"Money is an Addictive Substance"

"[Many of the super-wealthy have been] navigating work and life in sixth gear for decades."
"Once they have no financial need to work -- are 'post-economic' -- as some say in San Francisco -- they have trouble shifting into lower gears."
Tim Ferris, life-hacking writer

"I don't know that I have an exact threshold on what amount of money someone should have."
"But on some level, no one deserves to have that much money."
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, $70 billion

"A lot of Wall Street traders didn't create anything -- all they did was trade on the value and ingenuity of what other people created, so at the end of the day, what can they point to that's tangible?"
"All they have is money. So they go out and buy a house and a fancy car, and that feels good for a short while, then they buy a second house and a fancier car."
"Because all they have is what they earn. They're defined by it."
Jordan Belfort, inspiration for "The Wolf of Wall Street"

Tim Graham / Getty

F.Scott Fitzgerald, the American writer born in the 19th Century and published in the early 20th, was fascinated by the wealth and status of American millionaires. He became famous himself, albeit not wealthy, as a writer. As for his conclusion about the different mindset of the wealthy, he put it this way: "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different."

Where once being a millionaire was an unattainable goal for the financially ambitious, millionaires now abound, and it is billionaires whose inaccessible wealth and the influence and prestige that comes with it, as a manifestation of a mysterious entrepreneurial skill that fascinates the public. And as they amass their fortunes and keep getting richer and richer, the puzzle is, why make the effort once their finances have reached such a stratospheric level of achievement? Why not just enjoy what they have amassed and set aside the focus on acquiring more, for how much after all, does anyone need?

The answer to that appears to be that it is not the considerable wealth that motivates them to continue striving to acquire more, but the fact that the wealth itself is symptomatic of their achievement which has set them apart and above, and apart and above is where they want to remain. The chief executive of Apple, with an estimated wealth of hundreds of millions wakes up at 3:45 a.m. to begin his quotidian effort to leave his competitors in the dust. Space X, and Tesla's Elon Musk, worth about $23 billion, decided to cut back his working hours from 120 hours weekly to a "manageable" 80 or 90 hours. 'Getting a life' to these high achievers is nonsensical; they hotly pursued the life they attained.

"Driven people are just driven", noted Fox Business TV anchor, Maria Bartiromo. "They want to stay fresh and relevant, and to do that, it requires consistent practice. If you want to win, you need to be all in." Make sense? If all you focus on is acquiring more wealth and achieving the vaunted status of ultra-wealthy you join a rare enclave, elevated in status through the acquisition of wealth beyond the dreams of ordinary people ... or even most over-achievers ... through following a unique vision and promoting it endlessly. 

Warren Buffett has given away a staggering 71.1 percent of his wealth

A Harvard University survey of 4,000 millionaires discovered that those whose financial capital is $8 million or grater tended to be no more satisfied than their $1-million counterparts. Robert Frank, wealth editor for CNBC stated "For most people enough is enough. But there is another group of people, no mater what they have, they have to keep going. I call them 'scorekeepers;' They're truly driven by competitive zeal." That material needs have been achieved is irrelevant among the very wealthy, according to Edward Wolff, professor of economics at New York University.

"Among the rarefied group of the extreme rich, social status depends on net worth. Their enhanced wealth allows them to make substantial charitable contributions to institutions like museums and concert halls that may lead to having a building or the like named after them." How's that for motivation to dispense with spare cash by having your name immortalized? Oddly, close to 20 percent of the world's most wealthy people having assets of $30-million or greater, live in ten cities globally, and it seems six of those cities are located in the United States.

"If you're an alcoholic you're going to take one drink, two drinks, five drinks, six drinks to feel the buzz. Well, when  you get a million dollars, you need 10 million dollars to feel like a king."
"Money is an addictive substance."
Steven Berglas, psychologist

Should Jeff Bezos with his $110-billion nest-egg make a bad investment on Amazon delivery drones, he won't be forced to auction off his $65-million Gulfstream Jet. He can just casually write off the loss. According to Dr.T.Byram Karasu, emeritus professor of psychiatry, Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, apex entrepreneurs and financiers are "adrenaline-fueled, transgressive people who tend to have laser-focused digital brains, always in transactional mode, and the bigger they get, the lonelier they are, because they [are isolated]."