We're almost in agreement but not quite.
You seem to negate the group of people that are wealthy due to ability. I don't really think Bill Gates was mostly in it for the money, for instance. And the same goes for all those sportsmen, inventors, artists etc.
I thought you were going a bit too far in thinking that those people only differ from you and me in that they want money more. I don't think I have the kind of talent to become that rich, anyway. In a manner of speaking I might think that I'm as smart as some of those people but not in a way that would yield me as much money.
I'm not saying you can dance like Michael Jackson, or play like Liberace, or steal you ex-roommates ideas like Bill Gates, but there's something you can do very well. Maybe it's marbles, or jacks, or hop-scotch, or impressions of Richard Nixon, or maybe you can drink every one under the table, but there's probably at least one thing you can do extremely well, maybe better than anyone else in Sweden. Maybe these aren't marketable skills. Or maybe you just haven't thought about how to go about marketing them, or even whether they're marketable skills, because you don't have that drive to be rich. Maybe you're the best card player on the block, but you only play for pennies. And that's okay. I don't have that rich man's drive, either.
Well, anyway, I thought it was an interesting question. I hadn't thought of it before, but once asked, I too was curious. So I spent about 20 minutes googling, and what I could find was that it's easy to get the number of rich people (define as 1% or .1% or .01% if you prefer, it's all available from the IRS), and their mean income, and the income cut-off levels that define those groups, and the total amount of taxes that they pay, and the percent they pay, etc. But it's hard to actually find out exactly how many are bankers, or artists, or whatever. Maybe it's a privacy thing, but more likely I just gave up because I'm lazy, or didn't really care to know that much. But I did find a couple of articles from fairly reputable sources making claims. And from those claims it seems that about a third fall into one category (110+25 out of 400 from a Forbes article of the 400 richest Americans). I admit my statement about the remainder was ambiguous, and I still don't know about the other 2/3, but I'd imagine that a good many were the type that came into their money the old fashioned way. But it does take some skill to retain that wealth, once acquired, and, I'd guess, it takes some love of money. A great deal, in fact. But you're right, that analysis is just based on my presuppositions and I have no objective way to back it up. Just a strong hunch.
Here's an interesting, but off-topic, set of data from Forbes in tabular form:
country percent of wealth owned
by top 10% of earners
Switzerland 71.3%
United States 69.8%
Denmark 65.0%
France 61.0%
Sweden 58.6%
UK 56.0%
Canada 53.0%
Norway 50.5%
Germany 44.4%
Finland 42.3%
I was looking for some trend to pair it with, such as highest individual rate or percent of workers who are government employees, but I haven't found any monotonically increasing or decreasing numbers to pair with these yet.