I also know many who have 7 figure NW’s. Many just by investing. Putting them in the top 2-3% of Americans. Is that not wealth too? Do you have to be a 1% er to be wealthy? Perhaps we need a poll.
When is enough, enough?
"Enough" is more a matter of whether a person feels justified in tapering-off additional effort, rather than, if the wealth-number hits some threshold. Point being, that maybe I wasn't all that successful in absolute terms, but even so, I grow tired of the effort, and declare "enoughness"... or on the contrary, maybe I'm doing fabulously well, but insist on going further, not because of greed or competitive zeal, but because I'd feel guilty or self-disabling, by giving it a rest.
As for 1% or 2% or whatever, that is facile and meaningless comparison. Even in raw numbers, it ignores things like household size. Suzie is single and has no kids, but has $10M. Joe is married with four children, and the family has $20M. Who is richer? Are such things per-capita or per-person? Do we include imputed value of pensions? What about real estate? And so on. Then, even if we could agree on a metric for measurable wealth, we have COL variations. In my local market, $1.2M buys you a 1700 sq ft house on a 6000 sq ft lot. Elsewhere, that's a genuine mansion. Gas is >$5/gallon here; elsewhere, half as much. And so on.
Point being, that even if we're crass materialists and only care about the dollar-dollar-dollar, even under such narrow criteria, we can't have a frat-boy locker room comparison.
But as for "what is wealth", I'd say, we might equate raw dollar wealth with what historically was aristocratic privilege. In say 17th century England, how many Peers of the Realm were there? How many dukes and counts and so on, in Louis XIV's court? Or in any other such pre-democratic regime, where a writ of nobility determined one's station in life? My guess... England had maybe 10M people, and a few hundred peers; maybe 1000. So, one would have to be a 0.01%-er to qualify as "wealthy".
Back to my earlier question... I think that a $10M or $20M threshold in today's dollars is achievable with a good but not extraordinary W2... things like a senior engineer making $250K/year, sustained over decades. but to cross $100M, it would have to be a C-suite W2, or business ownership, or a windfall.