Filip Hráček / text /

If you want to make money, be useful to rich people

This is both a piece of advice I give to young people, and a sad statement of fact. It explains why:

• Financial advisors routinely make more money than successful doctors and engineers and scientists.
• Doctors in private clinics for wealthy people (i.e., concierge medicine) make even more money than the financiers (because they’re more useful to the same group), and significantly more money than their counterparts in hospitals.
• Car mechanics specializing in Porsche or Ferrari earn significantly more than average.

Maybe you remember that scene from The Big Short (2015) where a corrupt stockbroker tells Steve Carell’s character something along the lines of “I’m more valuable to society than you, look at how much money I make”. Some people genuinely think that. They assume that your wealth directly reflects your value to society. But that’s not true. The corrupt stockbroker earned more money because he was (at the time) more useful to more wealthy people.

If you put it my way, “to make more money, be useful to rich people,” it almost sounds like a truism. Of course you get more money if the people you are useful for are more wealthy — simply because those people have more money to spend and are, in general, less stingy. A guy with a Ferrari is more likely to spend $10K for a tune up than a guy with a Toyota. If you help a person with a $1M transaction, you can expect a better commission than if you help a hundred people with $100 transactions each.

But despite being kind of obvious in retrospect, I don’t think many people realize that this is what’s happening. We constantly get surprised when we learn how comparatively easy it is to make money in some roles, or — on the other end of the spectrum — how low salaries are in otherwise prestigious industries.

As advice

If you’re young, or otherwise facing a career dilemma, take the “useful to rich people → more money” advice into consideration. That doesn’t mean you should just become a financier or a private chef. There are obviously more important considerations in career planning than just “will I make more money”. You don’t want to spend the rest of your life doing something you hate, and/or something you find meaningless.

But life generally doesn’t give you a choice between a) become a financier in Manhattan, or b) become a pediatrician in an underdeveloped country. The dilemmas faced by most people are more nuanced, and for those, the advice above is an important piece of the puzzle.

In any case, it’s important to be useful. If you’re not useful, it doesn’t matter whom you’re useless to. And obviously, the more useful you are, the more wealth you can expect, regardless of your “target audience”.

As fact

Like any other single-sentence statement, this is a simplification. For example, you can become wealthy by being useful only to low-income people. The billionaire families behind discount stores and lowbrow entertainment are good examples. But that takes a lot more scale and luck to pull off. You have to be useful to millions. You need to start a company and get lots of investment first. Then you maybe become wealthy.

Compare that to the alternative approach, where you either work for such a company (you become useful to the billionaire who owns it) or you start a business that can be profitable even if it only has a few dozen clients.

So, take the statement in the title of this post with a grain of salt. But, hopefully, you can see the truth at the core of it, despite exceptions and noise.

Is this fair?

I wish I could say that, in fact, being useful to society as a whole is a better way to wealth. Cure cancer and child diseases and you will become a billionaire. But that’s not true.

Thankfully, wealth is not everything. Most people — at least when they shed their cynicism — will prefer a meaningful life over a life in wealth. The folks who save lives don’t do it because they think it’ll make them rich.

I still think it would be nice to see usefulness to society be more directly reflected in a person’s wealth. Let the private equity boys still be the wealthiest people around, but also maybe let some of that wealth go to great public school teachers and nurses and scientists.

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about top-down wealth redistribution (as someone who grew up in a totalitarian socialist state, I’m not a fan; see my previous post). In fact, when totalitarian redistribution comes into effect, it’s even more important to be useful to the rich. It’s just that the rich are now exclusively party members — people who wield political power and wealth.

I’d like to think you don’t need top-down wealth redistribution in a country for it to reward societal impact more. Healthy countries tend to have lower income inequality — even without a totalitarian intervention — but that’s a topic for another day.

Individually, we would all do well to weigh our expenditures to how they might impact our society’s long-term future. Let’s maybe all become a little less stingy about things like public education and science, and a bit more stingy about luxury goods and entertainment. Even if a tiny fraction of us start thinking this way, that will make a difference.

— Filip Hráček
July 2026