The 20 million threshold splits Silicon Valley into two worlds; the anxiety Das talks about is actually wealth explosion PTSD—money arrives, and meaning is lost.

AIMPACT reports that the AI wave is triggering wealth polarization and psychological fragmentation in the San Francisco Bay Area. Over the past five years, approximately 10k core employees and founders from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and NVIDIA have accumulated wealth exceeding $20 million, making the career prospects for traditional software engineers increasingly bleak. Four types of mindset shifts have emerged in Silicon Valley: promotion pathways failing, young people feeling career nihilism, middle managers becoming paralyzed, and the ultra-wealthy losing their sense of purpose. Das believes that the anxiety over the AI gold rush is tormenting industry practitioners, driving more people to develop AI products that can generate wealth.