‘Sudden wealth syndrome 2.0’: Therapists say AI’s new multimillionaires feel guilty and isolated

“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 AI boom are experiencing wealth on a different level, and having more complex emotions about it, too.”

Fortunately for the afflicted, there’s an industry for that. TIGER 21, a peer group whose members meet for a full day each month, requires at least $20 million in investable assets or qualifying net worth to join. Paracelsus Recovery, a residential clinic in Zurich that provides a private chef, a driver and a live-in therapist, charges about £100,000—roughly $131,000—a week. And one health care consultancy that finds doctors and mental health care for wealthy families charges retainers starting at $30,000 for 50 hours.

What differentiates this wave of sudden wealth syndrome from the dot-com era, DiFuria said, is that people are making money from a technology many consider destructive—including some of the people building it. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.

“If you’re already feeling anxious about your wealth and the whole world is saying, ‘What you’re doing is going to kill me or take my job,’ how do you speak to your friends?” she said. “It’s really next level from what we’ve seen before.”

A windfall measured in trillions

Fortune reported in August 2025 that there were 498 AI unicorns—private AI companies valued at $1 billion or more—with a combined value of $2.7 trillion, according to CB Insights. The Wall Street Journal reported in May that more than 600 current and former OpenAI employees sold a collective $6.6 billion in shares in an October 2025 tender offer; about 75 of them sold the maximum allowed and walked away with $30 million each. And Forbes counted at least 86 AI billionaires worth a combined $2.9 trillion on its 2026 list in March, 45 of whom were newcomers.

The ultra-wealthy may have more peers than ever before, but DiFuria and Goldbart said many of them feel cut off.

“It creates social isolation. People who have derived wealth from AI, they very much have their own subculture,” Goldbart said.

‘The rich people up on the hill’

Billionaires today have enclaves in places like Lake Tahoe and Hawaii, compounds where each relative gets a separate house and pool.

The world’s highest-profile tech billionaires offer the most conspicuous examples. Mark Zuckerberg’s Kauai compound, which Wired estimated would cost about $270 million including the land, includes a 5,000-square-foot underground shelter that he has described as “just like a little shelter.” Jeff Bezos has spent about $237 million on three properties on Indian Creek, a man-made island in Miami-Dade County nicknamed “Billionaire Bunker,” with its own police department and a gated bridge.

Goldbart called the trend a “major social problem” and said that society is “drifting toward a great imbalance between the haves and have-nots, with the rich people up on the hill, cut off from everybody else below them.”

The effects are intergenerational. “People are raising children who have barely ever left the house,” DiFuria said. “They don’t know what a poor person looks like.” Fortune recently reported on wealthy parents’ growing fear that their fortunes will sap their children’s drive.

‘We found our people’

Goldbart and DiFuria said they try to push clients the other way. In a first meeting that often runs about six hours, they ask clients to craft a “set of operational values” and set concrete goals, such as volunteering or donating some of their money—a path some AI leaders have publicly pledged to take.

But they acknowledged that the people who are most cut off are unlikely to seek them out.

“Our clients are self-selecting,” Goldbart said.

“Most people with narcissism are not going to come to ask us questions about values or purpose,” DiFuria said.

Some clients also choose to self-isolate regardless. DiFuria described a billionaire family that went from feeling guilty about their spending to owning yachts and planes and moving to an area where other billionaires live.

“We found our people,” she said the family told her. “We don’t have to be embarrassed or hide the fact that we have a plane and a yacht and five homes. We can finally be open about it.”

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