Well-off devs like the guy who quit Amazon don't have $$$ issues, so he can afford to do that.
Others don't, and that doesn't make them bad.
That makes them care for their family first.
That was the entire point. He addressed your concern in the first two paragraphs.
And it’s not just a perceived fear. The data shows that if you’re not in the portion of people increasing their rate of income/wealth growth, then you’re in the portion that is decreasing in income/wealth growth, and that compounds for your kids.
I would want a few hundred thousand in passive income before I would say I had FU money, which also means a few million in diversified assets other than my house. Especially in the US, where quality healthcare is a minimum $20k per year for a family in insurance premiums alone plus a few ten thousands in out of pocket costs.
In other words, you feel that you cannot be secure unless you're in the, what, top 5% of the society? You can't have an entire society living on passive income until the AI revolution delivers.
And until you feel secure, everything is justified at work?
One of the real, hard, lessons of the coronavirus situation is that security is collective. You can hole up for a while, and avoid catching the virus yourself, but the economic effects will get everywhere.
Hence the need for FU money because the collective decisions are/will be lousy. You do not want to be dependent on the collective for security.
Your sentence really sounds like just an 'I got mine, so forget everyone else' sort of statement.
Your FU money doesn't mean a damned thing if societal norms die due to a pandemic or disaster. If anything, they'll just make you a target for the actual collective when it gets bad.
You can't help yourself, by yourself, if the whole world is crumbling. You have to be dependent on the collective for security. That's the literal point of a society existing. We have societal norms and collective good for a reason.
We used to kill a lot of the rich people, every so often, in history. Why have we forgotten that?
We aren't talking about a French revolution type event here. In anything from Katrina to the Great Depression to even this current pandemic, financial security was/is crucial for maintaining your own well being.
And in the modern world where you can travel, it needs to be a truly global collapse for couple hundred thousand saved to not offer a path to safety.