Nearly everyone who chases positional goods in a global context is bound to end up depressed. When you're in the habit of evaluating your wealth in comparison to people who are wealthier than you, two overarching considerations necessarily define your value:
* You're not wealthy enough; and
* There's always someone wealthier than you. [1]
[1] Caveat: In principle, someone has to be the wealthiest in the world, which means the other ~7,000,000,000 people are not.
There seems to be a self-similarity at play where society looks roughly the same from a very wide range of vantage points. The elite see the elite within the elite and feel like outsiders in comparison. An important Buddhist meditation is a prayer of gratitude for being born human; how often do people remember how lucky they were to have human births, on a planet where we are 7 billion out of ~10^30 living beings (counting bacteria and plants, which Buddhists generally don't consider sentient but which are living).
Anyway, at the three-digit millionaire and billionaire level, it's all about score-keeping and social status for those who care at all. Most billionaires are not quite at the pinnacle of the social elite, and no one stays at the tip-top of that for very long. Wealth is more stable, at the upper tiers, than social status, which is lost to age if nothing else takes it away.
Has anyone ever studied wealth distribution to see if it's fractal based? It would be interesting if human interaction followed the same design principals as natural formations.
"Pareto found that the distribution of income was well approximated by a log-normal distribution, except for approximately the upper 3 percent of wealthy individuals."
* You're not wealthy enough; and
* There's always someone wealthier than you. [1]
[1] Caveat: In principle, someone has to be the wealthiest in the world, which means the other ~7,000,000,000 people are not.