Rich vs. Really Rich
Rich vs. really rich — and the one number that actually tells you which one you are
127 founders got surveyed about their money. The useful finding is buried here.
An educational piece. No positions, no recommendations.
The headline everybody’s going to run
There’s a report making the rounds from Hampton, a private peer group for founders. They surveyed their members about net worth, spending, and where the money actually sits. The editorial they built out of it asks a good question: what’s really different between a guy worth $10 million and a guy worth $100 million?
Their answer is that it’s psychological. Below about $50 million, founders are driven by fear — fear of losing it, fear of going backward, fear this was the only shot. Above it, that fear evaporates, and whoever doesn’t find a new reason to get up in the morning stalls out. Money solved. Motivation unsolved.
It’s a fine observation. It’s also the part every newsletter is going to quote this month, and it’s the least useful thing in the whole report.
Here’s why. “Find a bigger purpose once you’re worth fifty million” is not advice. It’s a description of a problem you’d love to have. Nobody reading this needs a plan for what to do after they’ve won.
The genuinely useful finding is sitting in the same survey, on page nine, and Hampton’s own editorial walks right past it.
The line nobody’s quoting
Buried in the section on financial goals, describing why members set the targets they set:
A high net worth doesn’t make people feel secure on its own. At almost every wealth level, people felt they needed more to be secure. The key to feeling secure seems to be maximizing the ratio between your take-home pay and your burn rate.
Read that twice.
They surveyed people worth one million, ten million, fifty million, a hundred million and up. At almost every level, the answer to “do you feel secure?” was no, not yet, I need more. And the goals they set were consistently two to ten times whatever they already had. At the very top of the sample, the median stated goal was two billion dollars.
Two billion. From people who already can’t spend what they’ve got.
So the survey accidentally proves something much sharper than its own editorial claims. It isn’t that motivation changes at $50 million. It’s that the number never works. Not at ten million, not at a hundred, not at a billion. There is no net worth at which the feeling of “I’m safe now” switches on, because security was never a net worth problem to begin with.
It’s a ratio problem. Money coming in, against money going out.
That’s a much better piece of news than it sounds, because a ratio is something you can fix this year. A net worth target is something you chase for a decade and then move.
Look at the last column, because that’s the whole article.
Wealth across that table goes up something like thirtyfold. Spending goes up four times. Which means the burn rate, measured against the pile it’s coming out of, collapses from roughly six percent to under one.
The guy worth $100 million spends four times more than the guy worth $3 million, and in the way that counts he is eight times more careful.
That’s the actual difference between rich and really rich. Not the houses. Not the motivation. It’s that one man’s lifestyle is a rounding error against his assets, and the other man’s lifestyle is a live drain on his.
So here’s a definition worth stealing:
You’re really rich when your lifestyle stops registering against your portfolio.
That’s testable at any size. Take what you spend in a year, divide it by what you own. If you’re at $800,000 and you burn $80,000 a year, that’s ten percent, and you are not wealthy — you are employed by your own portfolio, and it is not paying you enough to quit. Get that same number under four percent and the arithmetic flips: the pile grows whether you show up or not.
Four percent should look familiar. It’s the same line the retirement research has circled for thirty years. Hampton just walked into it sideways, from the top down, with a completely different sample.
What they actually own
The other half of the report backs this up, and this is the part that made me want to write about it at all.
As net worth climbs, the survey shows crypto exposure dropping off sharply and angel investing nearly disappearing. Bonds go up. Income real estate goes up. And a very large share of net worth stays parked in the core operating business — the thing they understand best and control.
Read that as a behavior change, not an asset list. The people at the top stopped buying lottery tickets. They stopped needing to be right in a spectacular way. Hampton puts it well: at that level you’re not trying to prove how smart you are anymore, you’re trying to protect your momentum. Volatility goes from something you exploit to something you’d rather just not have in the house.
Now, the honest caveat. These are founders, not traders, and their biggest asset is an operating company. Most of us don’t have one of those. So don’t copy the allocation.
Copy the job the allocation is doing.
For a founder, the business is the compounding engine — the thing that throws off cash without being sold, that they understand cold, that they don’t gamble with. For us, that’s the portfolio. Same role, different vehicle. The engine is the thing you protect. Everything else is a side bet, and the data says side bets are what you grow out of, not into.
Which reframes the whole premium-selling argument, by the way. Selling premium has never been about getting rich fast. It’s slow, it’s unglamorous, and it caps your upside on purpose. What it does is manufacture cash flow out of assets you already own. That is a direct attack on the exact ratio Hampton says is the real source of security. Not a coincidence, and not a sales pitch — the founders in this survey converged on the same behavior from the other direction, without an options account.
What I’d take from it
Three things.
The number is a moving target, so stop aiming at it. Every wealth band in this survey wanted two to ten times more. You will not out-earn that feeling. Chase the ratio instead.
Your burn rate is the fastest lever you own. Net worth takes years to move. What you spend against it, you can change this quarter. That’s the whole trick behind why the top of the table looks so disciplined — they didn’t get careful after they got rich, they stayed flat while the assets ran.
Build the engine, then stop poking it. The wealthiest people in this sample got boring on purpose. Cash flow over upside, control over cleverness, durability over being right.
Where the data comes from, and what it’s worth
Fair is fair, and it matters here, because this article draws on two separate Hampton reports.
The spending table and the $50 million observation come from Hampton’s 2024 Founder Wealth Report: 127 verified, vetted founders, all self-made through business ownership, up about 43% from the 89 who answered the year before. The net worth spread is worth knowing, because it isn’t a room full of billionaires. Roughly 35% are worth $1–5M, 20% are $5–10M, 20% are $10–20M, and only about 3% clear $100M. Most of that sample is closer to the average serious investor than to Oscar with his three billion.
The line this whole article turns on, about security being a ratio rather than a number, comes from the earlier 2023 Wealth Allocation Survey: 89 respondents, roughly fifteen percent of the membership, anonymous, with extreme outliers stripped out.
One honest flag on the spending numbers. The version of that table circulating in Hampton’s lead-magnet PDF quietly drops the $50–100M band, which lands at about $30K a month. Leaving it out makes the jump to $60K at $100M+ look like a sudden break. Put the band back in and the picture is calmer: spending grinds up gradually, and the burn ratio keeps falling the whole way. We’ve restored it above.
None of this is a census. Small samples, self-reported, one private community that skews hard toward tech founders, and an obvious bias where people who feel good about their numbers are likelier to fill out a survey about their numbers. Treat it as a sketch. It happens to be a sketch that lines up with what the retirement math and a lot of floor experience already say, which is why it’s worth your time. It is not proof of anything.
Sources: Hampton “Founder Wealth Reveal” (67pp., Part II editorial, pp. 47–48) and the 2024 Founder Wealth Report, both at joinhampton.com; 2023 Hampton Wealth Allocation Survey, Section 2, “Financial Goals.”
Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell anything. It’s one way of thinking about money, drawn from someone else’s survey and our own arithmetic. Your situation is yours.
Not a member yet? Everything we trade, in full, at growyourpile.com.
Tony Rihan Grow Your Pile