https://twitter.com/SatoshiLite/status/997978007875670016
He was millionaire before Bitcoin? Surprising. Anyone knows what he was doing before?
I think he worked at google right?
That would make for it yeah. Also probably he is older than he looks like (in fact in recent pictures he does).
A million dollars isn’t that much in the scheme of things. That’s half a house in Vancouver, Canada. Probably a third of a house in Silicon Valley. It’s not even a downpayment in London unless you are an hour from the City.
It's not that much if you need to be in one of those places you listed. Where, if you are, you will be paid well enough to be able to afford it (out of necessity) but will still only have a lifestyle on par with someone making 1/5th of your salary elsewhere. A really comfortable retirement starting at age 30 only requires about 2 million though. So it's not that a million is a small amount of money so much as it's that the particular examples you gave are WAY overpriced. For reference you need about 7 million dollars in assets to be in the american 1% and about 3 million to be in the global 1% (those figures assume that you have only assets and no income).
But yea there is a sense in which you are absolutely right. A lot of very financially illiterate people have very bad misconceptions about what a million dollars means. They will play a lottery that promises to pay out a million dollars and think if they could just win than they could live like an elite and never have to work again, which of course is not even close to accurate. It's also why everyone who wins the lottery blows through it all in a couple years, they think they won WAY more than they actually did.