Well, I take the opposite view. By being risk adverse, I stuck to paths that had a guaranteed but small income (grad school, postdoc, gov't job) instead of the opposite (going to work at Yahoo in '95, because I didn't really know CS). If I had gone to Yahoo in '95, just shown up and tried, I'd be wealthy today.
It's not that these kinds of people have made enough money to be secure and stable. They know they will likely have to work for the rest of their life, and they've deliberately structured it to ensure they can continue to work on interesting problems.
It's not like the normal maslow hierarchy applies to everybody, and it's especially inapt when doing long-term planning, where short-term incovenience can lead to a net win over the long term.