I wonder if there's a selection effect at work here, in that the majority of people who end up being very rich are those whose lives are defined by money. After all, why would you work your ass off to make more money than possibly can have a meaningful influence on your life unless you were driven by the idea of money alone?
1. Imagine a dude who just wanted to build something cool. Craig Newmark, of Craig's List fame, for example would fall under this category. He's got enough money to retire, yet he still works customer service, because that's what he enjoys.
2. Now imagine, someone who just wants more, more, more, more. It appears Donald Trump might fall into this category. I don't know for sure, but he seems to be purely driven by money and power.
You can become wealthy 'organically' in the sense that you didn't set out to be wealthy. You can so get wealthy from the expressed intent to get wealthy.
Any person I know who is rich and has become so through their own hard work bristles at the thought of spending a lot of money on anything, even a cup of coffee.
I've know some who want a Mercedes but hate the thought of paying so much for one and some who have taken out the motor and put in a Chevy motor to save on repair costs.
People with money don't spend money they have, people who don't have money spend money they don't have.
I think people tend to go into that game being decent and come out of it corrupted. In high school and college, they wanted to be writers. But investment banking seemed safer. Some failed out, but others got all their promotions, their MBAs, their first millions at a ridiculously young age, and started drifting away from their "interesting" (but poor, by banker's standards) college friends and into a certain money-centered social circle. People don't like to admit this, clinging to the notion of an atomic "self", but a few years in that kind of environment changes a person into someone unrecognizable by the younger, better person who went in. People who were once fascinating to talk about about all kinds of topics with devolve into defectives only capable of talking about mergers and acquisitions, people who talk fast and sound intelligent but, if you actually listen to the words they are saying, have almost no content in anything they say.
An unbroken pattern of severe wins and losses in the working world is usually corrosive to one's personality. Losses make people bitter and they either collapse or deeply desire, even at psychopathic cost, to win. Too many wins, especially those of the "windfall" kind and much less those that come from genuine hard work, make people shallow, childish, and impatient.
One set lives in a world where the assessment of one's work is extremely subjective and changes with political fads, a world in which 90% of the most successful (who are never the most talented or best) are social-climbing charlatans and cerebral narcissists who cultivate defective personalities in the hope that their flaws will be taken as proof of creative genius. This they do while creating elaborate fictions, plots, and intrigues, selling nothing of true use, while their products occasionally inspire heinous crimes and suicides.
