I agree they're different, but I think something like labor-wealth is what a lot of people aspire to when they say they want to be wealthy. They don't just want to have a lot of stuff, but want to not have to work anymore to have it (i.e. own 100% of their own time), and they often want to be able to hire significant amounts of services from others (hire a personal chef, stay at fancy full-staff resorts, have a personal trainer, etc.). At least for now; perhaps as high-level robotics advances the wealthy will no longer be as interested in hiring human services.
I think it'll remain true at the higher levels of wealth, though, because if you have a lot of wealth, what it really translates into isn't just material goods (there's diminishing returns on how many of those you really need past a few hundred million $s), but the power to significantly change what a non-trivial number of people work on. You can start a company and hire 5,000 people to work on a project you think should be worked on; you can take a different route by initiating a prize like the X-Prize to encourage people to work on it that way; you can start a foundation or grant program; you can singlehandedly decree that [movie genre] is going to be a significant new segment, by promising to plow $1 billion into it; etc. The main thing huge sums of money buy you, imo, is this relative power in the economy, to push people to work on what you think should be worked on--- which necessarily requires that your wealth has to be large in relative terms, as a fraction of the economy.
I think it'll remain true at the higher levels of wealth, though, because if you have a lot of wealth, what it really translates into isn't just material goods (there's diminishing returns on how many of those you really need past a few hundred million $s), but the power to significantly change what a non-trivial number of people work on. You can start a company and hire 5,000 people to work on a project you think should be worked on; you can take a different route by initiating a prize like the X-Prize to encourage people to work on it that way; you can start a foundation or grant program; you can singlehandedly decree that [movie genre] is going to be a significant new segment, by promising to plow $1 billion into it; etc. The main thing huge sums of money buy you, imo, is this relative power in the economy, to push people to work on what you think should be worked on--- which necessarily requires that your wealth has to be large in relative terms, as a fraction of the economy.