[noirbot]

To be honest, I think some of it is what you suggest - a gamble on long odds, but I think the bigger issue is just a carelessness that comes with having more money than you can ever effectively spend in your life if you tried. If you're so rich you could hand everyone you meet $100 and not notice, you have nothing in your life forcing you to care if you're making good decisions and not being conned.

It certainly doesn't help that so many of the people who are that rich got that rich by conning other people this exact way. It's an incestuous cycle of con-artists who think they're geniuses, and the media only slavishly supports that by treating them like they're such.