“You’re nobody here at $10 million.”

That’s one of the wealthy Silicon Valley executives talking to the New York Times for its series on the growing concentration of wealth in America. I know Silicon Valley well, having spent more than 20 years in high tech marketing and had a number of Silicon Valley companies as clients with my former firm here in Portland.

I enjoyed my years in high tech and, yes, I was able to make a good living. I left the industry a year ago, in part because of burnout and in part because I could no longer ignore the growing inequities in our world. It’s striking how warped the perspective of some wealthy individuals can become. How about these Times quotes from several rich technology types, for example:

• “People around here, if they have 2 or 3 million dollars, they don’t feel secure.”

• “We’re in such a rarefied environment, people here lose perspective on what the rest of the world looks like.”

• “I’d be rich in Kansas City. People would seek me out for boards. But here I’m a dime a dozen.”

• “We could move. But if you do that, then you’re admitting defeat. No one wants to go backwards.”

• “Here, the top 1 percent chases the top one-tenth of 1 percent, and the top one-tenth of 1 percent chases the top one-one-hundredth of 1 percent.”

It would be easy to dismiss these individuals as bad, selfish people. But that wasn’t my experience in working with folks like them. For the most part, these are extremely intelligent, extremely hard working people, devoted beyond any reasonable measure to their work and truly exhilarated by the technology their companies are producing. The thing is, high tech is unbelievably competitive and the drive to win is enormous. I learned years ago how the winners were determined: by their net worth. “Money is a way of keeping score,” I was told by a wealthy founder of the company I was working for.

By that measure there really is only one winner in high tech. His name is Bill Gates, the richest human on earth. If the winner is the one with the most money, then every other tech millionaire, even billionaire, is a nobody, and there will never come a time when those in pursuit have “enough.”

Unless they stop playing the game. And that’s really what it will take to alter the dynamics that concentrate more wealth into fewer hands. The haves must start conceiving and playing a different game. One where the goal is to produce the greatest number of winners. Imagine all the wealth, intelligence and ambition of Silicon Valley’s technology elites in service to the have-nots of the world. Now that would be a game I’d pay plenty to watch. I’d even play along.