What about the hundreds of losers that looked good right before the burst? My coworker retells a story where he dumped his life savings in dotcom companies that went to zero.
1. Yes, if someone generally invested in "dot-com stocks" before that crash--covering both winners and losers--they might today have a surprising amount of (potential) dollars.
2. However much of that impressive-looking sum would be just because of 25-30 years in the market.
3. So we need to scale that "very rich" against someone putting the same money into an total-stock market index fund back then, which may not make it look nearly as impressive.
Yeah you won't get extremely lucky and 200x your money because you bought NVidia a decade ago, but you also won't lose all your money because you bought Enron.