By almost any definition - except his own and perhaps those of his neighbors here in Silicon Valley - Hal Steger has made it. Steger, 51, a self-described geek, has banked more than $2 million. The $1.3 million house he and his wife own on a bluff overlooking the Pacific is paid off. The couple's net worth of roughly $3.5 million places them in the top 2 percent of families in America. Yet Steger continues to toil in what a colleague calls "the Silicon Valley salt mines," working as a marketing executive for a technology start-up company, still striving for his big strike. Most mornings, he can be found at his desk by 7 a.m. He typically works 12 hours a day and logs an extra 10 hours over the weekend.
"I know people looking in from the outside will ask why someone like me keeps working so hard," Steger says. "But a few million doesn't go as far as it used to. Maybe in the '70s, a few million bucks meant 'Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,' or Richie Rich [the comic-book character] living in a big house with a butler. But not anymore."
Silicon Valley is thick with those who might be called working-class millionaires - nose-to-the-grindstone people like Steger who, much to their surprise, are still working as hard as ever even as they find themselves among the fortunate few. Their lives are rich with opportunity and they generally enjoy their jobs. They are amply cushioned against the anxieties and jolts that worry the vast majority of people living paycheck to paycheck.
But many such accomplished and ambitious members of the digital elite still do not think of themselves as particularly fortunate, in part because they are surrounded by people with more wealth - often a lot more.
When chief executives are routinely paid tens of millions of dollars a year and a top hedge fund manager can collect $1 billion annually, those with a few million dollars often see their accumulated wealth as puny. This is a reflection of their modest status in the new Gilded Age, when hundreds of thousands of people have accumulated much vaster fortunes.
"Everyone around here looks at the people above them," said Gary Kremen, 43-year-old founder of Match.com. "It's just like Wall Street, where there are all these financial guys worth $7 million wondering what's so special about them when there are all these guys worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars."
Kremen estimated his net worth at $10 million. That puts him firmly in the top half of 1 percent among Americans, according to wealth data from the Federal Reserve, but barely in the top echelons in affluent California towns like Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Atherton. So he logs 60- to 80-hour work weeks because, he said, he does not think he has nearly enough money to ease up.
"You're nobody here at $10 million," Kremen said earnestly over a glass of pinot noir at an upscale wine bar here.
Not every Silicon Valley millionaire, of course, shares that perspective.
Celeste Baranski, a 49-year-old engineer with a net worth of around $5 million who lives with her husband in Menlo Park, no longer frets about tucking enough money away for college for their two children. Long ago she stopped bothering to balance her checkbook. When too many 18-hour days running an engineering department of 1,200 left her feeling burned out and empty, she left and gave herself 12 months off.
Yet like other working-class millionaires of Silicon Valley, she harbors anxieties about her financial future. Baranski - who was briefly worth as much as $200 million in 2000 but cashed out only $1 million before the collapse of the technology bubble - returned to work in March.
Along with two partners, she founded a software company, Vitamin D, and already she is resigned to the sleepless nights and other stresses that await her. "I ask myself all the time," Baranski confessed, "why I do this."
"People around here, if they have 2 or 3 million dollars, they don't feel secure," said David Hettig, an estate planner who has advised the wealthy in Silicon Valley for two decades
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/05/business/millionaires.php
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