This was a Quora question :
https://www.quora.com/What-dont-people-tell-you-about-being-ultra-wealthy
I was moved to provide an answer for it. There were already many good answers. Mine wasn’t needed and is possibly tripe. But here it is:
I don’t know any of them and I’m not one of them. So perhaps I’m 100% wrong but here’s my guess:
They don’t know any more about how to get rich than you or I do.
That’d be why, as some of these answers state, they’re frightened of losing their money.
And it’d often be because, as some of these answers state, they inherited their money.
And that’d be why they, as some of these answers state, sometimes slowly lose all their wealth until they’re worse off than you or I.
And that’d be why they often try to hide the fact that they’re wealthy.
And that’d be why they often live beneath their means and even sometimes quite mean little lives.
And that’d be why they’re not known for enlightening us all, showing the way, telling us how to do it, why there’s not a shelf full of books – ‘how I did it’, ‘do it my way’.
That’d be why all the books, tapes, seminars, etc. that we do see about how to get rich are so obviously their idea of their best chance of getting rich off of us.
That’d be why with chambers full of usually fairly wealthy and often really wealthy politicians ‘leading’ their nations the populace remains largely insolvent and bound to economic slavery.
Because the truth is they don’t have a clue any more than anyone else does.
What they don’t tell you is that.
And history shows it was always either luck or theft and oft times a mixture of the two.
Even those times when wealth can be shown to have been acquired by diligence, intelligence, application, sheer hard work then opportunity and good fortune can be shown to have played a senior role simply from observation of the many times greater number of examples where diligence, intelligence, application, sheer hard work unto even death failed to meet with success.
Any hard working successful person has the sense to give thanks to their god for the good fortune they enjoyed during their careers – regardless of how little it was, for they are well aware it could easily have been less as for many others it was.
It is the conceit of many a ‘successful’ entrepreneurs that only they know what hard work is when in fact they’d probably know the least.
And theft and war. They don’t tell you what they know of how fortunes that persist for generations were acquired by theft in war and in peace.
How to get rich. It is the great question isn’t it? Has occupied philosophers and economists since the dawn.
No one knows. Various theories. No certainties.
How to lift the millions of humans out of abject poverty? How to lift our own selves out of perhaps the relative poverty of unemployment in a modern state?
We don’t know. We’re trying to find out.
And the rich don’t know the answer any more than we do.
Just like us the find the obvious staring them in the face when they look at the facts, the history:
You get rich by either inheriting it or stealing it or just blind luck.
And there’s only one of the three we’ve normally got any control over.