Because then he risks the businesses failing and losing his livelihood.
On the second point, still nope. He took on the businesses for lack of a better option. It's true that it was a conscious choice, but my career path was actually harder to obtain, and more deliberate.
Not that there's anything wrong with being a business owner, but hopefully I'm making the point clear that there is more to the life equation than the quantity of money you make.
See my comment above. It's not that simple. Yes he could retire, but then he'd be sitting around, doing nothing. As many entrepreneurs have discovered that's not actually an appealing life. So the work that he does have to do just happens to be stressful and time consuming.
Basically, a business owner can find themselves in a theoretical situation where they have a boat load of money but are also overwhelmed with work and have no other options.
Granted, he probably will retire earlier than me, but in my scenario many of my co-workers actually choose not to retire, because they like the work.
He can get a job at Vons to get a discount on health insurance.
The couple that founded Sierra Online woke up one day and made a new game. Being wealthy they had no economic pressure to do this.
If I woke up rich tomorrow I’d probably work on video games and open source them. Which is what I’m doing now, just after my day job.
Dream level 1:
A game studio that makes quality open source games.
Level 2:
An easy open source game engine.
Level 3:
A programming language with 3 built in levels of abstraction.
LLM level, just write what you want to the application to do and it’ll “build” the functions in real time.
Scripting level:
Something like C# or Typescript.
Systems level:
Low level like Rust or C.
Mixing and matching each level in the same project is encouraged.
Dream Level 4- which would require billions upon billions of dollars to even attempt.
A completely open source OS along with open source hardware, phones, computers, tvs, etc. It scales from a 40$ Raspberry PI like device to a 10k super computer.
Your phone belongs to YOU, want to run your own code on it, cool.
I’d build the OS in the same language described in Level 3.
Linux is great, but it’s also bloated from needing to run on billions of devices. If you instead say no, you make your hardware fit the OS, not the other way around much of the code could be removed.
Anyway, I think I’ll be able to retire bit early ( early 50s) and then just work on weird open source games.
Everything else in this post would require much more money than I’ll ever have.
But I declare the contents this comment CC0/MIT. Maybe a lurking billionaire will read it and do it.
> Yes he could retire, but then he'd be sitting around, doing nothing
So? Is that not a valid choice?
> So the work that he does have to do just happens to be stressful and time consuming.
Imagine that he doesn't have to do this. That doing it is something that he gets to do.
Doesn't everything this person does tell us that they enjoy stress and having their time consumed by their business?
> Basically, a business owner can find themselves in a theoretical situation where they have a boat load of money but are also overwhelmed with work and have no other options.
> I have a family member who is a multi-millionaire and who owns multiple businesses. He has more money now than I'll have in my lifetime
Why can’t he sell the businesses or hire an operator to run them while he collects checks?
> The difference is that I work far fewer, less stressful hours, and have much more time to myself.
You both have 24 hours to yourself each day.
You choose to spend yours one way, he chooses to spend his in another.