“The rich aren’t particularly happy either,” Menlo Ventures partner and prolific poster Deedy Das wrote on X in May. By his own “back of the envelope” estimate, roughly 10,000 people—employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia and Meta, plus founders—have built fortunes well above $20 million in the past five years. Many of those who have “made it,” he added, feel “a profound lack of purpose.” (Menlo Ventures is an investor in Anthropic.)
Bay Area therapists coined a term for that feeling during the dot-com boom of the 1990s—“sudden wealth syndrome”—and they say the syndrome is back in the wake of the AI windfall.
