This NYT article about how the merely rich in the Valley are unabashedly envious of the lucky few super-rich got me thinking of something that an old boss at Yahoo! said a long time back, and still rings true today:
"There are two things I just don't give a shit hearing about: other people's kids and other people's money!"
Never were truer words said. Think about that when you consider the following excerpt -- you just want to shake these folks and tell them to keep it in perspective (you are not in prison/Darfur/breaking bricks in the hot sun all day):
Almost anywhere else, Reid Hoffman would be considered a major success. As an early executive of PayPal, he was in the money when the company was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. These days, he runs a new start-up company of his own while investing in others.
But when greater fortunes are made -- as happened recently to three former PayPal colleagues when YouTube was sold to Google for $1.65 billion -- Mr. Hoffman said he could not avoid a twinge of envy.
... Mr. Hoffman, who made enough from PayPal to "retire to a comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyle," said he felt no spite toward peers who later hit bigger jackpots. Still, he said, "there's always components of, 'Wow, you happened to pick the right time,' and that will always lead to some kind of implicit envy."
