> Most people here probably have around $5-10M in assets given we’re mostly in tech

Even in a SV world I'm trying to get my head around the logical leap that gets you to this number. Median comp in SV is <500k - that's 20 years in the business to earn $10m ignoring taxes & your actual living expenditure. Obviously we can jump that with equity, but that's still not moving the dial far enough for the "majority" to be up at those heights.

I don't see how we're getting anywhere near these figures without generational wealth (assume this is the answer).

If you're saving 100k per annum and getting a 10% ROI, 20 years brings you to 6.3m.

Obviously even in SV "most people" have not already finished doing this.

Definitely not salary. But over the past ten years GOOG has 8x in value, for example.

That's ignoring taxes, too. Real take home for a single filer earning 500k in SF is ~$282k. Take out another $48k for median-ish SF rent ($4k*12) and that "$500k" is already south of 250 before most of your bills are accounted for.