Those are weak examples.
You want to take base-rates into account. Of intellectually gifted people outside of academia, what fraction do you think have high technical proficiency in a quantitative subject? How does that compare with the fraction of super-rich people who have such proficiency?
What "major disadvantages" do you have in mind? Brilliant mathematicians are rarely wealthy or enjoy high social status.
No, but to a large degree, that's not what they're motivated by. If you look at revealed preferences, the most intellectually capable people do math disproportionately. Gauss is the one who developed the theory of linear regression and p-values, and he described math as being the queen of science and number theory as the queen of math. Alexander Grothendieck wrote:
I well recall the power of my emotional response ( very subjective naturally); it was as if I'd fled the harsh arid steppes to find myself suddenly transported to a kind of "promised land" of superabundant richness, multiplying out to infinity wherever I placed my hand in it, either to search or to gather... This impression, of overwhelming riches has continued to be confirmed and grow in substance and depth down to the present day.The phrase "superabundant richness" has this nuance: it refers to the situation in which the impressions and sensations raised in us through encounter with something whose splendor, grandeur or beauty are out of the ordinary, are so great as to totally submerge us, to the point that the urge to express whatever we are feeling is obliterated.
All else being equal, wouldn't you want the option to feel that way? :D
Those who do decide that they want to do something outside of math often do very well (again, Simons is virtually the only elite mathematician to have left academia), there just aren't very many of them.
Of intellectually gifted people outside of academia, what fraction do you think have high technical proficiency in a quantitative subject?
I have no idea and I suspect that this strongly depends on the definition of "intellectually gifted".
How does that compare with the fraction of super-rich people who have such proficiency?
Looking here it doesn't strike me that "math, physics, theoretical computer science and statistics" are a path to the riches. I'd bet on business ability instead.
...the most intellectually capable people do mat
Something that I've come to realize is that as a practical matter, intellectually gifted people who haven't developed very strong ability in a quantitative subject tend to be at a major disadvantage relative to those who have. The quantitative subjects that I have in mind as "quantitative subjects" are primarily math, physics, theoretical computer science and statistics, though others such as electrical engineering may qualify. [1]
This point is usually masked over by the fact that people who don't have very strong technical ability are often reasonable functional by the standards of mainstream society, and don't realize how far they're falling short of their genetic potential. They tend to have jobs that don't fully use their strengths, and experience cognitive dissonance around being aware on some level of far they are from utilizing their core competencies.
Consider the following:
I can't give a brief justification for this, but I have good reason to believe that the ~10000x+ differential in net worth comes in large part from the people having had unusually good opportunities to conducive to becoming very technically proficient, that resulted in them developing transferable reasoning abilities and having had an intellectually elite peer group to learn from.
I know a fair number of brilliant people who didn't have such advantages. The situation actually seems to me like one in which amongst intellectually gifted people, there's an "upperclass" of people who had opportunities to develop very strong technical ability and an "underclass" of people who who could have developed them under more favorable environmental circumstances, but haven't. Many intellectually gifted people who didn't have the chance to develop the abilities mistakenly believe that they lack the innate ability to do so. And people who did have the opportunities to develop them often look down on those who didn't, unaware of how much of their own relative success is due to having had environmental advantages earlier in their lives.
[1] James Miller points out that graduates of elite law schools may have analogous advantages – that's a population that I haven't had exposure to.