[ofcourseyoudo]

This is a great answer.

But I'm curious what the answer would look like if every strata in it was not "things you can buy" but "things you can do with the money" ... if the "IMPACT" section was delineated at each level.

One of the things I envy the most about my rich friends is their capacity to be generous. They can materialize their compassion on a regular basis without having to balance their budget.

I'd like to see what that looks like at each of these wealth levels.

(One funny thing I noticed is that I have multiple friends with virtual personal assistants now, at middle class levels of weath/entrepreneurship... definitely not a rich man's thing anymore.)

[canucker2016]

Automation is for less wealthy rich people - so the company can serve more users.

When you are rich, you get a real person who speaks your language well and has the authority/power to get things done.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-net-worth_individual

[bluGill]

Even wealthy in the US tend to have much less servants than they would have in the past. Labor is too expensive, and the large middle class has made automation just as good and sometimes better. Sure I could hire someone to turn on my lights - but the switch on the wall works well and isn't much effort (compare to the lamp lighter of the past which did work that would be annoying).

[canucker2016]

Note, I and, I assume, the parent commenter weren't talking about home automation.

"Virtual personal assistant" to me meant a computer program that could understand speech and carry out a limited set of actions based on that speech - the computer equivalent of a human personal assistant/secretary.

[bluGill]

That has been getting much less common. My dad used to have "his secretary" do tasks like schedule is meetings and book travel - the secretary was a department secretary for a couple dozen engineers and was kept busy just serving those needs. Today I don't have a secretary for several hundred engineers. My computer is better at scheduling meetings than the secretary ever was. Go back 100 years and the rich would have hard far more servants than they would today because various levels of automation have replaced many jobs.

The right still have servants of various types of course. Right now "Virtual personal assistant" are too limited to replace humans. Since I cannot afford a human servant I'm hoping that changes. Time will tell.

[canucker2016]

I would love a virtual assistant that could handle the tasks a human personal assistant does. VA would be available 24x7, would perform consistently regardless of time of day/how long they've been running/awake, would know/ understand my particular habits/preferences.

Maybe there's some bespoke software firm that does provide such a service for rich-enough people. Of course it'd have to run mostly locally/on-premises - none of this cloud stuff/monetizing my behaviours to bump their revenues.

[bluGill]

The rich can afford humans to do this job. While a lot of the jobs the assistant does would be easy to automate, the hard part is from the vague description of what they want to getting something acceptable. If I ask for "famous singer" do I need that singer, a cover band, or any band in that style, any live music, or a good DJ - depending on the situation any might be acceptable (and sometimes several of the above are not available at any price). Scheduling just the famous singer is easy - just send a calendar request and see if they accept (it is more complex than that, and odds are the singer isn't signed up for this service, but that is all details), but trying to figure out which substitute is available and acceptable is hard.

[ofcourseyoudo]

to clarify I meant a personal assistant that is an actual human but accessible via email/text, not someone that is actually with you physically

[loa_in_]

That's an opinion, but I would rather have a va

[thomassmith65]

There are only 902 American billionaires*, but this 'Redditor' claims to know nine of them. The wording implies these were chance friendships. It is a big answer, but not a great answer.

*https://npr.org/2025/04/01/nx-s1-5345950/forbes-billionaires...

[bluGill]

People tend to stick together. Once you know one odds become higher that you get introduced to a few more. Billionaires like parties as much as anyone else, so if you are not an insane stalker and get to know one well they will invite you to parties just to have a group of friends and now you are vetted so the others will not stay away as much. Different people have different sizes of friend circles so breaking in is hard.

[thomassmith65]

There are fewer than 200,000 Americans, rich or poor, who are chummy with billionaires, but many millions of Americans who are liars.

The post's author is a random person on social media...

making claims an attention-seeker would make...

for an audience that wants to believe them.

The sensible position, without corroborating evidence, is that the author is a liar.

[bluGill]

Odds are he is lieing. However on the off chance ne is not he lihely knows several