Research suggests that these tech superstars are driven to achieve more, and they are often driven by far more than simple money. This phenomenon is shown in the film The Social Network, in which Facebook backer and Napster founder, Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake), announces that a million dollars isn't anything special ? what's really cool is a billion.
Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, is a prime example. Already a billionaire, he came to Silicon Valley to change the world with his coding skills and grand visions of an online social platform. Similar stories are told of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google, and it will no doubt happen to Twitter's founders.
The tech billionaires' decision to keep working after their stock-market windfalls is actually not too different from financiers and investment bankers who also tend to simply keep working in a bid to continue their success. And yet their successes are flaunted in conspicuous ways, from sports cars and custom-made suits to lavish holidays and expensive markers of wealth. For Silicon Valley's millionaires, the flaunting of wealth is far more uncommon. As often as not, they are using their money to create new technologies or to invest in the next entrepreneur's start-up idea.
One of Google's multi-millionaires, Scott Hassan, explains this trend perfectly when he says that a person can only buy 'so many shiny things'. He says that Silicon Valley's start-up founders are often engineers and never lose their desire to keep building something new, even if they have already earned enough to retire in luxury.
Many of the newly wealthy went back to work to start up new companies. Hassan himself set up a robotics incubator for engineers who specialise in the field of telepresence robotics. He explained that he was passionate about building a new company that could affect the world. Start-up founders are driven by that need to keep building new things, often from nothing at all. This is often a different kind of person than a successful investment banker.
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