

The only way in which shares can more-or-less translate to real money at their face value is if you use them as collateral on a loan. This is how rich people are rich: they use their shares to take out loans which provide them with spendable money. Money now is always more valuable than money in the future, due to inflation and opportunity cost, so most rich people are almost always in monumental amounts of debt, but because they were able to spend a bunch of money up-front, they’re able to invest in things that bring them even more money to pay the debt off. Example: if you had the money to buy a house and rent it out to tenants, the rent you receive will EASILY cover the mortgage - the trick is getting the collateral to get a mortgage to begin with.
The only danger is that banks and lenders write in a clause that if your share prices (ie the collateral the loan relies on) drops below a certain value, you are forced to sell the shares off and give them the proceeds, so that they can recoup at least some of the money they lost on your bad collateral before it devalues completely. This could, theoretically, happen to Musk if $TSLA drops below a certain threshold, which is what half the Internet seems to be hoping for.
Note: “mo chara” is Irish for “my friend”