This situation/attitude is exactly the thing that great people end up in. As I've mentioned previously I have known a lot of people that developed enough wealth over time to "retire."[1] And by retire I mean choose to work on what they wanted to work on, and not work if they didn't want to. I once explained as "being a consultant with infinite days of paid vacation." Some folks like Jacques and the GP author are "old" (as in > 50 yrs old, (me too)), some I know are "young" in that they are under 40.
In very general terms I see three "types" as most common, the first type are what I think of as "score keepers" who equate bank balances with their "score" in life and a bigger score than their peers mean they "win" life. This is not a point of view that I really understand, but I generally think that is because in my younger years I lived in Las Vegas and knew other kids whose parents were professional gamblers. Their life was really random in terms of how much money was available that year/month/week/day. Money came and went based most on luck, and less on skill. As a result these folks understood money wasn't the definition of how "good" they were, just how lucky. That is how I translated equity earnings from stock options / grants. If you happened to get lucky then you got some wealth, if not well it didn't change the quality of your work or your abilities.
I see this a lot in the second type of person which is they are happy to not have to worry about money, but they don't "need" to generate any more. So they follow their passions which can be very different. One friend of mine became a patent attorney because they really liked the law and how that system worked.
The third type is the person that "fails" at retirement (I put it in quotes because I don't think of it as failing, just a different path) and they miss the technical/intellectual challenge and the camaraderie of being in a group working on tough problems. If you get to be senior enough you come to realize that you can get more done as a group of blended skills than you can as individuals. Recreating that in a non-company way is hard.[2] As a result people often "go back to work". My favorite example of this is Guido Van-Rossum, who "retired", got bored, and then went to work for Microsoft.
Tenured professorships are excellent for this third type as well. There isn't an industrial equivalent (there used to be, tech companies would have the title of "Fellow" but the grind of MBAs on margin over innovation has pretty much killed those in most places).
[1] Not a flex, I just happened to be part of a number of companies that were generous with stock options and grew into larger companies. These are not founders, they are regular employees whose stock options ended up being worth enough that they could diversify them into something they could live off of.
[2] I proposed a member-benefit type company arrangement that would address this need but have so far not pushed the idea into existence.