First things first, you have to stop comparing yourself with someone else. You cannot be them and they cannot be you. Your goals should be yours and they should not say, "I want to be as rich as Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, or Jack Ma.
You say why?
Well because the moment you become them, they are already far gone, so there is no point in chasing every darn successful human on the planet earth! You have to be the one that is enough for you.
Every human on mother earth has a different target for their retirement. This number defines how they go about their life before retirement and they work every moment of their life towards that goal. This number also keeps changing for an individual, for example, for some college graduate, who gets a job with $75,000/year along with benefits would dream of retiring somewhere around $500,000 to maintain the same lifestyle he is living now. The same graduate switches the job, and lifestyle with it, he gets married, bears kids, and the same individual would like to retire at less than a million. You have to have a number!
$75,000 per year is the bare minimum believed to be a threshold beyond which money doesn't really affect one's level of satisfaction and happiness. Again, this might be an average and this theory might have been based upon the majority of the underpaid individuals but then again the world is full of them. Let's say, the majority of the world would be happy if they could get a check of $75,000 every year throughout their lifetime (even after retirement).
The FIRE Movement (Financial Independence, Retire Early - source: NY Times), suggests that if you have a number in your mind, i.e. $75,000, you need about (25 X Your Number) in your Bank Account before you retire for the life to remain balanced, happy, and almost as you always wished and strived for!
$75,000 X 25 = $1.875 Million United States Dollars.
When should I retire?
Well, there is no hard and fast rule of thumb way to tell you. You need to get all the inputs like FIRE movement above, your own intuitions, your own needs, and wants, and you need to put a cap on it sooner than later!
FIRE Movement says you need to make about 25 times the amount of money you think is keeping you happy, well-fed, well-provided, well-entertained right now.
I also have a theory about retiring, I always thought of retiring the year when the Tax that I paid to IRS is exactly equal to or more than the paycheck I get from my job. This definitely means one needs to have different income sources. So my race is on, and with increasing tax percentages and shrinking tax slabs, I am not sure how early this is gonna be.
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