Masayoshi Son, one of Japan’s richest men, recently said he spends around three hours a day using AI on weekdays and seven hours on weekends.
I also often spend around three hours a day talking to AI on weekdays.
Add seven hours of sleep, and that’s ten hours, or roughly 42% of a day, spent on just two activities. If Son sleeps a similar amount, we already spend nearly half our weekdays doing essentially the same things.
The difference in financial resources is astronomical. Yet the way we spend much of our time can be remarkably similar.
A person worth tens of billions can live in an extraordinary mansion. But we both sleep in one bed.
Someone worth tens of billions of dollars can dine at the world’s finest restaurants every night. But would they actually want to? Kuala Lumpur already has plenty of excellent restaurants, and eating lavishly every day isn’t necessarily healthy.
Household services, digital entertainment, instant access to information, and increasingly powerful AI are no longer exclusive privileges of the ultra-rich.
Of course, enormous wealth buys private jets, influence, access, and extraordinary freedom. Those advantages are real. Yet fame and influence usually bring obligations and a loss of privacy.
I’d be curious to experience that lifestyle for a few days.
But here’s what fascinates me.
This reminds me of the economic principle of diminishing marginal utility. Beyond a certain point, additional wealth may transform your balance sheet far more than your everyday experience.
Technology is making this distinction even more interesting. Many of the same powerful AI tools are now accessible to people across vastly different levels of wealth.
Wealth inequality may remain enormous, even as certain differences in daily experience become smaller.
Perhaps the most important question isn’t how much richer someone else is.
It’s how different their ordinary day really is from yours. And the difference may be surprisingly small.
