‘Sudden wealth syndrome 2.0’: Therapists say AI’s new multimillionaires feel guilty, isolated and cut off from everyone else
Source: Fortune ·
The therapists who coined the term during the dot-com boom say the AI windfall has brought it roaring back—with more guilt, more isolation and a cottage industry ready to treat it.
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“The rich aren’t particularly happy either,” Menlo Ventures partner and prolific poster Deedy Das wrote on X in May. By his own “back of the envelope” estimate, roughly 10,000 people—employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia and Meta, plus founders—have built fortunes well above $20 million in the past five years. Many of those who have “made it,” he added, feel “a profound lack of purpose.” (Menlo Ventures is an investor in Anthropic.) Bay Area therapists coined a term for that feeling during the dot-com boom of the 1990s—“sudden wealth syndrome”—and they say the syndrome is back in the wake of the AI windfall. Joan DiFuria and Stephen Goldbart founded the Money, Meaning & Choices Institute in the 1990s to treat people struggling with a sudden influx of wealth from the first internet gold rush. They recently spoke to The Cut about the syndrome’s AI-fueled resurgence. ‘Sudden wealth syndrome 2.0’ “It’s sudden wealth syndrome 2.0,” DiFuria said. “All these people coming out of the…