Insight: Over Ten Thousand AI Core Employees Earned a Whopping $20 Million, Exacerbating Silicon Valley Class Anxiety

According to Scry News monitoring, Deedy Das, a partner at Menlo Ventures, published a post today pointing out that, influenced by the AI ​​wave, the San Francisco Bay Area is undergoing severe wealth inequality and psychological fragmentation. Over the past 5 years, about 10,000 core employees and founders from companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and NVIDIA have cumulatively amassed over $200 million. This cliff-like wealth creation myth is causing traditional software engineers to feel despair about their career prospects.

Alongside large-scale layoffs and daily work being transformed by AI, the Silicon Valley tech scene is experiencing four typical mindset shifts:

• The breakdown of the traditional career advancement path. Most people realize that a regular job earning $500,000 per year cannot bridge the wealth gap, leading them to frequently job-hop or blindly follow the entrepreneurial trend.
• The younger generation is trapped in professional nihilism. Faced with positions that could be replaced at any time, some young people are beginning to worry about falling into the underclass and find it difficult to focus on their current work.
• Middle managers feel paralyzed. Due to a lack of energy for entrepreneurship and a lack of core AI skills, many middle managers burdened with family pressure are facing the risk of their positions being hollowed out.
• The newly rich are experiencing a loss of purpose. Some people who have risen from a $150,000 salary to a net worth of $50 million within a few years are facing a dilemma where their life plans have been completely disrupted, often continuing to start a business only to gain social status.

Das believes that in this AI gold rush reshaping society, the anxiety of trying to keep up with the pace of wealth creation is psychologically tormenting a large number of Silicon Valley professionals. The side effect of this anxiety is precisely driving more people to crazily develop AI products that can create wealth.