Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep. Wealth is the factory, the robots, that's cranking out things. Wealth is the computer program that's running at night, that's serving other customers. Wealth is even money in the bank that is being reinvested into other assets, and into other businesses.

The purpose of wealth is freedom — not fur coats, Ferraris, or yachts. "That stuff gets really boring and really stupid, really fast. It's really so that you are your own sovereign individual."

Money is social credits — an IOU from society that you're owed something for value you (or someone who gave it to you) created in the past. It gets debased when governments print extra IOUs or people renege on theirs.

Wealth is positive-sum; status is zero-sum. Everyone can have a house, and the more houses built the easier building gets. But for number three to become number two in a status hierarchy, number two has to be displaced.

Many people deep down believe they can't make money, so they virtue-signal by attacking the whole enterprise — claiming "making money is evil." They're actually playing the status game while pretending to opt out of the money game.

On an evolutionary timescale, status predicted survival far better than wealth, because hunter-gatherers couldn't store anything. Wealth-based societies only became possible with farming, and modern industrial economies are the first to be heavily wealth-based.

Avoid status games because they make you into an angry, combative person. To win one, you have to put somebody else down — you're always fighting to lower others so you and your tribe rank higher.