For rich kids, it's only money; Young people risk big pots, when they have time to do it.(Report: Wealthy New Yorkers)

Byline: Andrew Marks

Investing and promptly losing $60,000 on a startup company doesn't show up on many college student resumes. But then, not everyone is as rich as Gianni Martire.

The 23-year-old also had the wherewithal to recently leave a six-figure job at Merrill Lynch to co-found CollegeHotlist.com, a MySpace-style personal networking Web site.

"No matter what I do with these business ventures, I'm going to be comfortable, money-wise,'' points out Mr. Martire, whose immigrant parents struck gold in Manhattan real estate. "Losing all that money was a great learning experience. I absorbed my lesson, and I went on to the next thing.''

Mr. Martire belongs to a rapidly expanding class of younger New Yorkers for whom dropping $60,000 on a business venture or $100,000 on a Maserati requires no sacrifice.

New York has a higher concentration of wealth than almost anywhere else in the country--only California has more residents with non-real estate assets of $1 million or more--and the number of wealthy New Yorkers has been on the rise over the past five years. Most of that growth is attributable to the incredible incomes on Wall Street, particularly in hedge funds and private equity.

The number of people with investable assets of more than $1 million in New York City has increased to 241,000 from 193,000 in the past five years, says Leslie Mandel, who maintains The Rich List, a direct-mailing service. "Most of them, nearly 80%, are in the financial industry, with the rest split among the real estate industry, entrepreneurs and people with inherited wealth,'' she says.