15 Concerns Rich People Take Seriously

You know, there are some things that rich people take way more seriously than everyone else. So we put together a list that goes up in importance as we go through it. Here are 15 concerns rich people take seriously, what goes on to social media and when. Here's a quote that we learned from a billionaire: "Whales only get harpooned when they surface." What you post on social media can be used against you. So there is strategy and thought behind what you let the world see. Not that you're doing anything illegal, but the richer you are, the less you want people seeing every aspect of your life.

Be careful who you're photographed with. Be careful how much content you leave up and how further back it goes. Rich people don't post live on location. You don't tag the restaurant you're in at the moment. You wait until you leave the place or post it the next day. You don't post the layout of your home. Some people will track your jet to see where you are. Don't forget Kim K got robbed in Paris because of her social media posts. Why give your stalkers the upper hand knowing that other people want what you have and they can physically reach you? Keeps you on your toes.

All right, now let's increase the importance a little bit. Who their kids hang out with. You know the saying, "Show me your friends and I'll show you your future." Well, it's more like, "Show me your friends and I'll show you our family's future." Who your kids hang out with has a disproportionate impact on how life will unfold. They influence their values, their habits. They might fall into peer pressure scenarios that lead to negative outcomes. Plus, their academic performance and work ethic usually drops by as much as 40% when surrounded by idiots. Not to mention that you're allowing new people to enter your home to have access to your private matters. And let's not forget that there are opportunistic people out there whose actions might not be sincere.

Being a little bit paranoid becomes part of the norm. Rich people will literally ship their kids overseas to boarding schools just to make sure they don't hang out with a problematic crowd. Backups, emergency escape, and travel insurance. There's some money in the safe. There are some gold, multiple passports, and some bitcoin on a ledger wallet. If a war is knocking on your border, if the political climate in your country is unstable, if the regime is changing, you want a way out. You want emergency plans in place. You want to have some money stashed overseas. You need at least one income-generating asset that is not tied to your local economic environment. And ideally, one that the government cannot easily seize.

Not only do you require ways out of the country in case of an emergency, you need safe passage until you get to where you think you and your family will be safe. Since you have money, people will target you, so you're always a little bit on guard. Disaster could strike, and you need to be ready. But maybe the danger lies from within. Employees stealing confidential data or trade secrets. You invested time, trust, and money into some of the people that you keep in your inner work circles. They've seen how the magic sauce is made. They know the recipe. You're always wary about the people you work with because they're in a position to impact your livelihood. Your identity is tied to what you do, so someone hurting the business feels like they're hurting you specifically. It takes decades to build something of value to fine-tune systems and recipes, and your competitors will do anything in their power to save those decades. An estimate puts corporate espionage up to 50% in the past decade. That's why NDAs and non-compete clauses are in place. You want to assume everyone operates in good faith, but you still have to keep an eye on everyone because you never know when the tide is turning.

Online activity, Privacy, and Security. Everything you do online is tracked, measured, and monetized, sometimes even used against you legally. From your search history to your browsing habits to sensitive data, rich people invest heavily in online security at home, making sure there are no vulnerabilities for others to exploit. But what happens when you leave your house? Well, every time you enter your credit card info somewhere online, every time you scan a QR code to open up a menu on the back end, there is your info, or even worse, you could fall victim to a man in the middle.

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Back stabbings and betrayal in the circles of the elite. Trust is the most valuable commodity, but it's still a commodity. If the price is right or if someone else is in a position to change their life at the expense of yours, they'll take it. Surveys indicate that over 70% of high net worth individuals have difficulty trusting others. A direct consequence of past betrayal. The thing that hurts and the thing that rich people fear the most is the fact that in order for them to backstab you, you've trusted them to have your back in the first place. This puts confidential information at risk, and most likely you and the one betraying you share a portion of your network. It always gets messy. High stakes come with high risks. They say it's easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend, especially if those in question are family members or people that you treat as family.

How much taxes you pay, how much money you take home, and the company set up, you claw your way to the top. You finally set everything up to keep the momentum going. And then the government decides to change the rules of the game. It's a constant pressure of having the right infrastructure in place to protect your hard-earned wealth. The IRS is not your friend, and you are under no obligation to pay more tax than you're legally required. So talks with your accountants and advisors are constant. You set up trusts. You set up different holding companies. Offshore subsidies, IRAs. You want to make sure your family is taken care of without creating a complex structure that becomes a burden to maintain the thought that at any point you could get audited and your entire process could be put on hold as a part of the heavy price of playing the game.

Someone's going to break in. This is the primary reason why once you get rich, you no longer stay in the shady neighborhood you started out in because it's not safe. People will try to get in, they'll jump the fence, will try to break down doors in order to get stuff. If you and your family are unlucky enough to be inside the house at that moment, the situation can quickly escalate. The thought of endangering your family or someone threatening you for information, money, or the combo to the safe is something you can never allow to happen. The more money you have, the more people will try to get in. So the more security you need to have, the more security you have in place. The more things that you have to maintain, pay for, and keep an eye on what we do for a little peace of mind.

Right. Okay. So we're at number eight on this list, and we're talking about break-ins. So let's increase the level of worry even more. If their partner is cheating, you spend your entire life working. You're away at the office. You travel. You're stressed out of your mind and you're tired. Your spouse feels your absence. Things are not the way they used to be, but instead of addressing it, you call it the maturity stage of the relationship and you leave it at that. You won't want to bother yourself with yet another thing you have to fix, but deep in your mind, dark thoughts start to crawl in. You say everything you do is for them in order for you to provide them with this lifestyle that you both enjoy.

But that's not what your family needs to be happy. They need you. You know, you don't give them enough of you. And there is a hole that you pretend isn't there. Somebody else is raising your kid, be it the grandparents, a nanny, or whoever is available. Your spouse feels distant, even kind of cold. You start sleeping in separate beds and you know where your mind wanders when it's bedtime. In a moment of clarity, you wonder if their mind wanders the same as yours. You couldn't take the betrayal, so you just don't think about it. But the thought never really goes away.

Fear of losing their edge or becoming uncompetitive. The more money you make, the more you realize you need to stay competitive in order to not lose what you've worked so hard to build. The hardest thing to accept is you no longer have the same drive you once did, that since your fridge is now full, the hunger just isn't the same. Everyone else you're fighting is hungry, and you've got food on the table. They're about to take it from you, and there is little that you can do about it. Rich people have this internal core belief that they are better, superior to everyone else, and this delusion allows them to build things others don't even dare to think of. You learn, you implement, you take risks, and then you slow down in a moment of pride. But things don't go up.

Deep down, you know, you have what it takes to not only turn things around, but your competitors are younger and maybe even smarter. The way rich people stay competitive is by keeping their mind sharp on a regular basis, the same way that people go to therapy to fix something broken in themselves. The rich have coaches whose goal is to keep them focused, driven, and smart. These coaches are incredibly expensive, so we decided to do something about it. Go to alux.com/app, download our app, and you'll have access to the same tools that rich people have used to make progress in their life for a fraction of the cost of what they pay. It's like having an MBA, a coach, and a billionaire mentor all in your pocket.

FOMO and not living enough. It'll hit you like a big bag of bricks. The realization that you can do anything you want in life, but not everything. And you have to be okay with the things that you're letting go of. Unfortunately, we're not wired that way, are we? For every financial success that makes your blood boil with pride, there is an equal response on the cost of opportunity. Sure, you got to $100 million, but you sacrifice your relationships. You never partied, you never dated your crush. You're pretty awkward. You expected life to be this grand adventure, but your life is stuck in a boardroom with neon lights and zoom meetings. When you started, it was about just making enough so you could do all the creative things you wanted to do. And then it became about the spreadsheet. You feel like your health is fading, and maybe that window of opportunity to do some of the things you wanted to do has already closed. Building wealth requires decades of focused effort, and by the time you get to do it, you might not be able to enjoy it the way you thought you would. Trying to figure out this balance between when you should grind and when you should live plagues everyone who has a little bit of money in their pocket.

Reputation Management. By now you already know reputation is everything. It can literally be the difference between financial bankruptcy or survival. Wealth buys freedom. Reputation determines how you're allowed to use it. Your reputation, your trust, your network, the power embedded into your last name and what it stands for. In our days in media, we've learned there are two distinct kinds of rich people. One, the kind that pay to get on the cover of Forbes, and the kind that pay to never be mentioned. Now, you might be shocked why reputation is so high up on this list, but it all makes sense once you realize reputation is a legacy asset for regular people. Reputation is about status for the super rich. It is the qualifying badge that gets you or your kids a seat at the table. You don't mess around with it, and everyone in the family works hard to protect it.

All right. So if reputation is so high, what are the top three left on this list? That the stress will kill them? Premature death, illness, cancer, and other health risks. The amount of stress someone operating at this level goes through on a daily basis is extraordinary. People age a decade in only 1 to 2 heavy years. You can see it in their gray hairs, in their eyes, or on their skin. You feel this responsibility on your shoulders for everyone that relies on you to perform. Your body needs a rest, but there are urgent matters for you to attend to. You're playing a continuous game of catch up, thinking that if you only push another one or two months to get to whatever imaginary goalpost you set for yourself, then you'll be able to take a break. But past experience teaches us that is just not the case. By the time you get there, something else breaks. There's another fire to put out. Sure, you hire smart people, but this is your baby. And any sort of decline in it is felt internally like a punch in the gut.

Rich people are heavily concerned with their health. Most of them are on dietary supplements and will do any crazy trend to reverse age or try to maintain any amount of youth left from slipping through their fingers. All right. Now let's talk about the top two things from the past resurfacing. Different people have different kinds of skeletons in their closet. In everyone's life, there is at least a couple of things that you would never want to surface. Even you watching this right now, you've got something that you want to keep in a past memory that still haunts you every now and then. You might have changed, grown, evolved. You're no longer the person you used to be back then, but it won't matter to the cultural mob in the public arena for the super rich. The stakes are even higher. The teardown of someone rich is like entertainment for the masses. Society feeds off of scandal, gossip, and tabloid-style circus.

The concern here is not specifically about the past resurfacing, but the impact it would have on the present and future. Because it's not just the individual. It's their family, their company, their employees, the stock price, the investors, and the entire business sector they're involved in. Decades of well-crafted reputation and genuine success could be wiped off and rebranded as something else if the wrong information gets out. So protect your secrets. Okay. And let's jump to the deepest concern haunting the super rich. If it all goes away, was it worth it? And what are they left with? What if you lost it all? What if it all went away, all those years of struggle? Would you be okay with it? Would you build it up again, or would you give up? If someone takes away the material achievement, what are you left with? Who are you as a person? Who are you when no one is looking?

And this concern, you know, it isn't merely hypothetical. History is full of tales of fortunes made and lost, of empires built over generations, only to crumble overnight. Yet the essence of this worry isn't about the fear of losing wealth itself, but about confronting what remains in its absence. It's a question of identity because, for many of the super rich, identity is so closely tied to what they do professionally. So take the professional away, and there's nothing left. It's a measure of worth because the sacrifices you made to get there carry a lot of weight, and you already went all in on this play. It feels lonely because most of your network that was only there for the mutually beneficial relationships will move on. And for some of you, family will not be there as a support system. It's an immediate wake-up call toward authenticity, towards being true to who you really are, not who the market, the papers, the social club needs you to be.

What you're left with, if all of it went away, is the only measurement of an individual in its purest form. And it sits at the very top of our customized version of Maslow's hierarchy of Needs. Anyone who has grand ambitions wants to be at peace and happy with who they are. If you're struggling to get there, click in the top right corner or the link in the description to watch our video about the 15 changes that unlock your life. And since you're still watching Elixir, we saved a little bonus just for you. Self-love is when you look in the mirror and feel respected. Shout out to Russ for this little gem. We want to encourage you to look in the mirror and see what you feel.

Take a moment for yourself today and actually do this. All right. Since you're looking for it, you'll see things that have been there for weeks, but you've missed them. Do you like the person you see? Do you feel pride? Do you feel respected? Does that person seem happy to you? This incredibly powerful exercise is your best indicator that something needs to shift in your life in order to make it work. Get yourself to a point where the person in the mirror smiles back because they're blessed to be living the life you're living. If that's your next short-term goal, write the word "mirror" in the comments. Let's see how many of you are proud of the person that you're becoming.