<p>Depends on what you define as power… You can have a lot of money and have no control over your life and never enjoy it constantly being enslaved to your job. You could have lots of control over your life and be able to enjoy it while being the poorest person in the world. Its just depends on how you view life.</p>
<p>Honestly, questions like this have to be qualified with:
How easy/hard is it to get on that career track.
How easy/hard is it to stay on that career track.</p>
<p>Becoming a wealthy hedge fund manager is not easy. There are many people in the finance industry and few get to be that wealthy. It’s much more likely that someone will become a managing director for an investment bank than a hedge fund manager (this is a merely a numbers game). Even so, the chance of becoming a managing director is extremely low (when accounting for the very high bar to even become an IB analyst).</p>
<p>I believe that a Medical Doctor with a lucrative specialization is still probably the “easiest/non-risky” way to 99th percentile income.</p>
<p>Anyone in management has considerable power and monetary budget and can make significant changes/decisions for their company. All I can say is, “Be careful what you wish for” because it is lonely at the top for a reason. And that loneliness is actually not fun.</p>
<p>What you find is that there is much more to life than power and money. And it is a hard lesson to learn. For example, a relative of mine is a self made millionaire and to this day he regrets not having kids and a whole family…he spent all this time working. He has no one to leave his money to…</p>
<p>SCOTUS Justice. That’s real power right there. On the way, you accumulate a good amount of money, and justices’ salaries are currently fixed at ~220,000 and cannot be cut.</p>