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Comment by floxy | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what the motivation is to keep working once you become a billionaire. Is there a lifestyle inflation component? For Musk, I could see the allure of traveling to Mars. But to make the best gosh-darn phone for the 16th year in a row? Does anyone know how much time he puts in? Does he show up at the office on a regular basis? Or is it more of a, we'll have a one hour status meeting on Monday morning. They you fly off to somewhere to negotiate a strategic deal for buying glass by the cargo-ship. Then stop off somewhere to give a keynote speech. Then you head back to office on Thursday to have a 2-hr brainstorming session with the crew for next year's air pod release. And then Friday is golf with the CFO.

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A young child saw a toy in a store. It is the "Nimbus 2000." The child worked hard, listened to the parents, did chores, mawed the lawns, and never spent pocket money. The money earned on the side during the weekend lemonade stand came in handy too. Finally, the Christmas of that year was the best. With all the money collected, and gathered from parents, grandparents were enough to buy the "Nimbus 2000."

The child spent the next few days and weeks playing with the "Nimbus 2000" and was the envy, pride, and inspiration of many. Of course, after some time, the child returned to normalcy and played games, studied, experimented with computers, wrote code, and many other fun things.

Hedonic Adaptation[1] is the tendency to return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major events or life changes.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

That seems very irrelevant to the question of why someone would work a difficult, high stress job if it provided basically no marginal value to them.

What about "value to others" and not just to themselves.

That would be a very plausible answer that has nothing to do with the hedonic treadmill

A billionaire keeps working because he is not a liquid billionaire, his ability to "be" a billionaire is dependent on the value of his stock.

It might not be so binary, i.e. maybe 40% of his assets are liquid and equal to $1bn, but the point stands.

How do you know this? You seem to imply billionaires cannot stop working because they don’t have cash? Every billionaire can take 10m+$ and sit and drink cocktails 24/7 and do nothing the rest of their life. Many do not want to, but I have never hear anyone mention the reason you state here for billionaires; I only know two personally and they both said they don’t want to stop working (both are around 80 now) as they want to achieve more (nothing related to money) and this is what I read as well about others like Tim Cook.

There's some point where it's more about power. You can have all your desires in the world handled forever with double digit millions of dollars, but beyond that more wealth means more power, and for some people their appetite for power and influence is a bottomless pit.

You can ask the same about a multi millionaire though, no need to be a billionaire to stop working.

Many people who achieve things don’t want to sit still and have a lot of things they want to still do. From personal observation (reading articles and meeting people), I would say; the richer, the less inclined to stop working. Even smaller scale: where I live, people with 100ks in the bank and a house are more likely to do nothing but play golf, eat and drink and go out far more than people who have a few million. The latter, even when old (up to 80 and over) cannot sit still and usually are on boards, write books, do up and flip houses, etc.

Same reason a gold medalist keeps competing or an Academy Award winner keeps acting. Scoring 100 goals or making the best phone for the 17th year, there's just that element of mastery to it.

>> I wonder what the motivation is to keep working once you become a billionaire.

Everyone asks this question and replaces billionaire with any other number. Some people just love to work on certain things and it makes them happy.

The same reason people keep playing a MMORPG even though they have already maxed out.

This question assumes nurture is the lever driving behaviour, but it’s not clear that’s true. What if instead you asked ”what personality traits would you expect to find in people who become billionaires?”

> I wonder what the motivation is to keep working once you become a billionaire.

Some people don't work for the moeny.

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