I wake up every day with my best friend. We have been together for so long, we have regularly similiar thoughts on things.
If i even want to know this, i want to hear the real people using their money in a way that i'm envy.
There was a documentary on netflix about a guy who was diving in the ocean in front of his house and befriended an octopus.
Besides this story (its well made), i had the feeling this person made it. Beautiful house, self care routine and the opportunity (which he actually uses) to use the ocean every day.
I saw that Reddit post a while back. It’s interesting, but I wonder how much it really applies to all of the super wealthy. There are certainly billionaires and centimillionaires who reject that lifestyle out of hand (I know I certainly would). The average person doesn’t know their name and they prefer it that way. Even the local billionaire near where I lived for a while was pretty modest, all considered (his kids not so much). I was surprised to see him and his family sit down next to mine at a restaurant one day. Could overhear him talking about the local farmers market and commenting about the tomatoes of the season haha
What wealth buys you is the freedom and opportunity to make that choice. It’s not that you have to use your influence; it’s that if your local billionaire whose name nobody knew decided to make a phone call or two, people would still pick up his call.
There is certainly a wide spectrum in how people behave, and an important factor is also how they would like to be perceived by others. Rundowns on how wealthy people live will tend to overindex on the behavior of people who want others to know they’re wealthy.
As an example, there’s a culture among what people refer to as "old money" families in the US northeast (with generational wealth from long ago), wherein they tend to avoid seeming outwardly wealthy or really talking about money at all…generally aiming to project an unpretentious vibe, eschewing designer clothes and driving 20 year old Volvos, but still spending vacations at long-owned family getaways worth tens of millions, flying first or charter, and send their kids to specific, expensive schools to socialize with others of similar backgrounds.
The local billionaires here own a large family business. The founders (parents) were great people. They lived life poor for the first 50 years of their lives. They were super down to earth.
The next generation are mostly good people. They're involved in politics at the state level and have some philanthropic organizations that really do good work with zero strings attached.
The grandkids, who all have known nothing but having immense wealth are garbage humans. They're entitled, awful, mean spirited assholes. Every. Last. One. They frequent local businesses, and the number of times I've heard, "don't you know who I am" is astounding.
The business mostly runs itself at this point, but I genuinely fear for the future in this area. There's already undercurrents of the family using its connections to bail out one of the grandkids when he was drunk driving. I believe the first murder will happen within the next decade.
The grandparents would be absolutely horrified if they saw what their family was turning into.
> The grandparents would be absolutely horrified if they saw what their family was turning into.
I wonder if they somewhat expected it. The 'third generation curse' is a widely known effect. Question is whether there is anything that could have been done to avoid it.
Donate their wealth before they die and leave only a token amount for the kids. Enough to give them a headstart, but not enough that they never have to try.
There's definitely a whole spectrum, and not every ultra-wealthy person is out there collecting yachts and private islands. Some just want comfort, privacy, and to be left alone to enjoy the little things
Self improvement is one thing, "go on coaching sessions to increase your confidence and how you socialize" & "buy dating coaches who understand the psychology behind dating and successful relationships" are a completely different beast.
This is just streamlining process of how to become desirable. Nerds with money can afford to even the odds VS their more successful peers who manage to do it naturally. Nothing cringe about that.
Yeah honestly I think this attitude is shit. Maybe you were born with beauty and charisma but not everyone was. You're really going to say "you're not allowed to learn what I got for free"?
Sure it does. Your friends are only available at their house on the day before Thanksgiving? Fly there and then leave to your private jet to fly to your parents for Thanksgiving.
I really like this post since it shows how very little there is for the wealthy to buy other than status goods.
The life of the rich, other than status, is very much like the life of upper middle class. The same phones, the same digital entertainment, the same appliances in their homes.
We have very few items for the rich to buy. Honestly, it is a problem it breaks incentives and it drives the rich more towards status goods which help no one since they are zero sum.
We should have expensive products which actually improve lives.
Yet people still hate the thought of a "maximum wage" or limit to wealth. Everyone should have a life of comfort, not just those who won the lottery or were born into it.
The problem with a maximum wage is deciding what that maximum is. Outsides returns are what incentivize people to start companies. A earning cap will cap that incentive accordingly.
People hate the thought because it's repeatedly failed to work historically, with even explicitly Marxist states deciding that it's best to allow some billionaires.
In fact they depend on the upper middle class in order to have those things. I'm thinking about cell phones. Nobody can have a cell phone unless enough people can afford them to create an incentive to build and improve the infrastructure.
Same thing with 401k enrollments at businesses. Management gets way more of a benefit from them than the wage slaves, but needs to maintain a minimum amount of people enrolled.
Sometimes it's fun to realize that if we all just decided dollars were worthless, they would be. There'd be nothing the government could do about it.
Crypto ain't it, though. Even the better-scaling blockchains still don't scale very well. I've heard of a few different mesh-network currency projects, and I wonder if any of them could scale by essentially giving each user their own blockchain. However, in a mesh-network currency, you still have to find a conversion path with enough capacity, and pay a fee at each step, so maybe that's not it either.
I’ve tried saying this the other way around to people and I’ve only received blank stares. Maybe I should describe it like that.
Money is only valuable because we decided it has value. It can’t really do anything for you except be spent. It isn’t like a log, which could be burned, or ground into paper, turned into a weapon, etc
My viewpoint is that money is a technology, and people will choose whatever technology works for their use. A technology can be designed so that some favored uses are much more likely than others. For our government money, those uses are as a medium of exchange, temporary store of value, and tool of government economic policy. Also, some money transactions are delimited by regulations.
People already choose that their government money is worthless, e.g., the people of Venezuela and Russia. They will risk prosecution to move their wealth into assets valued in dollars or euro's. Even in the dollar and euro zones, people use other technologies for storing and exchanging wealth. Most wealthy people don't store their wealth directly in dollars already.
The value of government money is based on expectations about the future behavior of the government. This is at least a little better than being arbitrary or a collective delusion, in the short term. There are already ways to bet against it if you want.
To the point about dollars, there very much is something the government can do about it: taxes.
If the government requires taxes to be paid in dollars, that sets a "floor" on the value of a dollar as a medium of exchange - for most people in the US living a "normal" life, you have to acquire some amount of dollars throughout the year, under penalty of jail/loss of property (property tax). Then, since you already have 300m+ consumers in a massive market using the currency, odds are you'll use it too.
The only way you'd truly render dollars worthless is through government action or malfeasance; the fictional scenario where every person on earth not only agrees dollars are worthless, but also agrees to forfeit all property in the US, all employment in the US, and interests in any US financial holdings is quite a few steps beyond the point where "the people just decide to rebuke the dollar's lack of backing".
Doing this in an environment where nobody is using dollars will lead to guillotines. The dollar has to be useful for exchange first, and then they can demand tax to be paid in it.
Uhm no? This is illogical. You just declared money worthless. Nobody is gonna bring out the guillotines if the government demands worthless paper. They'll happily give the worthless paper to the government.
So this thought experiment isn't just that "everyone decides dollars are worthless" but also that the state is dissolved, along with all the property rights and the govt's monopoly on violence?
That's more like saying "Dollars are worthless in a scenario like Fallout or The Road", rather than making any relevant point about government efforts to maintain fiat currency.
In the original scenario of "people decide dollars are worthless... nothing the government can do", my point was that the government has a lot of levers to pull to backstop value, albeit at a far lower level than today's dollar.
Any idea of an instantaneous, sweeping change, is utopian. But more gradual actions are possible. For instance the government could decide to let the dollar serve as a medium of exchange while discouraging its use as a long term store of value. They could do this by triggering a mild inflation, such as 2% per year, that would encourage people to move their wealth out of dollars and into things like land, goods, factories, etc.
The dollar wouldn't become worthless, but it would become worth 2% less per year.
"if we all decided dollars were worthless" does a lot of heavy lifting
Consider the following scenario:
If everyone except one person decided that dollars were worthless then on day one everyone would think that the one person accepting money must be insanely stupid. That person now has all the worthless money.
Turns out, money is created through contractual obligations that mandate the acceptance of money in equal amount to the created quantity. Everyone is now indebted to that person.
People who can't fulfill their contractual obligations must go and declare insolvency. The person with all the money offers a single dollar for all the assets that this person owns, since that person owns all the money, there isn't a second dollar to go around to compete with him.
After spending his first dollar, the economy now has one dollar representing the entire worth of the economy. The next insolvency will be auctioned off for two dollars, four dollars and so on.
What I'm getting at here is that "if we all decided that dollars were worthless" implies the abandonment of the rule of law, which makes the statement significantly less interesting. You can do a lot of things in a failed state. Abandoning the currency is one of the least interesting ones.
The very wealthy had mobile phones years before they were commonly available/affordable. The only things they can't have are things that are technically/physically impossible. A Gilded Age railroad titan could not have had a mobile phone. But the wealthy had them in the 1940s.
Sure, but they were giant beasts with limited functionality. My first boss's wife had one for her real estate business. It came in a shoulder bag. The investment that produced today's smart phones and infrastructure required broader access.
That cell phone cost as much as modern smart phones despite not adjusting for inflation as well. That was just to pay, they were so expensive per minute to use that most who had one avoided using it if they had other options. Which is to say real estate agents had them and they tried to keep all calls to under the first incoming minute free.
The mobile phones they had were absolute garbage, service was abysmal, and the security was non existent.
There was no way to get to a smartphone without cumulatively trillions of dollars of investment in silicon, software, network rollouts, and so on. A person with 100 billion in 1998 could not have bought one despite it being a decade away for the entire population.
The very wealthy cannot get things that are that special and it’s actually pretty amazing. Warren Buffet has called out several times that he lives like a regular middle class American and the main exception is flying private, but if were forced to choose he would dump the jet over the iPhone.
The average rural farmer in India has instant access to a world of information and entertainment at his fingertips 24/7 via his phone
Even just 30 years ago the most a billionaire would have were staff who would find information (at a far slower speed) from large libraries and copies of broadcast TV and most films available relatively quickly (perhaps even same day)
A mobile phone today is a world away from Dick Tracy's radio watch, or even a nokia 3210 on a digital network in a western city
The other piece is that there's no incentive to keep prices out of reach.
There might be reasons for high prices, like costly manufacture, but no one is going to refuse to expand their market by 10000x if they are able to bring costs down.
I clicked through hoping for something interesting and different, and got the same impression.
So... More plus influence.
I think the only thing listed that people with less money don't really "know about" is how much perspective changes with staff. You know people have people, but not necessarily how it changes things.
I'm on the very low end of that - I run a small DevOps consultancy and can, now employ a few people in low cost countries, and though I've managed large teams before, having unilateral ability to set people to work on things because I want them is a game changer, and it's hard to get used to asking for things instead of doing them.
The rest feels like things everyone knows, if not directly then from TV and movies.
I knew a son of two entrepreneurs with a ~30m yacht, they own a (ex) monastery they use, either for parties, events, or as a residence
They have Miele appliances, but having "same appliances" doesn't make justice to the fact that there are deeper differences. Yes, they're status goods, but I think one's life might greatly improve by being very wealthy - even if your life can still be shitty as a wealthy person
Miele makes really good stuff. I have their stackable W1/T1 washer/dryer. It's unbelievably good at washing or drying pretty much anything. They also supposedly last forever, even today. I'll let y'all know how true that is in 20 years LOL
Oh no... Ok, Miele rant - I got a whole set in the new house. Their firmware SUCKS. Turning on the oven/dishwasher takes 5-10s. The dishwasher takes 3 power button presses with no feedback. The oven has no indication when it starts turning on and it's a touchpanel, so you stand there like an idiot deciding is the next press will work or be perfectly timed to turn it off again. Then once you start the drying after steaming, you can't cancel (~20min). The washer needs a strong long press on "start" because it's somehow read twice in software and you can get into an in-between state where the controls go away but the washing doesn't start. ("Known issue, press harder") Their kitchen extractor fan has "loud" and "jet engine" settings. (At least that one's hardware)
Would not recommend this to anyone who can't easily test them in a showroom and even then not really... They do the actual job well, but their UX makes me angry every day.
The biggest difference more money would make is that I could have someone else deal with those issues.
The microwave in my apartment also has bad firmware. It beeps four times when the timer runs down and it turns off. Unfortunately, the beeping continues unnecessarily after opening the door. I believe Frigidaire (the brand) contracted a manufacturer to build the model, but they have their own people install the official firmware. Then the manufacturer produces extras, installs their own firmware, and sells them, cutting out the brand. And that's how I end up with a "Frigidaire" microwave that beeps when it shouldn't and says "GOOD" instead of "DONE". At least that's my theory.
Firmware is an important part of the appliance. An appliance with Frigidaire hardware and third-party firmware is counterfeit.
Maybe the same thing happened with your Miele appliances?
I don't believe Miele would go for selling the rebranded production extras as their own. But that beeping-after-open is common in many models and super annoying.
My apartment has Miele appliances. It came with the apartment and I'm honestly not impressed at all besides the fact that they still work after 18 years (when they were installed).
The oven is mediocre at best, my Annova Precision Oven is much much better, much better control of temperature, heats up much faster, has more features, infinitely cheaper.
The range hood needs to be repaired because it makes a lot of noise. Repair of Miele appliances are super expensive.
The only appliance I'm impressed with is the wine cave but that's a white labeled Liebherr
I'd say it really depends on the mentality of the very rich person
The very wealthy are going to fly private. Upper middle class could swing this on a case-to-case basis, but not regularly and especially if not if they frequently travel
Other than that, the main difference is the very wealthy having a mentality of getting people to "take care of problems" to a much larger extent. For example, routine tasks like cleaning. An upper MC person might have a weekly cleaner at best. But they still have to load/unload dishwasher, do their own laundry, etc. A very rich person has a full-time housekeeper.
The very rich have circles of people they rely on to take care of problems. Like having "a lawyer" who they go to for and have known for years. There seems to be much more of a sense of personal relationships / loyalty. Almost like the old feudal oaths.
> The very rich have circles of people they rely on to take care of problems.
At the higher levels, there's a "family office" which takes care of such things.
All bills go there, and anything that needs to be done, they take care of.
The first big one was the Rockefellers', which was in Rockefeller Center in New York. (That turned into a business. Now it offers Being Rich as a Service.)
Traditionally, yes. That's for the people who inherited a mansion, retainers, and trusts.
Now there are family office concierge services. "Luxury lifestyle as a service" is available.[1] That's for people who made a lot of money all at once and need guidance in spending it.
(The people I've known with serious money made most of it themselves, and didn't need a family office.
Except for one married couple who blew through 8 figures and went broke.)
These are between multi-family offices and scams targeting new money. (The intersection between the best hospitality folks you can privately hire and the best money managers is roughly zero. Consolidating those functions makes no sense unless someone cannot afford them.)
Maybe I'm not rich enough to get it, but in the footer this site identifies itself as a member of a travel agency which is itself a member of a third travel agency. I'm getting the same vibe you see from the "wealth advisors" who run around trying to feed people structured notes.
What comes to mind here is Up In The Air starring George Clooney.
Now Ryan Bingham doesn't command any particular status or wealth, but he makes a living firing people on behalf of other companies ("Concierge firing-as-a-service"?) and he leads a nomadic lifestyle that many of us would find completely intolerable.
His one lifelong dream is to earn 10,000,000 Frequent Flyer miles and hold the special Unobtanium card from American Airlines. [SPOILER WARNING] He achieves this during the final flight of the film, and when he dials the number on the back, he comes to realize that this is his unique number and there is a specially-assigned staffer waiting by the phone to personally take his call.
I can envision this sort of revelation as the experience of someone who comes into money and suddenly finds their needs being personally met by a concierge or family office.
> this is his unique number and there is a specially-assigned staffer waiting by the phone to personally take his call.
For small values of "personally".
I once visited a rent-an-office place which had a live receptionist. She had a phone with about thirty line buttons. Each time she answered a different line, she gave a different company name.
Well your link is to have Amtrak tow your private rail car. You have to provide it yourself. There is a different company that offers luxury private cars that I can’t remember the name of now.
Perhaps not exactly comparable, but I went to a talk at wlog REI from some relatively ordinary person who climbed some famous, but accessible peak (Kilimanjaro?). I asked about the practice of hiring local porters, and got basically this answer.
The local economy pretty much depends on the influx of foreign money from the people climbing. A fit person would be physically capable of carrying their full load, but it simply isn't done because of the economic disparity between the foreign climbers and the local porters. I don't know if that was enforced by law or custom, but the presenter was quite clear that it's not really possible to climb without local porters.
On Kilimanjaro you must employ a guide, a cook for the guide, and a porter to carry the gear of the cook and the guide. You are welcome to carry your own gear but at this point you've already got a support team of 3 people and are paying $1500+. An extra porter is probably around $100.
I don't know why you are getting downvoted. Over the years I have heard several anecdotes from "expat" wives in various places (Kenya, Philippines, New Guinea) of being taken aside by a local headman soon after arrival and being told that they will hire a cook and a housekeeper and a laundrymaid.
On the mediocrity principle, I think this is how things worked in general. Necessary to the local economy.
Yeah I think this is something that people in countries like the US don't instinctively understand, or at least I didn't.
My Filipino friend explained to me that back home, if you have more than a certain amount of money, it's seen as incredibly selfish not to employ people as housekeepers, etc.
I'd imagine that's true in a lot of places with income disparity and/or high unemployment numbers. It made a lot of sense to me.
My mom visited a professor in an African country a few years back, as part of a project.
She told me the professor had a guy employed to open and close the gates for when he drove to work and came home in the evening. That's all the guy did. Full time job.
Sounded so preposterous at first, but after thinking a wee bit I came to a similar conclusion that the alternatives might be a lot worse. It was steady income, albeit not a lot.
I understand where this is coming from but that argument simply doesn’t make sense. There are many ways to give back to society; providing low-status jobs is only one of them. And a poor one, because it locks people in that status and heteronomy. Within 10 minutes, anyone can come up with some ideas that would contribute to other people’s development and growth in a more sustainable fashion.
It serves other purposes. That narrative is a convenient collective lie, full stop.
> And a poor one, because it locks people in that status and heteronomy
What is the current alternative? Are they any better?
When I was kid growing up (in Brazil), we had a live-in housekeeper. She moved to São Paulo from some poor rural area in the South of Brazil. As many people from poor rural areas, she was forced to drop out of school on 3rd grade to help her family.
If I remember it correctly, she was 21, 22 years old when she first moved in. The agreement was she would get minimum wage + regular benefits + free housing. She would work from ~7:30am until 3pm, get a break in the afternoon and then go to night school from 7 to 10pm. On weekends she was free, so she could either be out with her friends or coming along our weekend camping trips.
She worked with us for 5-6 years, finished school, moved out of our home when she got married. Had two daughters, the oldest one just finished college. I know all that because 30+ years later my mom and her still keep in touch.
Possibly stories like these are not the majority, but they were pretty common. Today, this would be unthinkable not because economic inequality has diminished, but because whatever we had that passed for "middle class" in Brazil got completely squeezed out by governments over the last 25 years.
Right, but ultimately what (nearly all) people want is frigging jobs. Or to be even more specific: steady, dependable income.
because it locks people in that status and heteronomy
Yeah there's so many incorrect assumptions here.
I can tell you that here in the US, my somewhat upper middle class aunt used to clean homes part time. Husband was an engineer, she was a housewife, kids were away at school. Not the type of person with hobbies and such. Was a bit bored.
Not sure of the specifics but I think she pulled in a couple of grand a month cleaning. Pretty handy when you're putting two kids through college. Or so I thought. Thanks to you, today I learned it was all "a lie." ((giant eye roll))
It's not an uncommon side gig for bored suburban housewives. There are a few women in my middle class town that do it.
I don't think full time housekeeping, which seems more common in other countries, necessarily locks anybody into anything. Anecdotally I think it's a fairly common thing to do when getting an education. I also don't know that it's always low-paid, either, especially if it includes nanny duties etc.
> Yeah I think this is something that people in countries like the US don't instinctively understand, or at least I didn't.
Guilty as charged. I have the American mentality due to being raised here, and I would be horrified to hire a housekeeper or servant. The "well, it's better than nothing" argument, while true, feels icky and exploitative. "Better than nothing" is a terrible bar and a sign of a broken society, and I personally just don't want to be part of continuing that brokenness. Totally understand if someone grew up in a different culture, they likely have a totally different view on it.
Kind of. I don't do food delivery at all, and only hire uber/lyft when all other options are exhausted, and when I do, I at least I feel sufficiently bad about it. I would definitely feel "icky" hiring a personal shopper or hiring a chauffer to drive me everywhere.
And yea, I know there are other less visible areas in every product and service value chain where people are exploited and yet I am part of society. I don't have an answer or solution to this that is politically feasible.
> I would definitely feel "icky" hiring a personal shopper or hiring a chauffer to drive me everywhere.
Do you feel "icky" by going to a supermarket and having a cashier scanning your products? Do you feel "icky" by taking a taxi? How about by taking a public bus, train or plane?
Do you go to restaurants or bars? Do you feel "icky" about someone taking your order, cleaning up your table, pouring out drinks for you?
Do you have kids? Have you ever hired a babysitter? Do you feel "icky" about someone else being temporarily responsible for the well-being of your child?
> I know there are other less visible areas (...) where people are exploited and yet I am part of society. I don't have an answer or solution to this that is politically feasible.
I'm honestly more concerned about people who think that they should have "an answer to this" than all the exploitation that exists.
I can tell you what it's *not* the solution. Eliminating all sort of manual labor is *not* a solution. Eliminating manual labor will lead to even more isolation and atomized individuals. It will put us all in different bubbles and make us completely unable to relate to other people and it will make us even more susceptible to be defined by what we consume.
If you are part of a society, it will be better for everyone if you start participating in it. Instead of looking down on people whose work is not as valuable as yours (because that's what honestly your "feeling icky about it" seems to boil down to), look at these interactions as opportunities for mutual, voluntary help. If you think their work is worth more than what they are getting, tell them so and back it up with your generosity. There is no point in "feeling bad" about it.
You can, instead of paying for a housekeeper pay for machines etc. made in the country in question, thus creating technical jobs there that might develop people more than housekeeping does.
One of my coworkers - a senior engineer - came to the US from India and found it a big change - sure he knew how to cook, but he didn't realize he would have to cook every meal. He has two house keepers before who would come in the morning make breakfast, and clean the house. They would then leave for the afternoon and return to make supper and minor tidying up. He really only had enough work for 1 house keeper but having 2 meant if one was sick or quit he had time to find a second. Since he was paying them less than $1/day each the total cost was very reasonable.
Who know if or how long the above will continue, but it is still possible in many countries if you can get a job there.
Yup, no big deal. One of my cousin has like 2 housekeepers full time and 2 comes are different time of day like help with cooking and cleaning during lunch and dinner. Their luxury car is however lowest end Audi and another is Corolla.
On flip side he had to change 2 jobs because travel distance as ~20 miles but in term of duration it was 4+ hrs daily. And no such thing as peak hours there, day-in/day out, morning, afternoon, late night, week day, weekend, same worst possible traffic.
Any interaction with real world outside of home can wear people down specially the kind who keep multiple household helps. From traffic, to pollution, medical care, school admissions, doing groceries, shopping, parking and on and on.
One way to think is at absolute top level like senior most politicians, industrialist, CEOs, other types of super influential people, developed vs developing countries' lifestyle can match, but as one start moving down the ladder, the quality falls very rapidly in developing world and serious compromises can start just 2 step down from top.
> Other than that, the main difference is the very wealthy having a mentality of getting people to "take care of problems" to a much larger extent. For example, routine tasks like cleaning. An upper MC person might have a weekly cleaner at best.
Pfft... amateurs. I've solved the same problem by just living in filth.
>The very rich have circles of people they rely on to take care of problems. Like having "a lawyer" who they go to for and have known for years. There seems to be much more of a sense of personal relationships / loyalty. Almost like the old feudal oaths.
That has more to do with owning business interests than wealth. The guy who owns a small chain of a mundane business, has stake in another business via investment, etc, etc, his social circle looks roughly the same.
Create expensive products which materially improve the lives of those with wealth? Align the incentives of the rich so that they don't spend on these zero sum status goods. Also incentivize the rich to get richer so that they can buy these products that make their lives better in a non-shallow way.
Work with incentives instead of against incentives.
There's yachts and fancy houses and supercars to buy for the rich. They make their lives better, in some way. A lot of people are employed to make those things.
I don't see how this helps anyone. If wealth were distributed more equally, those people would work on making the lives of everyone better, not just the lives of a small elite.
You can't talk about top rates without also talking about where they kick in. Italy's top rate of 43% kicks in for everything over 50k euros. The 50k feels a bit low to me, and maybe 100k euros would be better. 90% of everything over 5M may work, but then you run into another problem where people that rich are not bringing home a salary. So you lower where it kicks in and then just impact the working professionals, which also isn't who you really want to target. And if you do want to target those working $500k+/year, removing the cap (176,100 this year) on SS payments is probably a better path.
So now we're back to the ultra-rich where you need to first think about taxing dividends as income without hurting retirees, and second think about some wealth tax. It could be small like .2% on everything over 5M or something, but it would actually put some tax burden on the people you're trying to put it on.
Goods, yes. Services, fuck no. Look at the Four Seasons and Amangani yacht and jet programmes for a <$10mm example of the sorts of experiences wealth opens up.
The four seasons isn't materially better than the hilton next door. The rooms are basically the same, the fixtures at the four seasons are fancier, the bedding is prettier, some random furniture may be sourced from a different supplier. The four seasons will be in a location which has somewhat better views.
The four seasons has prettier and more attentive staff, and there are less "less well off" at the four seasons. And you get to brag that you went to the "four seasons" but it really isn't that much better.
I stayed at the 4 seasons a few years ago just to give it a try. Not even remotely worth it. The only real difference I noticed was the obsequiousness of the staff.
If you want hotel employees to kiss your ass and pretend to respect you, then this is the place for you. But the quality of the room wasn’t noticeably better than other places I’ve stayed.
I will give you a good example of something that most upper middle class people can’t afford or at least can’t afford frequently.
Disney World VIP tours. My wife has family who are club 33 members and they gifted us a VIP tour as a wedding present. The tour guide drives you around to the different parks and walks you backstage through tunnels and hidden areas to get you the very front of any ride you want to go on.
> the quality of the room wasn’t noticeably better than other places I’ve stayed
I broadly agree with you on their hotels. But I’d note that Four Seasons doesn’t compete on room quality, but service. If you planned your stay perfectly they shouldn’t outperform. But if you forgot something, or need help with something weird, they have a habit of being halfway legendary. (Colleague left his suit at home. They had one made overnight. Concierge apparently knew a suit maker’s cell.)
This is exactly it. The middle class (even upper) aren’t really used to the “mention something, get it fixed” type of lifestyle. But that’s what you’re paying for.
Memorable experience at a four seasons in Shenzhen (memorable for how well they fixed my screwups that is), I had forgotten my laptop charger (apple laptop). They didn't have any I could borrow, went to the apple store to buy one and lent it to me. I forgot my phone in the taxi arriving at the airport. Noticed immediately, I tried calling my phone, the taxi driver hung up immediately on me (so he knew I left my phone there and was probably planning on selling it). I called Four Seasons, they had kept a record of the taxi number, got the phone fedexed it to my destination.
Depends on which one you go to. Supposedly the experience is insanely better internationally.
Regardless, at luxury hotels, the rooms are nice, sure [^0], but you're mostly paying for top-tier service.
If you want to travel somewhere within the US where you _know_ your room will be tip-top and don't want to lift a finger, the Four Seasons/Ritz/St. Regis is it.
[^0] They do have some huge, amazing suites that you won't find at a Westin, though.
> The four seasons isn't materially better than the hilton next door
I think it would be more fair to say that the Four Seasons isn't materially better than the _Conrad_ next door. I've stayed in some amazing Hilton-branded properties, but also some terrible ones. I guess I am expecting the hotel brand to denote the _minimum_ level of comfort, and there are some Hiltons that truly drag along the bottom, where I'd be very surprised to find myself at a shitty Four Seasons (or Conrad, which is the HHG's next step up from a Hilton).
Can't say I've stayed at the Four Seasons, but we stayed in the St Regis in SF last year. We got upgraded to the Metropolitan Suite and that was quite the experience. Note that I paid exactly zero as I'm a long time Bonvoy Gold Member and was burning points on one of their regular rooms for a vacation, then they elected to upgrade us. I think it was due calling ahead asking for an accommodation for my autistic son (which they were amazing regarding).
I have nothing bad to say and everything good about how they handled our stay. Whether it was worth the price is (as this whole topic is about) relative to your means. I would say that it was more than we would have paid, but now that we've experienced it it's on my radar as a reasonable value. Their signature "Butler" service was beyond amazing; traveling with my son is difficult at the best of times and they handled everything.
They essentially allowed me to have an actual vacation vice allowing me to handle a series of challenges and let the rest of my family have a vacation (which is the normal way things go).
Now take that experience, put it on a private jet and yacht, with staff who know you personally and can be prepositioned to ancitipate your needs and you're around where the hundred millionaires live. (Billionaires operate like mini heads of state.)
In my experience, if you value your privacy, freedom etc... I'd say living like a millionaire with close to 100 (but not above) is much nicer than living above that. Below 100 million, you don't need bodyguards and private security, you can be as low key as you want.
Oh yeah of course, depends entirely of the country and the income disparity. I live in HK and regularly I see some members of the Li Ka-shing family go to one of my favourite restaurant (Chiu Tang, a nice but not too expensive fine dining place). They're always accompanied by 4-6 bodyguards and have to dine in a private room.
Since you bring him up specifically I'm guessing you already know he's a capitalist but is perfectly fine with hereditary wealth extracted from other people's labour, so maybe look into his predatory practices towards the poor, e.g. in lending, or other corporations.
Perhaps you also recognise this quote:
"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."
Look at the context of that quote and you’ll understand he is not arguing either in support of your stance against the rich nor is he supportive of how the rich as a class are minimizing taxes through equity loans/etc.
when the 3D printing stack gets a little further, we'll all get "a utopian, post-scarcity space society of humanoid aliens and advanced superintelligent artificial intelligences living in artificial habitats spread across the Milky Way galaxy."
Signalling Status plays a big role in group formation/group maintenance/social cohesion etc.
The larger groups grow, the more complex the group dynamics get, keeping groups of people together and preventing them from disintegrating is one of the most complex problem we face, given all the differences in culture, religion, language, class, personalities, ambitions, values, needs, intelligence, skill, education level, interests etc etc
A short cut frequently used (cause its easy) is using Leisure and Luxury (see Theory of the Leisure Class).
"So you like what I wear, where I stay, what I eat, who my friends are, what toys I have and want to be like me or hang out with me then do what I say". This works pretty well. In fact Veblen's prediction in Theory of the Leisure Class was that since Tech has a tendency to eliminate waste, tech would eventually eliminate the need for a Leisure/Status signalling Class that keeps large groups from unraveling.
But social cohesion of large groups is such a complex problem, society even today requires all kinds of Status Signalling to keep the groups together.
If you find ways to keep groups together without status signalling you are onto something special.
In my experience roaming many different groups, the ones who do not signal status typically are the most powerful/influental. Their membership is safe; they don’t need to signal status, or rather, signaling it draws too much attention (annoyances by those seeking to gain status by affiliation). I remember reading a study about this some years back to find my own findings confirmed.
The people I know with a net worth over 10m do not display it. Why would they want to. It only has downsides and no upside. Same applies to other forms of status/rank/belonging.
(Not contradicting your points, merely adding to them.)
If you want to experiment with that, try to NOT match other people’s style AND radiate a deep sense of security/belonging/entitlement. Do not hide your (other) insecurities; those with status don’t have to hide their authenticity. This may sound like a contradiction at first, but you can develop an universal sense of belonging that remains authentic. You will be surprised which people will suddenly find you to talk with you, once you stop seeking their attention.
Veblen goods are the most simplistic and superficial form of intentional status signaling and yes, the world would be much better off without them.
Other kinds of status signaling are more interesting and more subtle. If I talk about my weekend softball team, I'm not doing it to impress anybody, but it unavoidably does convey some things about my status.
It tells you I almost certainly have a car, I have leisure time, people like me enough to at least tolerate me on their team, that I have a few hundred dollars to spend on gear/fees, and that I have some basic level of physical coordination/strength/ability. It also strongly hints that I grew up middle class or higher because middle class+ kids are the most likely to have learned the game as kids and continued with it as adults.
There are only 24 hours in a day. Signaling (or looking for others' signaling) is inevitable if one wants to curate their interactions. There are uncountable types of signaling, other than the LVMH style.
Not sure how any individual or society could function otherwise, due to the limits physics places upon us.
> We should have expensive products which actually improve lives.
We do. It's just that "wealthy" is far past the point of diminishing returns when it comes to buying high-quality expensive items.
No, we don't need to come up with things for the rich to buy just to fix their incentives. We should be asking ourselves how to decrease wealth inequality, not how to make it more fair to those on top.
Bill Gates has saved millions of lives through his philanthropy, and the internet is full of malicious rumors about him. Other billionaires who do far less good, but keep a lower profile, get much less hate.
A common meme on the internet is "if your intent was truly charitable, you wouldn't care whether anyone said thank you".
But this is a false dichotomy. Many people find the idea of charity appealing to some degree, but most of us aren't die-hard saints either. When we see the good deeds of others get devalued or even punished, that makes us less enthusiastic about doing good ourselves.
"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome." Punishing do-gooders is one of the most anti-social things you can do. On the other hand, praising do-gooders is a very cheap way to incentivize people to do more good in the world.
I believe that once you get to a certain level of wealth, you start caring more about your personal reputation than your material goods. Sadly, there is so much reflexive skepticism towards billionaire philanthropy at this point that it's not even clear to me whether doing philanthropy is reputationally net-positive.
People make this claim about a lot of software (Netscape being the poster child) but typically whenever I look into it, the nuanced answer turns out to be "Microsoft may have thrown it's weight around, but the product largely failed on it's own merits."
Sure, and there was a huge antitrust trial about it too, and we all knew how it turned out. The trial surfaced a whole bunch of shady stuff, but that was more related to them abusing their monopoly position (i.e. "throwing their weight around"). Netscape died because:
1) Browsers were destined to be a commodity, given the first browsers (like Mosaic) were effectively free, and even then it was clear that a browser would be as critical a component of a consumer OS as, say, a file explorer or a calculator.
2) Netscape simply was an inferior product compared to IE and other browsers like Opera (which survived despite IE being free and Microsoft's shenanigans, and is a thing to this day.)
> Netscape simply was an inferior product compared to IE
The book of the battle - Competing for the Future - makes it clear how much of a mess Netscape was in internally
Essentially they had alternate code bases for every other version of the browser and we forever porting feature and bugs between the two (and often forgetting and so getting regressions)
You're right. On one hand he has saved millions of lives and nearly eradicated some diseases in developing countries. On the other hand we could have had another computer operating system. Really tough to balance.
For the sake of preventing perverse incentives, I would encourage you to just make this claim in discussions of BeOS or perhaps early Windows, and not when Bill's philanthropy comes up.
Otherwise other billionaires will think: "If I get into philanthropy, people will take it as an opportunity to publicize un-flattering facts about me."
In Bill Gates's post about changing his charitable giving goal to give most of it away in the next 20 years, he references Chuck Feeney as someone he admired.
Until he was 75, he traveled only in coach, and carried reading materials in a plastic bag." He did not own a car or a house and wore a $10 Casio F-91W watch
He gave away most of his fortune and required recipients not to reveal the source of the donation.
Wiki: "Beyond Mr. Feeney's reticence about blowing his own horn, 'it was also a way to leverage more donations—some other individual might contribute to get the naming rights.'"
NYT article(1):
..when asked what had driven him into such deep secrecy:
“I feel it’s my life,” Mr. Feeney said. “I’d be the last guy to tell a wealthy person what to do with their money. They’re entitled to do whatever they want.”
quote from his kid: "...he sheltered us from people using the money to treat us differently,” Leslie Feeney Baily said. “It made us normal people.”
when asked why he had chosen to reveal himself:
“A lot of wealthy people, they don’t realize they have the alternatives of spending the money for good,” he said. “If they knew it gives so much satisfaction, I wouldn’t have to persuade them."
> Bill Gates has saved millions of lives through his philanthropy, and the internet is full of malicious rumors about him.
But that's not related to his philanthropy mostly. There's evil business stuff he actually did and there are some conspiracy freaks. Those would exist anyway. But I've never seen a significant number of people with criticisms because of the programs he enables.
The conspiracy freaks around vaccines wouldn't exist if it weren't for his philanthropy. I just don't like to see someone punished for good-faith efforts to do good.
Nothing nihilistic or conspiratorial about it. Money gives you power over other people. You having more power over others means by definition that they have less power -> Zero sum.
Philanthropy is often used a strategy to lobby politicians and drive policy that benefits other investments while avoiding most taxes.
Nobody voted people like Bill Gates to have such a massive influence over media and institutions via "donations".
If you knew anything about NGOs and politics you wouldn't simply go for "They're asking for or donating money so they're obviously awesome, their intentions are great and it's a net positive".
Calling skepticism reflective is like saying that if you think your company doesn't have your best interest at heart like it says you're being paranoid.
>Philanthropy is often used a strategy to lobby politicians and drive policy that benefits other investments while avoiding most taxes.
Forbes estimates that Gates would be a trillionaire if it weren't for his philanthropy. Perhaps some philanthropists pursue the strategy you describe, but it's unreasonable to assume this is their strategy by default.
>Nobody voted people like Bill Gates to have such a massive influence over media and institutions via "donations".
In a free society, not everything people do needs to be authorized by the government. I believe that Gates has sincere concern about the well-being of people in the developing world, so it doesn't particularly bother me when he lobbies on their behalf.
Insofar as cynicism is justified, it should be easy to provide concrete and compelling evidence that Gates has bad intentions in his philanthropy. So why isn't there any such evidence in your comment?
Little, but largely impactful in certain circumstances
* money for health care
* education
* money to walk away from a bad job
+ money to hold you over for extended periods during hard times
After health and edu, your points do not apply. Filthy rich do not have jobs, hard times etc
And at least in Europe we have (mostly) low cost health and edu and we do not (mostly) get jealous about the rich
I'm French and, out of all the countries I've lived in (US, developing countries in South East Asia, China, ...) I have a hard time thinking of a country where there's more hatred for the rich than in France. So I'm not sure that the statement of Europeans not getting jealous about the rich tracks. If anything Americans seem to dislike their rich less.
Commissioned art and other things of little intrinsic utility plus occasional trappings of status are the discriminants for some. If you don't need these things, life is simpler and cheaper. It is nice to do things that aren't solely about advancing utility sometimes. Art is another good way to hide, transport, and increase wealth.
I'm not sure what you argument is here. But I world rather have inexpensive things that improve lives. There isn't a huge market for expensive things that improve lives. It are you trying to say you want rich people to spend their money trying to build things to improve lives? Some do. Why do you think we have star link, for example
Maybe in part, but you build an ISP (and then strong arm people into using it) because you want to control the data and the access. Especially when you clearly prioritize those things in your side jobs.
I've heard that it's even worse (better?) the more you go to the past. Bret Deveraux [argues] (https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...) that this is one reason why lots of farmers choose to stay in subsistence level, because there's not really better things they can buy anyway. So they just conserve energy and time (which some outsider may see as lazy) and focus on long term resiliency (through building horizontal and vertical social relationships) to ensure that no disaster may pull them down all the way to starvation.
The answer is out-of-topic because the question ask what is something that ordinary people do not know.They go on a tangent about perspective and power over society, but nothing listed was a thing that I do not know.
like
>Access. You now can just ask your staff to contact anyone and you will get a call back.
Funnily, my parents always call back within 60 seconds even midnight, while a certain someone get disowned by their kids.
>For a donation of $100k+ to his charity, you could probably play a match with him.
For a donation of 16k you can have a 1 on 1 zoom call with Keanu Reeves. He advertised this pretty well, so "ordinary people" should know this.
At this point, all the riches and riches are on SNS flexing their wealth, I don't think there is anything left that ordinary people just couldn't browse SNS and see what can you buy with those money.
Buying "things" really is the level 0 of wealth. What matters is that you don't have to sell your time for money, that alone changes your entire existence. Then you have access to better healthcare, education, seeing your kids grow, &c.
That's why a lot of poor people who unlock large amount of money go broke quite fast, they still think like poor people
Time is indeed a very major thing, but it’s more accessible than most realise - I am only marginally wealthy, high 7/low 8 figures, and that’s ample for me to not need to work for a living and live very comfortably. Frankly, once you have even $1M in free liquid capital, you are in the endgame, as money makes money far more efficiently than labour. I spend perhaps 20 hours a year farting around with our finances, place some bets, and that’s it. I decided to go full on idle-rich when I was still practically a pauper, and have grown my worth significantly since.
Perhaps my sample pool is skewed, but the billionaires and centimillionaires I know live pretty modest lives in general - yes, they fly first class, stay in the best hotels, and all that jazz, but they’re unpretentious, and you wouldn’t know them from the upper middle class family sat at the next table. In fact, one I know regularly gets weird looks because he’ll be in some elite country club in his coffee-stained slacks and threadbare jumper - but there’s the rub - he doesn’t care. The guy who looks rich is probably up to his eyeballs in debt. The guy who looks like the janitor probably owns the place.
I think the single biggest thing wealth buys is not giving a shit what other people think. You don’t have to play status games when you know you’re the big dog in the room, even if nobody else knows it. I mean, I take perverse joy in showing up at places looking like I just crawled out of a gutter, because I know it doesn’t matter - my money is good.
I'm not your level wealthy, but I don't work, live comfortably, and I'm happy.
I prefer not to eat at expensive restaurants, but I enjoy restaurants that serve good food. I don't really want to fly to an expensive city and spend lots of money. I'd rather spend time in nature, hike, try to ID plants, and spend time with my wife and our animals.
Yeah, that’s pretty much our schtick too - we live off grid in the boondocks of Portugal, and our idea of a holiday is to go spend a month hiking somewhere or other. Spend my days hauling gravel and digging pits. It’s good.
> In fact, one I know regularly gets weird looks because he’ll be in some elite country club in his coffee-stained slacks and threadbare jumper - but there’s the rub - he doesn’t care. The guy who looks rich is probably up to his eyeballs in debt.
This is so strangely true.
I arranged a dad's dinner once, and we had a drug dealer there. Stereotypical hard man, wife dressed in branded clothes, fancy car, very obviously not in the line of business that he pretended. Trying extremely hard to flash how he used the private airport.
Seated with him was an actual billionaire, one whose family made their money a while back so you wouldn't know if you hadn't come across it before, like me. This guy just behaved like a normal middle class dad. Dressed like everyone else, ordinary SUV. No flashy moves.
Other two I know in that class are also just ordinary. No supercar, just a Merc or upper end car. They send their kids to private schools that ordinary top 5% people can afford, but no big arm movements.
This could be true but it depends on the person. Marc Andreesen is a billionaire and he wears Rolexes quite prominently. In fact a lot of rich people wear Rolexes lately.
Anyone on a programmer's salary should be able to get to low 7 figures in a decade, and better in 2 decades. In fact I'd go further and say that if you're on a six-figure salary you really must do it. We can't be sure our privileged position will continue for too much longer.
lol, lmao even... Most devs aren't even making 100k a year, even in the US the median is at like 120k.
Let's say you make 100k a year in Berlin, you're already in the top 1% so "accessibility" is out of the equation at that point, that's 4.8k net. Let's say you manage to invest ~60% of your salary, that's about 3k a month, 36k a year. Now let's say you get 8% return per year (which you won't), you're barely above 500k after 10 years.
So yeah sure, if you're in the top 1% to begin with, and live on what basically amounts to your local minimum wage while investing everything else, you can get to 1 million after 15 years or so...
Ah, and don't forget the tax man, he'll take his 20-30% cut on your million.
Sorry but you're completely delusional if you think literally "anyone on a programmer's salary" can make 1 million in 10 years. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I'm not saying you didn't do it, I'm just saying it's not "accessible", nor the norm, nor representative of the vast majority of devs.
The median software engineer salary in Europe is under 60k euros, which is £50k. Show me how you make 1m on a 60k euros salary in 10 years, even if you paid 0 income tax and invested every single cent with an average 8% annual return you'd still be under 1m.
> Anyway, stay poor, I literally don't care.
Looks like you can't buy your way out of arrogance
8% is an awful return in today’s markets. 30% is eminently achievable with foresight and an appetite for risk. I started investing a decade ago with about £100k, as that was all I could afford to risk, and have a return of between 20% and 200% year to year. Shit, you’ll get 15-20% cash-on-cash just running an Airbnb, which is what provides our day-to-day living income.
Cool, do you know about statistics and survivor bias ? If it was that easy why isn't everyone a millionaire ? Why doesn't everyone make 20-200% per year ?
If you can guarantee 20-200% of return per year consistently over 10-20 years go to wall street they'll pay you millionS per year to work for them
There is a big gap between "I'm in the top 1% earners and lucked out in the market" and "Literally every software engineer can make 1m in 10 years".
People on huge salaries live paycheck to paycheck, spend money on ridiculous cars, and live in huge houses full of junk that they bought stuff on credit. What we're saying is, instead of that, save a large proportion of your salary so you can retire early, and even if you don't choose to do that, be in control of your future.
Yes, I understand statistics and survivorship bias - I’m a mathematical physicist by training. I’m also a pretty average schlub.
Most people aren’t wealthy because they don’t even try, and instead run on a treadmill until they drop dead.
I have no interest in going to work on Wall Street or anything similar.
My entire investing philosophy is basically based on this site. There is constant signal here on what will be big in 5-10 years, and all that’s required is that you get in before the press start talking about it, too.
A $10k investment in NVDA 10 years ago is worth $2.6M now - and if you were paying attention 10 years ago, when CUDA was fairly new and shiny and rapidly gaining mindshare, you would have noticed that they were inevitably going to own the ML/AI space, and that this shit was going to be huge.
This is also why I said $1M, not $100k - because I have managed exceptional returns - but with 10x the starting capital even moderately good returns can grow rapidly. I’ve also bet on some absolute lemons where I’ve lost every last red cent.
Either way, it seems that many would sooner be bitter than do something to improve their situation, which is sadly very common, and again, why not everybody is a millionaire.
Stuff I didn’t understand, in short - biotech, mostly. I can’t even remember their names, which kinda underscores why they were bad bets. Fortunately small stakes, and at least they’re a tax write-off against some of the gains.
Salaries in Europe are much worse than in the US. (I'm told for the best India pays better than Europe - though India is skewed by a lot of bad coders not making much). In US just maxing out your 401k for 15-20 years will do it (depending on your company match), and you still have far more than the average income left over. So if you live like the average person and save that difference as well 10 years seems doable.
That said I'm not sure I'd recommend it. It can pay off for some, but the future is unknown. I've been to funerals for several people who didn't live to 65. Your body starts declining as you get older so a lot of active things really need to be done young if you do them at all. Maxing a 401k seems like a good plan and then spend the rest today - you should still have a nice retirement if you live that long, but you can enjoy life now.
If you don't like the above, religion offers an afterlife if you choose the right one. However they agree choosing the wrong one won't... Good luck choosing.
Well - there is an alternative take. Whisper it... but we don't actually need to have ultra rich people in our society. They serve no purpose that normal rich people don't, and arguably introduce distortions that are profoundly corrosive.
They are decidedly a result of the taxation system of a country. The country decided they wanted to have this class of people to exist. (The degree of) Wealth inequality is always a product of society.
Public wealth vs private wealth. Trump has correctly identified that rising public debt is a problem, but not that the missing liquidity is trapped in his own class's pockets.
a) by disproportionally tax the poor vs. the rich. In the United States, "42 states tax the top 1 percent at a lower rate than the bottom 20 percent, while 46 states tax the top 1 percent less than the middle 60 percent of earners." https://media.itep.org/ITEP-Who-Pays-7th-edition.pdf
b) by using the taxes to disproportionately benefit the upper income brackets, e.g. by investing more in universities than schools, or infrastructure in wealthy neighborhoods than poor neighborhoods (both true for the US).
I guess I was just thinking about federal taxes. As long as I can remember, even when I wasn’t making much, I remembered state being less and I didn’t may much attention to it.
Looking into it more, I was ignoring sales tax and some of those other, as they are more indirect, but consumption taxes will hit harder for those with less… it’s just not as easy to quantify.
Looking at big more it seems like the split between federal/state taxes for the bottom 20% may be 20/80, while for the rich it’s flipped at 90/10.
While all this is interesting, and has opened my eyes a little in this area… I would still stand by the latter half my original statement. The wealth is created elsewhere before taxes even come into the picture. The local taxes can hit a point of being very low impact long before someone hits the 1% or is considered wealthy, and that isn’t turning anyone into a billionaire.
In the spirit of engaging in open conversation to try and broaden my mind and understanding, may I say that I feel your statement "The tax systems doesn’t create wealthy people, it just doesn’t cut their legs out from under them" begs a question: What is it that creates wealthy people?
I think that there are a few things that are needed for lots people to become wealthy (of course, the ability to exact physical violence on others can enable a few to become very very wealthy as well).
1) Property rights that are equally enforced. That you have important friends shouldn't give you the ability to take my business.
2) Liquidity. There needs to be mechanisms that enable investment.
3) Civil infrastructure & some sort of safety net. People who are frightened of what awaits their children, or them in their old age, or of sickness, are reluctant to invest. They will be happy to work themselves half to death, but even if they have enough money, they will be very very risk averse.
Is this what you think, or are there other mechanisms that you have in your mind?
Those things can create an environment to help create, grow, and maintain wealth. I'd say actually creating it requires producing something of value to society with enough scale and margin to make a profit. Typically it requires doing this consistently for decades. There are a few exceptions to this, but by and large, it seems to be how things work, at least under capitalism.
taxation or it's condoned avoidance/evasion does not create wealth or at least not to the same level as actual in-demand products and services, unless you believe that it is supposed to act as a filter between transactions by default rather than the standard accounting practice to tax after-the-fact.
I suppose this naiveté is a by product of swallowing the media's constant garbage about the reason Jeff Bezos (et al...) has a yacht is purely down to avoiding tax.
It's really curious that something as personal to people as smartphones don't have a rich-person equivalent the same way cars do. What is the McLaren of iPhones?
There's gold plated / jewel encrusted versions of phones or graphics cards [0] but that's just making things look garish for the people that want to look rich. But as far as I know there's no 'bespoke' phone manufacturer on the same level as Swiss watches or hand-built cars. No real reason either; with a watch, any performance has peaked years ago so the only thing that remains is design. Phones are mostly functional, although I suppose you could do something cool with the back side.
It’s remarkable how every market where Apple makes itself at home basically has no real luxury bracket anymore.
Almost every visible accessory or piece of functional equipment has luxury models that may be only slightly functionally better (sometimes not even better, sometimes actually worse) but also charge massive margins.
Not so much with phones, tablets, or laptops. It’s as if the world has collectively decided that you simply can’t beat Apple, which astoundingly in the meantime completely ignores the luxury market. Even if you charged $50K+ per unit—I’m sure Samsung and every other maker would love to charge exorbitant prices for end-game devices—you’ll make a fool of yourself: iPhone will objectively be more premium, work smoother, have all the high-end apps, etc. There’s no choice but to tighten your belt and thin your margins to stay competitive.
I’m not sure how this (undoubtedly impressive) achievement makes me feel. Maybe it’s the feeling of finally being able to afford one, or the ability to say “it’s a cute expensive toy, but it’s objectively worse for X and Y reasons”, but there is something about the Leicas and Ducatis of the world.
The problem was that technological advances made this a very tough market. Nokia used to have a separate marque called Vertu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertu) to serve this market. But rapid technological progress meant that next year's $300 phone is batter in most functional aspects as last year's $5000 luxury model, so even the very wealthy would probably prefer this year's iPhone 17 Air to last year's diamond-encrusted iPhone 16.
The market might get revived when the tech improvement flattens flattens. like they did for cars.
When I started earning much more money than I have had before (not “rich” money by any means - that’s not the point; but much much more than I grew up in or started my career with) I realised it’s not about buying things, it’s more about being able to pay for things without giving a thought if needed/wanted. That’s really a very relaxing or freeing feeling. (And they say money doesn’t bring peace :P)
what the super-rich can buy that the middle class can't isn't really things (except for luxury goods, which are meh), it's people (through services). you can buy someone to do anything that you want to be done (that can be done!) so you don't have to do it. nannies, companions, builders, killers, bodyguards, drivers, pilots, cleaners, house managers, lawyers, secretaries, etc. That's what you do with the money. You buy farmers to grow macadamia nuts on your hawaii estate to feed cows raised by more farmers so you can call your property a farm, get a tax break, and brag about the quality and freshness of the steak when people come over for dinner. and so on.
you can even buy people to make more money for you, so you don't have to do it yourself, either through your "family office" investment firm, or through venture capital. You don't have to do anything but ask for what you want and there it is.
Does that make a difference to people outside his personal circle, though? An extreme example of this is Bill Gates, spending billions to cure diseases. Maybe he’s only trying to buy his way into heaven, but I bet the people cured by his medicine couldn’t care less about his motivations.
I agree in the case of Bill Gates. Shatner, however, is just some Hollywood (reported) asshole. I do lose respect for a celebrity like that even if I'm not personally interacting with them.
I get it, I do. My opinion on Shatner was that he was a jerk to his coworkers a long time ago. I don’t follow him super closely, but most people chill over the course of 50 years or so. I do hope he has.
> There is literally nothing you can't buy except. Love. Sorry to sound so trite, but it is nearly impossible to have a normal emotional relationship at this level. It is hard to sacrifice for another person when you are never asked to sacrifice ANYTHING. Money can solve all problems for someone, so you offer it, because there is so much else to do. Your time is SOOOO valuable that you ration it. And that makes you lose connections with people.
That, and being surrounded by fawning yes-people, and the drugs?
In the worst cases (and there are a few, currently), you decide that you should be in charge of everything, democracy is a mistake, and that you are the person to destroy it.
Who has time for love, when there's so much ego to give.
tbf, I thought it was a brilliant demonstration of something missing from the list of things that wealthy people can buy: the adulation of the easily impressed...
No, because Batman isn't a real person with real constraints.
Sure, I mean, if you have a $1B, then you get to have a lab with gadget people making cool shit and you can buy a fighter jet and a personal submarine and you have the detective agency too.
But you don't get the rogues gallery of super villains. You don't get new knees every week. You don't get to save your local city, because the problems are mostly the problems that the people cause themselves. And solving all those problems makes you a tyrant, not a hero. And even then, the problems are the same we've had since before history.
This is why in the real world, we have philanthropy mostly aimed at education and the alleviation of extreme poverty and diseases as the main outlets for the billionaires. Because it's the only thing we think that works at all.
I guess, if you really wanted to be Batman, you could fund yet another study that would state how best to give away dollars. But, without even having to look, I know that there are a few dozen of them out there already and they all pretty much say the same thing: that it's muddy and hard to discern, but maybe if you squint, education and making sure people have food and shelter.
To be Batman, you already can do it. It's mosquito nets for the poor, it's giving that bum a $100 and an hour, it's volunteering with prisoners to get them to read, it's making sure your kids' classmates have a snack before the test, etc.
So yeah, the real world Batman is a boring stressed-out Mom that's active in the PTA, her church/community-center, and local politics. Real World Bruce Wayne is Steve Rogers before the serum.
I find GiveWells approach the most satisfying when I ask myself “how can I make my charity go the furthest”. https://www.givewell.org/ I also highly recommend Famine, Affluence, and Morality by Peter Singer, it’s a perspective changing book. Also, great comment!
Jim Simons did in fact fund Brookhaven national lab directly at one point. His foundations and friends continue to fund a variety of scientific endeavors. But we don't have too many scholar-turned-philanthropists around, unfortunately.
Government labs, not so much. But universities and independent research institutions, sure. For example, the Perimeter Institute is considered to be one of the top theoretical physics institutions in the world, and it exists because Mike Lazaridis made a ton of money from Research in Motion (aka BlackBerry) and decided that Canada needed a top tier theoretical physics institute.
I was part of the ATLAS collaboration at CERN. We had an annual collaboration meeting in Copenhagen, perhaps in 2012 or so. Poul Allen’s yacht was moored in the harbor, across from the venue. It as the high point of CERN hype, and we knew that he was a patron of the sciences. So a delegation (our spokesperson etc.) was sent with some ATLAS merchandise to greet him, and perhaps suggest a sponsorship of some student activities.
Allen was a uniquely generous person when it came to science, but historically, science is a gentleman activity for men og free time, so it surely happens.
Personally, the freedom to pursue my scientific curiosity is the only motivation to seek wealth.
If I by virtue of satisfying wealthy people’s interests in fundamental physics could sustain my life and research, I wouldn’t care about accumulating wealth for myself.
Generally its universities that are getting the money directly. Its mostly for big ticket items, especially buildings, and especially where they can attach their name to it. Like at Stanford its the "Gates Computer Science" building.
Other than that there are foundations that issue grants to individual researchers, e.g. Gates also has a foundation. There are others such as Burroughs-Wellcome, Clayton Foundation, etc.
The private foundations are generally very stingy with "Facilities and Administration" fees, which was in the news recently as the fight over NIH/NSF funding which can go in the 50-60% range. Private generally doesn't go over 15%, frequently its much less.
Having worked at a few 100~1000 person companies run by billionaires, this tracks.
Most of the difference in lifestyle is the quantity and quality of housing they can afford, and having people to take care of problems for them. But they ALL universally have messed up personal lives with multiple messy divorces, embarrassing affairs, NYPost Page Six appearances, etc.
The one thing you'd think it gives them is freedom, but they all pretty much end up working til they die so I don't know. I'm not sure if the money breaks something in their brain, or their broken brain is what leads them to chase the money. Likely some of both!
There's some level where you can afford 2-3 nice residences, flying private, and not lose your damn mind. I've seen some of the billionaire's lieutenants achieve this balance. Basically being able to be fabulously rich but anonymous. Like the Bill Murray quote about people who want to be rich & famous should try just being rich first.
I think these guys I've seen are probably in the bucket the reddit OP marks "Net worth of $30mm-$100mm". Adjust that upwards for inflation and also to account for many of these people being in VHCOL areas so maybe it's like $50-200mm.
>"What? You are old D. D.? But, hell's bells, you own a big slice of the company yourself; you ought to be able to do anything you like, rules or no rules."
>"That is not an unusual opinion, son, but it is incorrect. Rich men aren't more free than other men; they are less free—a good deal less free. I tried to do what you suggest, but the other directors would not permit me. They are afraid of losing their franchise. It costs them a good deal in—uh—political contact expenses to retain it, as it is."
>"Well, I'll be a— Can you tie that, Mac? A guy with lots of dough, and he can't spend it the way he wants to."
The way I’ve heard it, billionaires are generally not chasing money. They have some other mission/purpose that is driving them. If it was just about the money they would give quit.
>>The one thing you'd think it gives them is freedom, but they all pretty much end up working til they die so I don't know.
I was having this conversation about this colleague a few weeks back about another colleague we knew who made it big working at a start up. You would expect he has lots of free time and mental space at hand to do whatever he wants, instead it turns out he has to now worry about managing that money.
And its not exactly a easy job. Managing big money can be hard as any loss even a small percentage is a lot of money. And that begins to weigh heavily on you in form of stress as there is a lots at stake.
>>Like the Bill Murray quote about people who want to be rich & famous should try just being rich first.
Absolutely there is big difference between 'comfortably rich' and 'having to worry day and night for your money'. You would expect more of a thing make things awesome as you go, but as it turns out there is a counterintuitive aspect to this.
Plus announcing your success to friends and family can bring unexpected complications. People begin to think you owe them things, and they are entitled to it. And saying no can be quite tricky, and make you look evil.
> You would expect he has lots of free time and mental space at hand to do whatever he wants, instead it turns out he has to now worry about managing that money.
> And its not exactly a easy job. Managing big money can be hard as any loss even a small percentage is a lot of money. And that begins to weigh heavily on you in form of stress as there is a lots at stake.
A three-fund portfolio pretty much scales from $100 to $100M, probably more. Once you have enough money do whatever you want, you can do stocks:bonds anywhere between 20:80 and 80:20 and you'll be alright, and if not, there probably wasn't a reasonable choice you could have made with the information available.
If he's got enough to be set for life, and he's worried about market fluctuations, that's a choice.
> And its not exactly a easy job. Managing big money can be hard as any loss even a small percentage is a lot of money. And that begins to weigh heavily on you in form of stress as there is a lots at stake.
Only because the person "needs" to "have more". They could put it in TBills and never think about it again. And they'd be totally fine, still live a life of luxury.
It's only because the growth in money becomes a goal in itself, which is a trap.
This is pretty accurate.
I know a guy professionally worth probably $100M.
His name occasionally turns up in industry rags, and even in more mainstream business news once or twice.
However no photos have ever appeared in the stories. The only photo I can find of him online is his LinkedIn photo.
Within the industry his name can open doors, but out in public no one would recognize him and he can live a normal (extraordinarily wealthy) life.
I think much of human history (not just recent US history, but that's a prominent example on folks' minds these days) proves that the biggest differentiator that the wealthy can buy is complete immunity from any sort of legal consequences.
Even if you don't already live in a high-corruption society, you can either spend some of your wealth introducing that corruption (which pays dividends), or you can just go somewhere else that's already high-corruption and bribe your way into immediate permanent residence.
Live in a democracy? Just buy public opinion by leveraging your wealth into a highly-profitable propaganda network, which will also give you an appealing platform for opportunist would-be government officials, who will then owe you, making your bribes cheaper. Maybe you can even just directly blackmail or entrap them along the way, so you don't even have to pay.
Live in an autocracy? Buy enough weaponry and PMCs to insulate yourself or even rival the government itself, or just buy the autocrat's favor directly.
Live in an oligarchy? Psh, your work is already done. Just use the system as it's designed: to be exploited by your vast wealth.
Sam Bankman-Fried believed this, and it turned out not to be that simple. But it's very noticeable how the US is trying to set up a system of protected Party insiders.
But I'm curious what the answer would look like if every strata in it was not "things you can buy" but "things you can do with the money" ... if the "IMPACT" section was delineated at each level.
One of the things I envy the most about my rich friends is their capacity to be generous. They can materialize their compassion on a regular basis without having to balance their budget.
I'd like to see what that looks like at each of these wealth levels.
(One funny thing I noticed is that I have multiple friends with virtual personal assistants now, at middle class levels of weath/entrepreneurship... definitely not a rich man's thing anymore.)
Even wealthy in the US tend to have much less servants than they would have in the past. Labor is too expensive, and the large middle class has made automation just as good and sometimes better. Sure I could hire someone to turn on my lights - but the switch on the wall works well and isn't much effort (compare to the lamp lighter of the past which did work that would be annoying).
Note, I and, I assume, the parent commenter weren't talking about home automation.
"Virtual personal assistant" to me meant a computer program that could understand speech and carry out a limited set of actions based on that speech - the computer equivalent of a human personal assistant/secretary.
That has been getting much less common. My dad used to have "his secretary" do tasks like schedule is meetings and book travel - the secretary was a department secretary for a couple dozen engineers and was kept busy just serving those needs. Today I don't have a secretary for several hundred engineers. My computer is better at scheduling meetings than the secretary ever was. Go back 100 years and the rich would have hard far more servants than they would today because various levels of automation have replaced many jobs.
The right still have servants of various types of course. Right now "Virtual personal assistant" are too limited to replace humans. Since I cannot afford a human servant I'm hoping that changes. Time will tell.
I would love a virtual assistant that could handle the tasks a human personal assistant does. VA would be available 24x7, would perform consistently regardless of time of day/how long they've been running/awake, would know/ understand my particular habits/preferences.
Maybe there's some bespoke software firm that does provide such a service for rich-enough people. Of course it'd have to run mostly locally/on-premises - none of this cloud stuff/monetizing my behaviours to bump their revenues.
The rich can afford humans to do this job. While a lot of the jobs the assistant does would be easy to automate, the hard part is from the vague description of what they want to getting something acceptable. If I ask for "famous singer" do I need that singer, a cover band, or any band in that style, any live music, or a good DJ - depending on the situation any might be acceptable (and sometimes several of the above are not available at any price). Scheduling just the famous singer is easy - just send a calendar request and see if they accept (it is more complex than that, and odds are the singer isn't signed up for this service, but that is all details), but trying to figure out which substitute is available and acceptable is hard.
There are only 902 American billionaires*, but this 'Redditor' claims to know nine of them. The wording implies these were chance friendships. It is a big answer, but not a great answer.
People tend to stick together. Once you know one odds become higher that you get introduced to a few more. Billionaires like parties as much as anyone else, so if you are not an insane stalker and get to know one well they will invite you to parties just to have a group of friends and now you are vetted so the others will not stay away as much. Different people have different sizes of friend circles so breaking in is hard.
Brings to mind the famous Joseph Heller quote: "At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, 'Yes, but I have something he will never have … enough.'"
This is arguably not very scientific but if we didn't have the media fascination around the power and influence that billionaires carry, we would like come to accept that rationally it is a mental disease no different from Plyushkin's syndrome.
You won, you can provide for you and for your whole bloodline if you so choose. You can choose your adventure, go fully epicurean or fund Humanity impacting projects. Yet they keep going and going unable to exit the carrousel.
Fair my issue is not that there are no Joseph Heller's in the world, my issue is that due to the inherent power and influence, we as a society, have a huge reluctance in considering people like Bezos, Musk, Buffet, Slim, Arnault, as just suffering from some variant of a mental health hoarding disorder.
You were a fast collegiate-level runner, became a wealthy financial adviser, who now has three sons who are doing well in high school long distance running.
What do you do? You convince one of your old running buddies, who now coaches elite runners, to coach your son. The son sets the national high school indoor record for the 800m.
Son decides to go pro after graduating high school.
Then Covid19 hits. Access to outdoor 400 tracks is limited. What do you do?
You build an 8 lane 400m track with running surface to match the quality at the site of the Word/US track and field championships. Cost: ~$4M
You hire the best coaches for your kids. Coach needs a place to stay nearby - no problem, buy a townhouse for him to stay at. etc.
Sure, through sponsorships and adverts. But like all such things, it's an extremely limited number of people who have the right combination of talent, training, perseverance, looks/charisma and probably luck to get that amount.
But that's the thing, if you'd no longer need to think in money-constrained terms, then instead you'd just want to make something happen in the world. It doesn't need to have a financial return, because your finances would be solved already.
Suppose you have more than enough money for you and your family to live out their lives without needing to worry about that. Now that's solved, you can move on to what you actually want to happen in your life, such as helping your kids become pro athletes.
I'm sure taking the bronze or silver in the Olympics is a great talking point for a future as a lawyer or financial analyst, so the backup plan is in place.
Roger Bannister, the first person to run a sub-4 minute mile, did minimal training compared to modern day athletes.
from his wikipedia entry:
When asked whether the 4-minute mile was his proudest achievement, he said he felt prouder of his contribution to academic medicine through research into the responses of the nervous system.
absolutely, but let's just say the distribution is a bit skewed to making nothing from pro running ventures. It has an extremely bad effort to potential reward ratio.
By putting in the same level of extreme effort into any classicaly well paying profession you would highly likely become very rich and successful.
The whole response reads like a cheesed up, swaggered out, smug essay. It's so clearly trying to illicit strong emotional response. I read this years ago as a teen and ate it up. Wiser more adult me knows how garbage and fake the entire response is. Reddit is known for this.
It’s funny how emotional responses questions like this become on part of the people answering everything but the question. If some one asks in a sports forum what the best exercises are that pro tennis players do that novices don’t know about you wouldn’t expect the majority of answers being in the line of “Tennis players never experience true love! If all you have is tennis you’ll be depressed!”
Nah, money can buy pleasure, security, confidence, comfort... but happiness is not necessarily a consequence of that. Some rich people live a very unhappy life. I wouldn't trade places with them for their money.
CAN you be happy because you have money? Yeah, why not. WILL you be happy if you have money? No guarantees at all.
It always depends on the circumstances and the person but generally I would say that money can definitely buy happiness.
I think that sentiment is mostly cope by those less wealthy.
Sometimes the question is really asking something else.
In this case, it might seem to be "what trick can I use that ultra-wealthy use?" or "how can I be prosperous on a budnget" but it really is "what is it like to be rich?"
Yeah but I really wanted to know what rich people buy that I don't know about. The top answer - while vaguely interesting - didn't actually tell me anything I didn't already know.
I think the conclusion is probably that they don't buy anything we don't know about.
One thing I didn't quite realize is that they accidentally spend significant amounts of money. At a party I talked to someone who was like a financial coach for super wealthy people and he helps them clean up their shit. The way we might accidentally have a running $50/mo subscription for something we don't use any longer, they might have a $500/mo club membership they never go to. Or prebooked vacation rentals they don't visit, or maintenance on cars they don't use, etc.
If you're over 100m net worth and get 5% returns, you get over 400k/month income on capital. At that point it might not be worth your time and attention to save $50 or even $500/mo if it takes any effort.
Exactly, to use the same math from the linked comment, it's less like comparing $500/mo and $50/mo and more like comparing $500/mo for the high net worth folks to $0.05/mo for someone making a more average salary.
You could have a single part-time minimum wage job and you're not going to waste your time worrying about $0.05/mo. 60¢ a year? Please.
That's easy - experiences. This is what many rich pay their last dime for. You can get much better experiences than they pay for, for much much much less.
Going for an exotic tropical beach location? Well they normally stay in sterile 5* bubble which is boring beyond belief and very unauthentic. You can go ie to Seychelles or Bali, live with locals in cheapish airbnbs, swim on same beaches or go to same restaurants they do, if you want, or even better eat with locals too. You can dive on same spots, kite surf on same spots etc. You will remember such vacation much more than they will do.
Or another typical one - skiing holidays. You can go ie to Verbier or Chamonix and ski next to kings, princes or industry moguls on same slopes they do, use same lifts, but you can ie go of piste for some extra fun. Sure afterwards you can only go to public spa but that may be better equipped than their private one. Or you can paraglide over them (on your own, not with paid instructor). And so on and on...
I know you can outmatch them only on specific aspects of those experiences, but that part is rather easy. Rich play their game of life in general very safely, so you can have way cooler things if you take some risks, and invest time into learning how to get best out of travels and adventures. Rich generally pay others to figure these out for them, and then of course such service is not well tailored to specific personality and expectations as much.
I lived in Southeast Asia for years and explored countless beaches at price points all across the spectrum, and while I understand what you're saying and agree to some extent, there are still experiences only money can buy.
Example 1: the overwater bungalow in the Maldives where I could watch fish swim under a glass table and step right off the balcony into the reef to join them.
Example 2: the stupidly expensive hotel in Laos where my wife and I were the only guests one night, so we got to enjoy a tropical sunset at our private pool bar with our private orchestra playing just for us. (The GM, who dropped by for a chat, told us a honeymooning couple last year had dropped six figures to buy out the place to do the same.)
Not really, ie that Maldives bungalow - I had exactly same experience in Mabul island for example, with 0 snobbishness that luxury inevitably brings (and is disgusting for me personally). Literally watching manta rays under my feet while eating breakfast. Kids would come on their dhingy and sell fresh coconuts right from water. All for peanuts.
Very similar experiences can be had in ie Togian islands in Sulawesi. And I could go on. Not everything is yet spoiled for rich.
As said its not full end-to-end experience, ie getting there in economy flight class instead of direct private jet is... well different, but the gist of adventure and reason why actually travel there can be easily matched, or surpassed. While leaving much more intense trail of memories and experiences with locals, which is what you are left with at the end. Instead of having everything served on plate like a clueless baby, you discover and 'fight' for your own adventures. And while paying 1-10% of price rich living next door paid.
Coming back from such vacation makes it feel like it lasted massively longer. 2 weeks feel like a month at least, 3 like few months. 3 months in India & Nepal spent in such way felt, and I am not joking, like decades spent traveling. A very surreal and profoundly enjoyable feeling, when memories of life back home feels like memories from previous life before one reincarnated.
With all due respect, you're showcasing some serious reverse snobbery yourself here, since you're basically claiming at your "authentic" travel experiences make you superior to those "disgusting" luxury tourists paying for their experiences.
But I'll throw you a bone: it goes both ways. I've had equally memorable experiences doing things like sitting with a couple of farmers on the floor of a jam-packed 3rd class train carriage in Thailand, sharing a bottle of Maekhong and watching the rice paddies go by. And commuting to work with canal boats in Bangkok barrelling down the klongs at ridiculous km/h was much more fun than taking a taxi, as long as you didn't bonk your head on a bridge or slip and fall into what's basically ripened sewage.
In theory, these rich people can do all of those "genuine" experiences too - and the lesser famous ones probably do? - but especially kings and the like are so valuable that they can't go to "normal" places anymore, for security and safety reasons. Rich people and their families are prime targets for kidnapping and extortion.
That's European rich though. If you're American rich, you're Reed Hastings who co-founded Netflix, so you can buy up a ski resort in Utah for you and your pals so you don't have to ski with the poors.
Powder Mountain (Reed Hastings' ski resort) has lift tickets available for about $100-150, in-line with most common ski resorts in America (about the same price as Hunter Mountain in New York, for example, the place everyone in the area takes their family).
If he wanted to not ski with the poors he would do as rich people already do and go to Deer Valley.
Although last I heard Powder Mountain was pivoting a bit to an premium resort kind of deal, same kind of thing Windham Mountain in NY is doing. Still, neither are pricing out normal skiiers yet, they're just edging in to "do you have more money than sense? dump some of it in this overpriced 'mountain club'" territory. If I had Reed Hastings money I wouldn't bother buying one of them up, I would just fly in to any of the existing nice ones with better terrain and facilities than Powder Mountain (or Windham) have.
Chamonix and ski next to kings, princes or industry moguls on same slopes they do, use same lifts, but you can ie go of piste for some extra fun.
This makes no sense to me. First of all Chamonix is hardly what I'd consider a 'rich' people ski resort. You're far more likely to be skiing next to a broke ski bum than "kings, princes or industry mogul". But beyond that, why can't the rich people ski off piste? In fact the rich people have the option to decide on a whim to take a helicopter to the really nice off piste runs and do 7 runs in a day if they feel like it, while you and I can only do one since we have to walk up. They can also travel to some of the finest skiing in the world, do two quick runs, decide the snow wasn't great and then just chill at the hotel bar and fly home early, knowing that it doesn't matter because if they want they can just come back in a few weeks.
Rich people can (and do) do all things you do, but they can also do a bunch of additional things that you and I cannot hope to do.
> Title: What do insanely wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about?
> Text: I was just spending a second thinking of what insanely wealthy people buy, that the not insanely wealthy people aren't familiar with (as in they don't even know it's for sale)?
The comment just plain and straight doesn't answer the question being asked.
It's kinda amazing how much more it is upvoted than comments with relevant answers. Maybe because emotions from dreaming of what it's like being rich (that's what it actually goes about) are so strong, the interpretation of the question is getting bent towards experiencing them.
I think this could be super unpopular around here, but here goes:
This is a symptom of societal unfairness. In this case there are different ways to react, but this is one of them. Tennis isn’t oppressing anyone, so no one is getting emotional about the pro tennis players knowing all the tips.
But the story since the 70s has been that you can have anything you want if you just work hard enough and are skilled enough (particularly in North America and the UK). Which means that if you don’t have something you want, then it is no one’s fault but your own.
Except in realty there are a whole host of external factors that influence once’s ability are accrue nice things.
It’s hard to reconcile these two things in our minds. We don’t have any narrative except the current one. So either we accept that we’re simply not good enough, or we accept things are broken with no solution. The former is often the most emotionally tolerable.
So when people see people with more than them, they don’t think, “good for them, we all choose how much we want to work for and I’m happy at my level”. Instead there is a collision of irreconcilable thoughts, and what comes out is, “they’ll never know what true love is”.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 385 ms ] threadI wake up every day with my best friend. We have been together for so long, we have regularly similiar thoughts on things.
If i even want to know this, i want to hear the real people using their money in a way that i'm envy.
There was a documentary on netflix about a guy who was diving in the ocean in front of his house and befriended an octopus.
Besides this story (its well made), i had the feeling this person made it. Beautiful house, self care routine and the opportunity (which he actually uses) to use the ocean every day.
That isn’t true for your local plumber.
As an example, there’s a culture among what people refer to as "old money" families in the US northeast (with generational wealth from long ago), wherein they tend to avoid seeming outwardly wealthy or really talking about money at all…generally aiming to project an unpretentious vibe, eschewing designer clothes and driving 20 year old Volvos, but still spending vacations at long-owned family getaways worth tens of millions, flying first or charter, and send their kids to specific, expensive schools to socialize with others of similar backgrounds.
The next generation are mostly good people. They're involved in politics at the state level and have some philanthropic organizations that really do good work with zero strings attached.
The grandkids, who all have known nothing but having immense wealth are garbage humans. They're entitled, awful, mean spirited assholes. Every. Last. One. They frequent local businesses, and the number of times I've heard, "don't you know who I am" is astounding.
The business mostly runs itself at this point, but I genuinely fear for the future in this area. There's already undercurrents of the family using its connections to bail out one of the grandkids when he was drunk driving. I believe the first murder will happen within the next decade.
The grandparents would be absolutely horrified if they saw what their family was turning into.
I wonder if they somewhat expected it. The 'third generation curse' is a widely known effect. Question is whether there is anything that could have been done to avoid it.
I want to give my kids just enough so that they would feel that they could do anything, but not so much that they would feel like doing nothing.
I feel like Elon is finding this part out the hard way lately.
- schedule beauty appointments to fix how you look
- go on coaching sessions to increase your confidence and how you socialize
- take people out on dates without thinking "oh that's a bit expensive"
- buy dating coaches who understand the psychology behind dating and successful relationships
- buy therapists to heal your past traumas
Love is still not guaranteed, but you can do a lot to increase your odds.
To me, that is not “buying love.” I buy so I don’t have to do any work.
Pretty low dude.
But getting coaching, or thinking of attractiveness as a problem to solve, optimise and streamline ? This is where I object.
Why?
This whole “money doesn’t buy happiness” is pure grade copium for poor.
“You can have all the money in the world, but I have my dear one”
The life of the rich, other than status, is very much like the life of upper middle class. The same phones, the same digital entertainment, the same appliances in their homes.
We have very few items for the rich to buy. Honestly, it is a problem it breaks incentives and it drives the rich more towards status goods which help no one since they are zero sum.
We should have expensive products which actually improve lives.
If you rent a $10m house you pay $500k a year for it. With 50% tax you'd have to earn $1m a year to pay the rent.
If you own a $10m house you pay no rent, and have to earn $0 a year to live there.
That includes everyone who filed a tax return from the kid working at McDonald’s to Warren Buffet.
Not sure what you’d call a comfortable life but a single mom making $72,000 per year would be struggling in many major cities.
So all those people who sold $100M businesses are included in that $72,000 figure.
The comment I replied to referenced a “wealth cap” and “redistribution” so “everyone could have a comfortable life”.
My point is that take to an extreme of equal redistribution to everyone, people would end up in a barely comfortable position.
Crypto ain't it, though. Even the better-scaling blockchains still don't scale very well. I've heard of a few different mesh-network currency projects, and I wonder if any of them could scale by essentially giving each user their own blockchain. However, in a mesh-network currency, you still have to find a conversion path with enough capacity, and pay a fee at each step, so maybe that's not it either.
Money is only valuable because we decided it has value. It can’t really do anything for you except be spent. It isn’t like a log, which could be burned, or ground into paper, turned into a weapon, etc
People already choose that their government money is worthless, e.g., the people of Venezuela and Russia. They will risk prosecution to move their wealth into assets valued in dollars or euro's. Even in the dollar and euro zones, people use other technologies for storing and exchanging wealth. Most wealthy people don't store their wealth directly in dollars already.
The value of government money is based on expectations about the future behavior of the government. This is at least a little better than being arbitrary or a collective delusion, in the short term. There are already ways to bet against it if you want.
If the government requires taxes to be paid in dollars, that sets a "floor" on the value of a dollar as a medium of exchange - for most people in the US living a "normal" life, you have to acquire some amount of dollars throughout the year, under penalty of jail/loss of property (property tax). Then, since you already have 300m+ consumers in a massive market using the currency, odds are you'll use it too.
The only way you'd truly render dollars worthless is through government action or malfeasance; the fictional scenario where every person on earth not only agrees dollars are worthless, but also agrees to forfeit all property in the US, all employment in the US, and interests in any US financial holdings is quite a few steps beyond the point where "the people just decide to rebuke the dollar's lack of backing".
That's more like saying "Dollars are worthless in a scenario like Fallout or The Road", rather than making any relevant point about government efforts to maintain fiat currency.
In the original scenario of "people decide dollars are worthless... nothing the government can do", my point was that the government has a lot of levers to pull to backstop value, albeit at a far lower level than today's dollar.
The dollar wouldn't become worthless, but it would become worth 2% less per year.
What you say is true of Bitcoin though, since there's so little debt denominated in Bitcoin.
"if we all decided dollars were worthless" does a lot of heavy lifting
Consider the following scenario:
If everyone except one person decided that dollars were worthless then on day one everyone would think that the one person accepting money must be insanely stupid. That person now has all the worthless money.
Turns out, money is created through contractual obligations that mandate the acceptance of money in equal amount to the created quantity. Everyone is now indebted to that person.
People who can't fulfill their contractual obligations must go and declare insolvency. The person with all the money offers a single dollar for all the assets that this person owns, since that person owns all the money, there isn't a second dollar to go around to compete with him.
After spending his first dollar, the economy now has one dollar representing the entire worth of the economy. The next insolvency will be auctioned off for two dollars, four dollars and so on.
What I'm getting at here is that "if we all decided that dollars were worthless" implies the abandonment of the rule of law, which makes the statement significantly less interesting. You can do a lot of things in a failed state. Abandoning the currency is one of the least interesting ones.
There was no way to get to a smartphone without cumulatively trillions of dollars of investment in silicon, software, network rollouts, and so on. A person with 100 billion in 1998 could not have bought one despite it being a decade away for the entire population.
The very wealthy cannot get things that are that special and it’s actually pretty amazing. Warren Buffet has called out several times that he lives like a regular middle class American and the main exception is flying private, but if were forced to choose he would dump the jet over the iPhone.
Oh? What d'you call this, then? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator
Now, granted, most very rich people would probably not have _wanted_ one of these.
Even just 30 years ago the most a billionaire would have were staff who would find information (at a far slower speed) from large libraries and copies of broadcast TV and most films available relatively quickly (perhaps even same day)
A mobile phone today is a world away from Dick Tracy's radio watch, or even a nokia 3210 on a digital network in a western city
There might be reasons for high prices, like costly manufacture, but no one is going to refuse to expand their market by 10000x if they are able to bring costs down.
Maybe the super rich should take up training LLMs as a hobby.
So... More plus influence.
I think the only thing listed that people with less money don't really "know about" is how much perspective changes with staff. You know people have people, but not necessarily how it changes things.
I'm on the very low end of that - I run a small DevOps consultancy and can, now employ a few people in low cost countries, and though I've managed large teams before, having unilateral ability to set people to work on things because I want them is a game changer, and it's hard to get used to asking for things instead of doing them.
The rest feels like things everyone knows, if not directly then from TV and movies.
They have Miele appliances, but having "same appliances" doesn't make justice to the fact that there are deeper differences. Yes, they're status goods, but I think one's life might greatly improve by being very wealthy - even if your life can still be shitty as a wealthy person
Nothing but good stuff to say in coming up on 10 years of use.
Would not recommend this to anyone who can't easily test them in a showroom and even then not really... They do the actual job well, but their UX makes me angry every day.
The biggest difference more money would make is that I could have someone else deal with those issues.
Firmware is an important part of the appliance. An appliance with Frigidaire hardware and third-party firmware is counterfeit.
Maybe the same thing happened with your Miele appliances?
The oven is mediocre at best, my Annova Precision Oven is much much better, much better control of temperature, heats up much faster, has more features, infinitely cheaper.
The range hood needs to be repaired because it makes a lot of noise. Repair of Miele appliances are super expensive.
The only appliance I'm impressed with is the wine cave but that's a white labeled Liebherr
The very wealthy are going to fly private. Upper middle class could swing this on a case-to-case basis, but not regularly and especially if not if they frequently travel
Other than that, the main difference is the very wealthy having a mentality of getting people to "take care of problems" to a much larger extent. For example, routine tasks like cleaning. An upper MC person might have a weekly cleaner at best. But they still have to load/unload dishwasher, do their own laundry, etc. A very rich person has a full-time housekeeper.
The very rich have circles of people they rely on to take care of problems. Like having "a lawyer" who they go to for and have known for years. There seems to be much more of a sense of personal relationships / loyalty. Almost like the old feudal oaths.
At the higher levels, there's a "family office" which takes care of such things. All bills go there, and anything that needs to be done, they take care of. The first big one was the Rockefellers', which was in Rockefeller Center in New York. (That turned into a business. Now it offers Being Rich as a Service.)
(The people I've known with serious money made most of it themselves, and didn't need a family office. Except for one married couple who blew through 8 figures and went broke.)
[1] https://www.maisonbenjamin.com/familyoffices
These are between multi-family offices and scams targeting new money. (The intersection between the best hospitality folks you can privately hire and the best money managers is roughly zero. Consolidating those functions makes no sense unless someone cannot afford them.)
That's a good way to look at it.
Now Ryan Bingham doesn't command any particular status or wealth, but he makes a living firing people on behalf of other companies ("Concierge firing-as-a-service"?) and he leads a nomadic lifestyle that many of us would find completely intolerable.
His one lifelong dream is to earn 10,000,000 Frequent Flyer miles and hold the special Unobtanium card from American Airlines. [SPOILER WARNING] He achieves this during the final flight of the film, and when he dials the number on the back, he comes to realize that this is his unique number and there is a specially-assigned staffer waiting by the phone to personally take his call.
I can envision this sort of revelation as the experience of someone who comes into money and suddenly finds their needs being personally met by a concierge or family office.
For small values of "personally". I once visited a rent-an-office place which had a live receptionist. She had a phone with about thirty line buttons. Each time she answered a different line, she gave a different company name.
https://www.aaprco.com/charter-a-private-car
Of course, if you’re really rich, you’d have your own. ;)
So does any middle class family living in a developing country with high economic inequality.
The local economy pretty much depends on the influx of foreign money from the people climbing. A fit person would be physically capable of carrying their full load, but it simply isn't done because of the economic disparity between the foreign climbers and the local porters. I don't know if that was enforced by law or custom, but the presenter was quite clear that it's not really possible to climb without local porters.
On the mediocrity principle, I think this is how things worked in general. Necessary to the local economy.
My Filipino friend explained to me that back home, if you have more than a certain amount of money, it's seen as incredibly selfish not to employ people as housekeepers, etc.
I'd imagine that's true in a lot of places with income disparity and/or high unemployment numbers. It made a lot of sense to me.
Some places if you’re the only house on the block who mows their own lawn, you’ll be considered stingy or weird.
She told me the professor had a guy employed to open and close the gates for when he drove to work and came home in the evening. That's all the guy did. Full time job.
Sounded so preposterous at first, but after thinking a wee bit I came to a similar conclusion that the alternatives might be a lot worse. It was steady income, albeit not a lot.
It serves other purposes. That narrative is a convenient collective lie, full stop.
What is the current alternative? Are they any better?
When I was kid growing up (in Brazil), we had a live-in housekeeper. She moved to São Paulo from some poor rural area in the South of Brazil. As many people from poor rural areas, she was forced to drop out of school on 3rd grade to help her family.
If I remember it correctly, she was 21, 22 years old when she first moved in. The agreement was she would get minimum wage + regular benefits + free housing. She would work from ~7:30am until 3pm, get a break in the afternoon and then go to night school from 7 to 10pm. On weekends she was free, so she could either be out with her friends or coming along our weekend camping trips.
She worked with us for 5-6 years, finished school, moved out of our home when she got married. Had two daughters, the oldest one just finished college. I know all that because 30+ years later my mom and her still keep in touch.
Possibly stories like these are not the majority, but they were pretty common. Today, this would be unthinkable not because economic inequality has diminished, but because whatever we had that passed for "middle class" in Brazil got completely squeezed out by governments over the last 25 years.
I can tell you that here in the US, my somewhat upper middle class aunt used to clean homes part time. Husband was an engineer, she was a housewife, kids were away at school. Not the type of person with hobbies and such. Was a bit bored.
Not sure of the specifics but I think she pulled in a couple of grand a month cleaning. Pretty handy when you're putting two kids through college. Or so I thought. Thanks to you, today I learned it was all "a lie." ((giant eye roll))
It's not an uncommon side gig for bored suburban housewives. There are a few women in my middle class town that do it.
I don't think full time housekeeping, which seems more common in other countries, necessarily locks anybody into anything. Anecdotally I think it's a fairly common thing to do when getting an education. I also don't know that it's always low-paid, either, especially if it includes nanny duties etc.
Guilty as charged. I have the American mentality due to being raised here, and I would be horrified to hire a housekeeper or servant. The "well, it's better than nothing" argument, while true, feels icky and exploitative. "Better than nothing" is a terrible bar and a sign of a broken society, and I personally just don't want to be part of continuing that brokenness. Totally understand if someone grew up in a different culture, they likely have a totally different view on it.
And yea, I know there are other less visible areas in every product and service value chain where people are exploited and yet I am part of society. I don't have an answer or solution to this that is politically feasible.
Do you feel "icky" by going to a supermarket and having a cashier scanning your products? Do you feel "icky" by taking a taxi? How about by taking a public bus, train or plane?
Do you go to restaurants or bars? Do you feel "icky" about someone taking your order, cleaning up your table, pouring out drinks for you?
Do you have kids? Have you ever hired a babysitter? Do you feel "icky" about someone else being temporarily responsible for the well-being of your child?
> I know there are other less visible areas (...) where people are exploited and yet I am part of society. I don't have an answer or solution to this that is politically feasible.
I'm honestly more concerned about people who think that they should have "an answer to this" than all the exploitation that exists.
I can tell you what it's *not* the solution. Eliminating all sort of manual labor is *not* a solution. Eliminating manual labor will lead to even more isolation and atomized individuals. It will put us all in different bubbles and make us completely unable to relate to other people and it will make us even more susceptible to be defined by what we consume.
If you are part of a society, it will be better for everyone if you start participating in it. Instead of looking down on people whose work is not as valuable as yours (because that's what honestly your "feeling icky about it" seems to boil down to), look at these interactions as opportunities for mutual, voluntary help. If you think their work is worth more than what they are getting, tell them so and back it up with your generosity. There is no point in "feeling bad" about it.
You can, instead of paying for a housekeeper pay for machines etc. made in the country in question, thus creating technical jobs there that might develop people more than housekeeping does.
In the US (and Europe...) labor is expensive so it make sense to have technical people design machines.
Who know if or how long the above will continue, but it is still possible in many countries if you can get a job there.
On flip side he had to change 2 jobs because travel distance as ~20 miles but in term of duration it was 4+ hrs daily. And no such thing as peak hours there, day-in/day out, morning, afternoon, late night, week day, weekend, same worst possible traffic.
Any interaction with real world outside of home can wear people down specially the kind who keep multiple household helps. From traffic, to pollution, medical care, school admissions, doing groceries, shopping, parking and on and on.
One way to think is at absolute top level like senior most politicians, industrialist, CEOs, other types of super influential people, developed vs developing countries' lifestyle can match, but as one start moving down the ladder, the quality falls very rapidly in developing world and serious compromises can start just 2 step down from top.
Pfft... amateurs. I've solved the same problem by just living in filth.
That has more to do with owning business interests than wealth. The guy who owns a small chain of a mundane business, has stake in another business via investment, etc, etc, his social circle looks roughly the same.
Create expensive products which materially improve the lives of those with wealth? Align the incentives of the rich so that they don't spend on these zero sum status goods. Also incentivize the rich to get richer so that they can buy these products that make their lives better in a non-shallow way.
Work with incentives instead of against incentives.
There's yachts and fancy houses and supercars to buy for the rich. They make their lives better, in some way. A lot of people are employed to make those things.
I don't see how this helps anyone. If wealth were distributed more equally, those people would work on making the lives of everyone better, not just the lives of a small elite.
So now we're back to the ultra-rich where you need to first think about taxing dividends as income without hurting retirees, and second think about some wealth tax. It could be small like .2% on everything over 5M or something, but it would actually put some tax burden on the people you're trying to put it on.
Goods, yes. Services, fuck no. Look at the Four Seasons and Amangani yacht and jet programmes for a <$10mm example of the sorts of experiences wealth opens up.
The four seasons isn't materially better than the hilton next door. The rooms are basically the same, the fixtures at the four seasons are fancier, the bedding is prettier, some random furniture may be sourced from a different supplier. The four seasons will be in a location which has somewhat better views.
The four seasons has prettier and more attentive staff, and there are less "less well off" at the four seasons. And you get to brag that you went to the "four seasons" but it really isn't that much better.
It's almost all status.
If you want hotel employees to kiss your ass and pretend to respect you, then this is the place for you. But the quality of the room wasn’t noticeably better than other places I’ve stayed.
I will give you a good example of something that most upper middle class people can’t afford or at least can’t afford frequently.
Disney World VIP tours. My wife has family who are club 33 members and they gifted us a VIP tour as a wedding present. The tour guide drives you around to the different parks and walks you backstage through tunnels and hidden areas to get you the very front of any ride you want to go on.
I broadly agree with you on their hotels. But I’d note that Four Seasons doesn’t compete on room quality, but service. If you planned your stay perfectly they shouldn’t outperform. But if you forgot something, or need help with something weird, they have a habit of being halfway legendary. (Colleague left his suit at home. They had one made overnight. Concierge apparently knew a suit maker’s cell.)
I’m not comparing the hotels, I’m comparing their yacht and jet programmes.
Status signalling is mostly an upper middle class game—the truly wealthy tend to use their wealth to buy power or privacy.
Regardless, at luxury hotels, the rooms are nice, sure [^0], but you're mostly paying for top-tier service.
If you want to travel somewhere within the US where you _know_ your room will be tip-top and don't want to lift a finger, the Four Seasons/Ritz/St. Regis is it.
[^0] They do have some huge, amazing suites that you won't find at a Westin, though.
I think it would be more fair to say that the Four Seasons isn't materially better than the _Conrad_ next door. I've stayed in some amazing Hilton-branded properties, but also some terrible ones. I guess I am expecting the hotel brand to denote the _minimum_ level of comfort, and there are some Hiltons that truly drag along the bottom, where I'd be very surprised to find myself at a shitty Four Seasons (or Conrad, which is the HHG's next step up from a Hilton).
I have nothing bad to say and everything good about how they handled our stay. Whether it was worth the price is (as this whole topic is about) relative to your means. I would say that it was more than we would have paid, but now that we've experienced it it's on my radar as a reasonable value. Their signature "Butler" service was beyond amazing; traveling with my son is difficult at the best of times and they handled everything.
They essentially allowed me to have an actual vacation vice allowing me to handle a series of challenges and let the rest of my family have a vacation (which is the normal way things go).
Perhaps you also recognise this quote:
"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."
In what way for example?
In what why am I protective of rich people? Just by asking for what you mean?
https://g.co/kgs/tgHhdkD
You aren’t alone
Signalling Status plays a big role in group formation/group maintenance/social cohesion etc.
The larger groups grow, the more complex the group dynamics get, keeping groups of people together and preventing them from disintegrating is one of the most complex problem we face, given all the differences in culture, religion, language, class, personalities, ambitions, values, needs, intelligence, skill, education level, interests etc etc
A short cut frequently used (cause its easy) is using Leisure and Luxury (see Theory of the Leisure Class).
"So you like what I wear, where I stay, what I eat, who my friends are, what toys I have and want to be like me or hang out with me then do what I say". This works pretty well. In fact Veblen's prediction in Theory of the Leisure Class was that since Tech has a tendency to eliminate waste, tech would eventually eliminate the need for a Leisure/Status signalling Class that keeps large groups from unraveling.
But social cohesion of large groups is such a complex problem, society even today requires all kinds of Status Signalling to keep the groups together.
If you find ways to keep groups together without status signalling you are onto something special.
The people I know with a net worth over 10m do not display it. Why would they want to. It only has downsides and no upside. Same applies to other forms of status/rank/belonging.
(Not contradicting your points, merely adding to them.)
If you want to experiment with that, try to NOT match other people’s style AND radiate a deep sense of security/belonging/entitlement. Do not hide your (other) insecurities; those with status don’t have to hide their authenticity. This may sound like a contradiction at first, but you can develop an universal sense of belonging that remains authentic. You will be surprised which people will suddenly find you to talk with you, once you stop seeking their attention.
> AND radiate a deep sense of security/belonging/entitlement.
That's also signaling status.
"Don’t be so humble — you’re not that great" -- Golda Meir.
And of course:
"You cannot not communicate" -- Paul Watzlawick
We should strive to remove ourselves from these games as much as possible and not to lean into them as LVMH would like.
Rejecting such superficial signaling only enhances one's life, IMO.
Veblen goods are the most simplistic and superficial form of intentional status signaling and yes, the world would be much better off without them.
Other kinds of status signaling are more interesting and more subtle. If I talk about my weekend softball team, I'm not doing it to impress anybody, but it unavoidably does convey some things about my status.
It tells you I almost certainly have a car, I have leisure time, people like me enough to at least tolerate me on their team, that I have a few hundred dollars to spend on gear/fees, and that I have some basic level of physical coordination/strength/ability. It also strongly hints that I grew up middle class or higher because middle class+ kids are the most likely to have learned the game as kids and continued with it as adults.
Not sure how any individual or society could function otherwise, due to the limits physics places upon us.
This stuff isn't life, it's just the random trinkets we fill our lives with. Time is life. The rich can do with their time what they please.
We do. It's just that "wealthy" is far past the point of diminishing returns when it comes to buying high-quality expensive items.
No, we don't need to come up with things for the rich to buy just to fix their incentives. We should be asking ourselves how to decrease wealth inequality, not how to make it more fair to those on top.
I remember a few years ago Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was donating 99% to charity. The internet got very angry about it, based on flimsy reasoning: https://qz.com/564805/5-criticisms-of-billionaire-mega-phila...
Bill Gates has saved millions of lives through his philanthropy, and the internet is full of malicious rumors about him. Other billionaires who do far less good, but keep a lower profile, get much less hate.
A common meme on the internet is "if your intent was truly charitable, you wouldn't care whether anyone said thank you".
But this is a false dichotomy. Many people find the idea of charity appealing to some degree, but most of us aren't die-hard saints either. When we see the good deeds of others get devalued or even punished, that makes us less enthusiastic about doing good ourselves.
"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome." Punishing do-gooders is one of the most anti-social things you can do. On the other hand, praising do-gooders is a very cheap way to incentivize people to do more good in the world.
I believe that once you get to a certain level of wealth, you start caring more about your personal reputation than your material goods. Sadly, there is so much reflexive skepticism towards billionaire philanthropy at this point that it's not even clear to me whether doing philanthropy is reputationally net-positive.
https://lowendmac.com/myturn/02/0403.html
(Edited to add, another more detailed article: https://macfolkloreradio.com/be/)
People make this claim about a lot of software (Netscape being the poster child) but typically whenever I look into it, the nuanced answer turns out to be "Microsoft may have thrown it's weight around, but the product largely failed on it's own merits."
Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer for free with Windows, essentially destroying Netscape’s business overnight.
1) Browsers were destined to be a commodity, given the first browsers (like Mosaic) were effectively free, and even then it was clear that a browser would be as critical a component of a consumer OS as, say, a file explorer or a calculator.
2) Netscape simply was an inferior product compared to IE and other browsers like Opera (which survived despite IE being free and Microsoft's shenanigans, and is a thing to this day.)
The book of the battle - Competing for the Future - makes it clear how much of a mess Netscape was in internally
Essentially they had alternate code bases for every other version of the browser and we forever porting feature and bugs between the two (and often forgetting and so getting regressions)
Otherwise other billionaires will think: "If I get into philanthropy, people will take it as an opportunity to publicize un-flattering facts about me."
His actions since then have been far better.
The hate he gets now tend to be from people attacking his more recent actions. "Trying to cure malaria - clearly mind control" sort of stuff.
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Feeney
He gave away most of his fortune and required recipients not to reveal the source of the donation.I suppose that's one way to avoid the bad press :-P
NYT article(1):
..when asked what had driven him into such deep secrecy:
“I feel it’s my life,” Mr. Feeney said. “I’d be the last guy to tell a wealthy person what to do with their money. They’re entitled to do whatever they want.”
quote from his kid: "...he sheltered us from people using the money to treat us differently,” Leslie Feeney Baily said. “It made us normal people.”
when asked why he had chosen to reveal himself:
“A lot of wealthy people, they don’t realize they have the alternatives of spending the money for good,” he said. “If they knew it gives so much satisfaction, I wouldn’t have to persuade them."
(1): https://archive.ph/gLfLY
But that's not related to his philanthropy mostly. There's evil business stuff he actually did and there are some conspiracy freaks. Those would exist anyway. But I've never seen a significant number of people with criticisms because of the programs he enables.
Just the opposite. By engaging in positive-sum transactions, society as a whole becomes wealthier. That's how economic growth occurs.
Not everything is accurately seen through this nihilistic, conspiratorial power lens.
Philanthropy is often used a strategy to lobby politicians and drive policy that benefits other investments while avoiding most taxes.
Nobody voted people like Bill Gates to have such a massive influence over media and institutions via "donations".
If you knew anything about NGOs and politics you wouldn't simply go for "They're asking for or donating money so they're obviously awesome, their intentions are great and it's a net positive".
Calling skepticism reflective is like saying that if you think your company doesn't have your best interest at heart like it says you're being paranoid.
Forbes estimates that Gates would be a trillionaire if it weren't for his philanthropy. Perhaps some philanthropists pursue the strategy you describe, but it's unreasonable to assume this is their strategy by default.
>Nobody voted people like Bill Gates to have such a massive influence over media and institutions via "donations".
In a free society, not everything people do needs to be authorized by the government. I believe that Gates has sincere concern about the well-being of people in the developing world, so it doesn't particularly bother me when he lobbies on their behalf.
Insofar as cynicism is justified, it should be easy to provide concrete and compelling evidence that Gates has bad intentions in his philanthropy. So why isn't there any such evidence in your comment?
Those are called philanthropic charities - research institutes or the like. Some of the very rich have them.
Edit: the town I was born in had a Carnegie Library[1].
Edit 2: the point being that the very rich buy social status and respect.
1. https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/carnegie-libraries/
like
>Access. You now can just ask your staff to contact anyone and you will get a call back.
Funnily, my parents always call back within 60 seconds even midnight, while a certain someone get disowned by their kids.
>For a donation of $100k+ to his charity, you could probably play a match with him.
For a donation of 16k you can have a 1 on 1 zoom call with Keanu Reeves. He advertised this pretty well, so "ordinary people" should know this.
At this point, all the riches and riches are on SNS flexing their wealth, I don't think there is anything left that ordinary people just couldn't browse SNS and see what can you buy with those money.
That's why a lot of poor people who unlock large amount of money go broke quite fast, they still think like poor people
Perhaps my sample pool is skewed, but the billionaires and centimillionaires I know live pretty modest lives in general - yes, they fly first class, stay in the best hotels, and all that jazz, but they’re unpretentious, and you wouldn’t know them from the upper middle class family sat at the next table. In fact, one I know regularly gets weird looks because he’ll be in some elite country club in his coffee-stained slacks and threadbare jumper - but there’s the rub - he doesn’t care. The guy who looks rich is probably up to his eyeballs in debt. The guy who looks like the janitor probably owns the place.
I think the single biggest thing wealth buys is not giving a shit what other people think. You don’t have to play status games when you know you’re the big dog in the room, even if nobody else knows it. I mean, I take perverse joy in showing up at places looking like I just crawled out of a gutter, because I know it doesn’t matter - my money is good.
I'm not your level wealthy, but I don't work, live comfortably, and I'm happy.
I prefer not to eat at expensive restaurants, but I enjoy restaurants that serve good food. I don't really want to fly to an expensive city and spend lots of money. I'd rather spend time in nature, hike, try to ID plants, and spend time with my wife and our animals.
This is so strangely true.
I arranged a dad's dinner once, and we had a drug dealer there. Stereotypical hard man, wife dressed in branded clothes, fancy car, very obviously not in the line of business that he pretended. Trying extremely hard to flash how he used the private airport.
Seated with him was an actual billionaire, one whose family made their money a while back so you wouldn't know if you hadn't come across it before, like me. This guy just behaved like a normal middle class dad. Dressed like everyone else, ordinary SUV. No flashy moves.
Other two I know in that class are also just ordinary. No supercar, just a Merc or upper end car. They send their kids to private schools that ordinary top 5% people can afford, but no big arm movements.
> I am only marginally wealthy, high 7/low 8 figures
We must have a very different definition of "accessibility"
Let's say you make 100k a year in Berlin, you're already in the top 1% so "accessibility" is out of the equation at that point, that's 4.8k net. Let's say you manage to invest ~60% of your salary, that's about 3k a month, 36k a year. Now let's say you get 8% return per year (which you won't), you're barely above 500k after 10 years.
So yeah sure, if you're in the top 1% to begin with, and live on what basically amounts to your local minimum wage while investing everything else, you can get to 1 million after 15 years or so...
Ah, and don't forget the tax man, he'll take his 20-30% cut on your million.
Well first off £100 != $100 != €100
Sorry but you're completely delusional if you think literally "anyone on a programmer's salary" can make 1 million in 10 years. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I'm not saying you didn't do it, I'm just saying it's not "accessible", nor the norm, nor representative of the vast majority of devs.
https://www.levels.fyi/heatmap/europe/
The median software engineer salary in Europe is under 60k euros, which is £50k. Show me how you make 1m on a 60k euros salary in 10 years, even if you paid 0 income tax and invested every single cent with an average 8% annual return you'd still be under 1m.
> Anyway, stay poor, I literally don't care.
Looks like you can't buy your way out of arrogance
If you can guarantee 20-200% of return per year consistently over 10-20 years go to wall street they'll pay you millionS per year to work for them
There is a big gap between "I'm in the top 1% earners and lucked out in the market" and "Literally every software engineer can make 1m in 10 years".
Most people aren’t wealthy because they don’t even try, and instead run on a treadmill until they drop dead.
I have no interest in going to work on Wall Street or anything similar.
My entire investing philosophy is basically based on this site. There is constant signal here on what will be big in 5-10 years, and all that’s required is that you get in before the press start talking about it, too.
A $10k investment in NVDA 10 years ago is worth $2.6M now - and if you were paying attention 10 years ago, when CUDA was fairly new and shiny and rapidly gaining mindshare, you would have noticed that they were inevitably going to own the ML/AI space, and that this shit was going to be huge.
This is also why I said $1M, not $100k - because I have managed exceptional returns - but with 10x the starting capital even moderately good returns can grow rapidly. I’ve also bet on some absolute lemons where I’ve lost every last red cent.
Either way, it seems that many would sooner be bitter than do something to improve their situation, which is sadly very common, and again, why not everybody is a millionaire.
Also, edited nitrogen fixers. Haber-Bosch is going to be hard to sustain with environmental targets.
Oh, and DRI, same kind of reason, as coking coal is likewise going to fall foul.
I could be totally wrong, but that’s seemingly the drift of things, and where I have lately been placing my chips.
Went long on nuclear power as soon as AI started to take off, and there’s still ample headroom there too.
As ever, only invest that which you can afford to lose.
That said I'm not sure I'd recommend it. It can pay off for some, but the future is unknown. I've been to funerals for several people who didn't live to 65. Your body starts declining as you get older so a lot of active things really need to be done young if you do them at all. Maxing a 401k seems like a good plan and then spend the rest today - you should still have a nice retirement if you live that long, but you can enjoy life now.
If you don't like the above, religion offers an afterlife if you choose the right one. However they agree choosing the wrong one won't... Good luck choosing.
The tax systems doesn’t create wealthy people, it just doesn’t cut their legs out from under them.
a) by disproportionally tax the poor vs. the rich. In the United States, "42 states tax the top 1 percent at a lower rate than the bottom 20 percent, while 46 states tax the top 1 percent less than the middle 60 percent of earners." https://media.itep.org/ITEP-Who-Pays-7th-edition.pdf
b) by using the taxes to disproportionately benefit the upper income brackets, e.g. by investing more in universities than schools, or infrastructure in wealthy neighborhoods than poor neighborhoods (both true for the US).
Looking into it more, I was ignoring sales tax and some of those other, as they are more indirect, but consumption taxes will hit harder for those with less… it’s just not as easy to quantify.
Looking at big more it seems like the split between federal/state taxes for the bottom 20% may be 20/80, while for the rich it’s flipped at 90/10.
While all this is interesting, and has opened my eyes a little in this area… I would still stand by the latter half my original statement. The wealth is created elsewhere before taxes even come into the picture. The local taxes can hit a point of being very low impact long before someone hits the 1% or is considered wealthy, and that isn’t turning anyone into a billionaire.
I think that there are a few things that are needed for lots people to become wealthy (of course, the ability to exact physical violence on others can enable a few to become very very wealthy as well).
1) Property rights that are equally enforced. That you have important friends shouldn't give you the ability to take my business.
2) Liquidity. There needs to be mechanisms that enable investment.
3) Civil infrastructure & some sort of safety net. People who are frightened of what awaits their children, or them in their old age, or of sickness, are reluctant to invest. They will be happy to work themselves half to death, but even if they have enough money, they will be very very risk averse.
Is this what you think, or are there other mechanisms that you have in your mind?
I suppose this naiveté is a by product of swallowing the media's constant garbage about the reason Jeff Bezos (et al...) has a yacht is purely down to avoiding tax.
[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/graphics-cards/one-day-the-...
Almost every visible accessory or piece of functional equipment has luxury models that may be only slightly functionally better (sometimes not even better, sometimes actually worse) but also charge massive margins.
Not so much with phones, tablets, or laptops. It’s as if the world has collectively decided that you simply can’t beat Apple, which astoundingly in the meantime completely ignores the luxury market. Even if you charged $50K+ per unit—I’m sure Samsung and every other maker would love to charge exorbitant prices for end-game devices—you’ll make a fool of yourself: iPhone will objectively be more premium, work smoother, have all the high-end apps, etc. There’s no choice but to tighten your belt and thin your margins to stay competitive.
I’m not sure how this (undoubtedly impressive) achievement makes me feel. Maybe it’s the feeling of finally being able to afford one, or the ability to say “it’s a cute expensive toy, but it’s objectively worse for X and Y reasons”, but there is something about the Leicas and Ducatis of the world.
It was exactly the "expensive watch" model; priced absurdly high on the Veblen good theory. It didn't work.
The market might get revived when the tech improvement flattens flattens. like they did for cars.
That's quite enough actually.
you can even buy people to make more money for you, so you don't have to do it yourself, either through your "family office" investment firm, or through venture capital. You don't have to do anything but ask for what you want and there it is.
One famous chap who is nailing it is Shatner. Strive to be spreading joy like that guy, whatever your means.
Picard, Sisko (spelling), Janeway
I hope none of them are bad people IRL, they didn't give that impression on the little screen.
That, and being surrounded by fawning yes-people, and the drugs?
In the worst cases (and there are a few, currently), you decide that you should be in charge of everything, democracy is a mistake, and that you are the person to destroy it.
Who has time for love, when there's so much ego to give.
No, because Batman isn't a real person with real constraints.
Sure, I mean, if you have a $1B, then you get to have a lab with gadget people making cool shit and you can buy a fighter jet and a personal submarine and you have the detective agency too.
But you don't get the rogues gallery of super villains. You don't get new knees every week. You don't get to save your local city, because the problems are mostly the problems that the people cause themselves. And solving all those problems makes you a tyrant, not a hero. And even then, the problems are the same we've had since before history.
This is why in the real world, we have philanthropy mostly aimed at education and the alleviation of extreme poverty and diseases as the main outlets for the billionaires. Because it's the only thing we think that works at all.
I guess, if you really wanted to be Batman, you could fund yet another study that would state how best to give away dollars. But, without even having to look, I know that there are a few dozen of them out there already and they all pretty much say the same thing: that it's muddy and hard to discern, but maybe if you squint, education and making sure people have food and shelter.
To be Batman, you already can do it. It's mosquito nets for the poor, it's giving that bum a $100 and an hour, it's volunteering with prisoners to get them to read, it's making sure your kids' classmates have a snack before the test, etc.
So yeah, the real world Batman is a boring stressed-out Mom that's active in the PTA, her church/community-center, and local politics. Real World Bruce Wayne is Steve Rogers before the serum.
Just like the rest of us.
btw does anyone know if places like Fermi lab, CERN receive donations from the super-wealthy?
Other than that there are foundations that issue grants to individual researchers, e.g. Gates also has a foundation. There are others such as Burroughs-Wellcome, Clayton Foundation, etc.
The private foundations are generally very stingy with "Facilities and Administration" fees, which was in the news recently as the fight over NIH/NSF funding which can go in the 50-60% range. Private generally doesn't go over 15%, frequently its much less.
> Chuck Rhoades: Walk away.
> Bobby Axelrod: I should. But then again, what's the point of having fuck you money, if you never say, fuck you.
https://youtu.be/upfyoQdc_r4
Most of the difference in lifestyle is the quantity and quality of housing they can afford, and having people to take care of problems for them. But they ALL universally have messed up personal lives with multiple messy divorces, embarrassing affairs, NYPost Page Six appearances, etc.
The one thing you'd think it gives them is freedom, but they all pretty much end up working til they die so I don't know. I'm not sure if the money breaks something in their brain, or their broken brain is what leads them to chase the money. Likely some of both!
There's some level where you can afford 2-3 nice residences, flying private, and not lose your damn mind. I've seen some of the billionaire's lieutenants achieve this balance. Basically being able to be fabulously rich but anonymous. Like the Bill Murray quote about people who want to be rich & famous should try just being rich first.
I think these guys I've seen are probably in the bucket the reddit OP marks "Net worth of $30mm-$100mm". Adjust that upwards for inflation and also to account for many of these people being in VHCOL areas so maybe it's like $50-200mm.
From "Requiem" by Robert Heinlein, 1940 <https://archive.org/details/Astounding_v24n05_1940-01_dtsg03...>:
>"What? You are old D. D.? But, hell's bells, you own a big slice of the company yourself; you ought to be able to do anything you like, rules or no rules."
>"That is not an unusual opinion, son, but it is incorrect. Rich men aren't more free than other men; they are less free—a good deal less free. I tried to do what you suggest, but the other directors would not permit me. They are afraid of losing their franchise. It costs them a good deal in—uh—political contact expenses to retain it, as it is."
>"Well, I'll be a— Can you tie that, Mac? A guy with lots of dough, and he can't spend it the way he wants to."
I was having this conversation about this colleague a few weeks back about another colleague we knew who made it big working at a start up. You would expect he has lots of free time and mental space at hand to do whatever he wants, instead it turns out he has to now worry about managing that money.
And its not exactly a easy job. Managing big money can be hard as any loss even a small percentage is a lot of money. And that begins to weigh heavily on you in form of stress as there is a lots at stake.
>>Like the Bill Murray quote about people who want to be rich & famous should try just being rich first.
Absolutely there is big difference between 'comfortably rich' and 'having to worry day and night for your money'. You would expect more of a thing make things awesome as you go, but as it turns out there is a counterintuitive aspect to this.
Plus announcing your success to friends and family can bring unexpected complications. People begin to think you owe them things, and they are entitled to it. And saying no can be quite tricky, and make you look evil.
> And its not exactly a easy job. Managing big money can be hard as any loss even a small percentage is a lot of money. And that begins to weigh heavily on you in form of stress as there is a lots at stake.
A three-fund portfolio pretty much scales from $100 to $100M, probably more. Once you have enough money do whatever you want, you can do stocks:bonds anywhere between 20:80 and 80:20 and you'll be alright, and if not, there probably wasn't a reasonable choice you could have made with the information available.
If he's got enough to be set for life, and he's worried about market fluctuations, that's a choice.
Yeah, thats the problem. Humans always want more. Its always a choice.
Only because the person "needs" to "have more". They could put it in TBills and never think about it again. And they'd be totally fine, still live a life of luxury.
It's only because the growth in money becomes a goal in itself, which is a trap.
However no photos have ever appeared in the stories. The only photo I can find of him online is his LinkedIn photo.
Within the industry his name can open doors, but out in public no one would recognize him and he can live a normal (extraordinarily wealthy) life.
Even if you don't already live in a high-corruption society, you can either spend some of your wealth introducing that corruption (which pays dividends), or you can just go somewhere else that's already high-corruption and bribe your way into immediate permanent residence.
Live in a democracy? Just buy public opinion by leveraging your wealth into a highly-profitable propaganda network, which will also give you an appealing platform for opportunist would-be government officials, who will then owe you, making your bribes cheaper. Maybe you can even just directly blackmail or entrap them along the way, so you don't even have to pay.
Live in an autocracy? Buy enough weaponry and PMCs to insulate yourself or even rival the government itself, or just buy the autocrat's favor directly.
Live in an oligarchy? Psh, your work is already done. Just use the system as it's designed: to be exploited by your vast wealth.
But I'm curious what the answer would look like if every strata in it was not "things you can buy" but "things you can do with the money" ... if the "IMPACT" section was delineated at each level.
One of the things I envy the most about my rich friends is their capacity to be generous. They can materialize their compassion on a regular basis without having to balance their budget.
I'd like to see what that looks like at each of these wealth levels.
(One funny thing I noticed is that I have multiple friends with virtual personal assistants now, at middle class levels of weath/entrepreneurship... definitely not a rich man's thing anymore.)
When you are rich, you get a real person who speaks your language well and has the authority/power to get things done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-net-worth_individual
"Virtual personal assistant" to me meant a computer program that could understand speech and carry out a limited set of actions based on that speech - the computer equivalent of a human personal assistant/secretary.
The right still have servants of various types of course. Right now "Virtual personal assistant" are too limited to replace humans. Since I cannot afford a human servant I'm hoping that changes. Time will tell.
Maybe there's some bespoke software firm that does provide such a service for rich-enough people. Of course it'd have to run mostly locally/on-premises - none of this cloud stuff/monetizing my behaviours to bump their revenues.
*https://npr.org/2025/04/01/nx-s1-5345950/forbes-billionaires...
The post's author is a random person on social media...
making claims an attention-seeker would make...
for an audience that wants to believe them.
The sensible position, without corroborating evidence, is that the author is a liar.
They have a current star singer perform a private concert for them (so this was probably a corporate event, but I'm sure centi-millionaire/billionaire have hired her to perform) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyonc%C3%A9_2023_Dubai_perfor...
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10651136-at-a-party-given-b...
You won, you can provide for you and for your whole bloodline if you so choose. You can choose your adventure, go fully epicurean or fund Humanity impacting projects. Yet they keep going and going unable to exit the carrousel.
What do you do? You convince one of your old running buddies, who now coaches elite runners, to coach your son. The son sets the national high school indoor record for the 800m.
Son decides to go pro after graduating high school.
Then Covid19 hits. Access to outdoor 400 tracks is limited. What do you do?
You build an 8 lane 400m track with running surface to match the quality at the site of the Word/US track and field championships. Cost: ~$4M
You hire the best coaches for your kids. Coach needs a place to stay nearby - no problem, buy a townhouse for him to stay at. etc.
see https://www.letsrun.com/news/2025/05/how-josh-hoey-went-from...
Suppose you have more than enough money for you and your family to live out their lives without needing to worry about that. Now that's solved, you can move on to what you actually want to happen in your life, such as helping your kids become pro athletes.
from his wikipedia entry:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KScnjzfK6f8
By putting in the same level of extreme effort into any classicaly well paying profession you would highly likely become very rich and successful.
The whole response reads like a cheesed up, swaggered out, smug essay. It's so clearly trying to illicit strong emotional response. I read this years ago as a teen and ate it up. Wiser more adult me knows how garbage and fake the entire response is. Reddit is known for this.
I closed my Reddit account years ago. To be on that site is to be forever stuck in a middle school cafeteria.
The top comment mentions some things wealthy people buy, but nothing ordinary people don't know about.
Money can't buy happiness but nether could the absence of money. It's not really a good argument against money.
Probably all of the current problems in my life could be solved with money.
CAN you be happy because you have money? Yeah, why not. WILL you be happy if you have money? No guarantees at all.
It always depends on the circumstances and the person but generally I would say that money can definitely buy happiness. I think that sentiment is mostly cope by those less wealthy.
In this case, it might seem to be "what trick can I use that ultra-wealthy use?" or "how can I be prosperous on a budnget" but it really is "what is it like to be rich?"
I think the conclusion is probably that they don't buy anything we don't know about.
You could have a single part-time minimum wage job and you're not going to waste your time worrying about $0.05/mo. 60¢ a year? Please.
Going for an exotic tropical beach location? Well they normally stay in sterile 5* bubble which is boring beyond belief and very unauthentic. You can go ie to Seychelles or Bali, live with locals in cheapish airbnbs, swim on same beaches or go to same restaurants they do, if you want, or even better eat with locals too. You can dive on same spots, kite surf on same spots etc. You will remember such vacation much more than they will do.
Or another typical one - skiing holidays. You can go ie to Verbier or Chamonix and ski next to kings, princes or industry moguls on same slopes they do, use same lifts, but you can ie go of piste for some extra fun. Sure afterwards you can only go to public spa but that may be better equipped than their private one. Or you can paraglide over them (on your own, not with paid instructor). And so on and on...
I know you can outmatch them only on specific aspects of those experiences, but that part is rather easy. Rich play their game of life in general very safely, so you can have way cooler things if you take some risks, and invest time into learning how to get best out of travels and adventures. Rich generally pay others to figure these out for them, and then of course such service is not well tailored to specific personality and expectations as much.
Example 1: the overwater bungalow in the Maldives where I could watch fish swim under a glass table and step right off the balcony into the reef to join them.
Example 2: the stupidly expensive hotel in Laos where my wife and I were the only guests one night, so we got to enjoy a tropical sunset at our private pool bar with our private orchestra playing just for us. (The GM, who dropped by for a chat, told us a honeymooning couple last year had dropped six figures to buy out the place to do the same.)
Very similar experiences can be had in ie Togian islands in Sulawesi. And I could go on. Not everything is yet spoiled for rich.
As said its not full end-to-end experience, ie getting there in economy flight class instead of direct private jet is... well different, but the gist of adventure and reason why actually travel there can be easily matched, or surpassed. While leaving much more intense trail of memories and experiences with locals, which is what you are left with at the end. Instead of having everything served on plate like a clueless baby, you discover and 'fight' for your own adventures. And while paying 1-10% of price rich living next door paid.
Coming back from such vacation makes it feel like it lasted massively longer. 2 weeks feel like a month at least, 3 like few months. 3 months in India & Nepal spent in such way felt, and I am not joking, like decades spent traveling. A very surreal and profoundly enjoyable feeling, when memories of life back home feels like memories from previous life before one reincarnated.
But I'll throw you a bone: it goes both ways. I've had equally memorable experiences doing things like sitting with a couple of farmers on the floor of a jam-packed 3rd class train carriage in Thailand, sharing a bottle of Maekhong and watching the rice paddies go by. And commuting to work with canal boats in Bangkok barrelling down the klongs at ridiculous km/h was much more fun than taking a taxi, as long as you didn't bonk your head on a bridge or slip and fall into what's basically ripened sewage.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/everettpotter/2023/09/17/netfli...
If he wanted to not ski with the poors he would do as rich people already do and go to Deer Valley.
Although last I heard Powder Mountain was pivoting a bit to an premium resort kind of deal, same kind of thing Windham Mountain in NY is doing. Still, neither are pricing out normal skiiers yet, they're just edging in to "do you have more money than sense? dump some of it in this overpriced 'mountain club'" territory. If I had Reed Hastings money I wouldn't bother buying one of them up, I would just fly in to any of the existing nice ones with better terrain and facilities than Powder Mountain (or Windham) have.
This makes no sense to me. First of all Chamonix is hardly what I'd consider a 'rich' people ski resort. You're far more likely to be skiing next to a broke ski bum than "kings, princes or industry mogul". But beyond that, why can't the rich people ski off piste? In fact the rich people have the option to decide on a whim to take a helicopter to the really nice off piste runs and do 7 runs in a day if they feel like it, while you and I can only do one since we have to walk up. They can also travel to some of the finest skiing in the world, do two quick runs, decide the snow wasn't great and then just chill at the hotel bar and fly home early, knowing that it doesn't matter because if they want they can just come back in a few weeks.
Rich people can (and do) do all things you do, but they can also do a bunch of additional things that you and I cannot hope to do.
The topic is stuff they buy that I don't know about.
> Title: What do insanely wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about?
> Text: I was just spending a second thinking of what insanely wealthy people buy, that the not insanely wealthy people aren't familiar with (as in they don't even know it's for sale)?
The comment just plain and straight doesn't answer the question being asked.
It's kinda amazing how much more it is upvoted than comments with relevant answers. Maybe because emotions from dreaming of what it's like being rich (that's what it actually goes about) are so strong, the interpretation of the question is getting bent towards experiencing them.
This is a symptom of societal unfairness. In this case there are different ways to react, but this is one of them. Tennis isn’t oppressing anyone, so no one is getting emotional about the pro tennis players knowing all the tips.
But the story since the 70s has been that you can have anything you want if you just work hard enough and are skilled enough (particularly in North America and the UK). Which means that if you don’t have something you want, then it is no one’s fault but your own.
Except in realty there are a whole host of external factors that influence once’s ability are accrue nice things.
It’s hard to reconcile these two things in our minds. We don’t have any narrative except the current one. So either we accept that we’re simply not good enough, or we accept things are broken with no solution. The former is often the most emotionally tolerable.
So when people see people with more than them, they don’t think, “good for them, we all choose how much we want to work for and I’m happy at my level”. Instead there is a collision of irreconcilable thoughts, and what comes out is, “they’ll never know what true love is”.
Anthony Pratt is worth a few billion dollars and acknowledges the above with his quote "being rich is my superpower".
[1] https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/being-rich-is-my-...