you come out the other end of those two or three decades, if you have been working in tech, politics, or banking, your last couple of decades will not be filled with worry about how you're going to pay the rent or pay for groceries or heating in the winter. Your kids will be doing better because they didn't have to pay for their own college educations and so started after school debt free.

Oddly enough, for many people that is the definition of "winning" in life. Not a big bank balance.