[Etheryte]

This is a mixup of money and wealth. Money is not wealth, and in the same vein, the point of the game if you'd like to call it that, is not to make money, but to become wealthy. These are two very different things.

Wealth is possession of real assets, natural resources, real estate, valuable companies, in classical econ terms, any scarce resource. Money is not a scarce resource, for nearly marginal cost we could create a near infinite amount of it (and in the digital age of banking we often do create large amounts of it with no direct cost). You can't create more oil, land, houses etc without incurring considerable costs, whether it be in the form of effort, time or etc and that's what makes those resources scarce. Money is scarce if you look at it on a personal level, you can't just create more money for yourself, but that doesn't make it scarce on a global level.

What might create some confusion is that wealth is often measured in money, but that doesn't make it the same thing. Wealth is real resources and money is the means we use to decide who gets how much of those real resources.

[neilwilson]

Yet the wealthy have very large bank accounts and own an awful lot of financial assets.

Almost like you are completely wrong.

Not everybody is enamoured with shiny yellow metal.

The wealthy are not interested in hoarding stuff. The wealthy are interested in the flow of money that lets them do stuff - primarily by freeing up their time.

It's control of the annual pie that's the key, not a sitting on a pile of gold like Smaug.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/How-Get-Rich-Greatest-Entrepreneurs/d...