True, it’s probably that this drive is what allowed them to be billionaires in the first place.
Just to rant a bit more: the Wordpress situation makes this point even more crazy to me. Mullenweg has about 400m and instead of retiring and enjoying life, he’s arguing with anonymous users on Hacker News. No offense against hacker news but defending my life decisions on HN isn’t exactly the first thing I would do if I could do everything I ever wanted. Like, go buy a plane and take flying lessons, or go scuba diving? Nah, I’d rather justify myself on the internet.
The internet is a direct pipe to every person on earth. You have to acknowledge that this is new territory for humankind.
In fact, internet communication is much closer to dark-age "public square" type communication. Bring your soapbox to the square, talk loudly, gather a crowd, and listen to the crowd jeer or clap. We haven't had that since the industrial revolution pre-1800s (i.e. at the earliest 1700s)
For the forseeable future, we are in a situation where people will "feel" that the most authentic communication is intentionally said in-front of the internet bystanders. So a CEO posting an intimate reply to an individual with billions of people able to see the intimate reply is more "authentic" than everything else.
(Much closer to dark-age communication implies that we are closer to "old" methods of communication that disappeared for the last couple of centuries. We used to have industrial revolution-type communication medium, one-direction broadcast medium.)
I expect a lot of people with that kind of money can't enjoy life as it disconnects them from everyone else. Your friends can't afford to do those things with you, so you either end up buying friends – with all the disillusionment that goes with that – or you turn away from people and get your fix trolling computers instead.
Just to rant a bit more: the Wordpress situation makes this point even more crazy to me. Mullenweg has about 400m and instead of retiring and enjoying life, he’s arguing with anonymous users on Hacker News. No offense against hacker news but defending my life decisions on HN isn’t exactly the first thing I would do if I could do everything I ever wanted. Like, go buy a plane and take flying lessons, or go scuba diving? Nah, I’d rather justify myself on the internet.