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.)
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.
There are many ways to give back to society
because it locks people in that status and heteronomy
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).
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
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
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."
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.
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.
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.
IMPACT. Your money can literally change the world and change lives.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.
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.
"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:
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.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 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-...
True wealth is being able to spend all your time doing things with and for people you love. It sounds trite, but the truth is many people miss the opportunity to jump off the train and enjoy their life while they can.
I would love to have a private yacht, or whatever other symbol of wealth you can dream of. I have plans for what I would do with a house more than double my current house in size. However it isn't worth going into upper management to get those things.
PERSPECTIVE. The wealthiest person I have spent time with makes about $400mm/year. i couldn't get my mind around that until I did this: OK--let's compare it with someone who makes $40,000/year. It is 10,000x more. Now let's look at prices the way he might. A new Lambo--$235,000 becaome $23.50. First class ticket internationally? $10,000 becomes $1. A full time executive level helper? $8,000/month becomes $0.80/month. A $10mm piece of art you love? $1000. Expensive, so you have to plan a bit. A suite at the best hotel in NYC $10,000/night is $1/night. A $50million home in the Hamptons? $5,000.
My issue with this level of 'earning' is, it feels entirely like stealing from them would be justified since they're most obviously stealing a whole lot from the rest of the world.
What products can I buy that don't filter up some percentage into these billionaires bank accounts?
Scrooge McDuck is a fictional character. Rich people don't have all their money hoarded in a pool of gold coins - excess money is invested back into the economy.
What definition of “stealing” are you using here?
It seems like it somehow includes owning a large equity stake in a profitable or rapidly growing company since that’s how most people that “make $400mm/year” are actually gaining wealth.
Claiming that is stealing is pretty dumb considering it’s how everyone that holds equity gains wealth. So when does it become stealing?
"Crime against humanity" is closer to the description I would otherwise use. Am I being more clear? The effects of that level of accumulation of wealth and power on the individual, the community, country, and the world are grossly negative.
No one who has ever lived deserves that amount / percentage of wealth.
Where it gets blurry is "so, what is enough then?" and "what is to be done with anything over the "enough" amount?". I don't know the answer, I don't know when it turns from earnt to evil. I doubt there's a specific number, although specific numbers are required for laws and legislation and regulation, but it would defnitely be a variable amount depending on the individual at which they become irreparably morally bankrupt.
The correct answer, however, cannot possibly be: Just let them accumulate more forever. That's inarguably stupid, but that's where we're at.
They own a company that a lot of other people want a part of so the open market value for shares of that company go up significantly. There is no negative impact or stealing involved here. There isn’t even accumulation.
All wealth gains at these magnitudes are through appreciation of existing assets.
If the man who sent two pizzas in exchange for 10,000 Bitcoin just sat on that Bitcoin all of this time, he would be “stealing” or conducting a “crime against humanity”. Do you see how ridiculous that is?
Very little, that's why wealth tends to increase in the 8-10% a year increase but income doesn't.
For example I wish someone told me about the existence of Miele kitchen equipment before I accidentally rented an apartment of a well-to-do woman. She renovated it for herself but then rented out when circumstances changed.
Similarly it took me a long time to realize just how much better the veneer wood furniture and doors are compared to laminated chipwood. Price is 3-4 times higher but it lasts 5-10 times longer and is much more pleasant to use. Unfortunately you need years to notice such long-term differences, unless someone tells you.
And I'm basically learning to be lower-middle class here. I'm sure there are similar things to know in higher stratas and I'm unlikely to live long enough to find out naturally even if I happen to get the money somehow.
Hardly rich, but that "veneer wood furniture and doors" are much better than "laminated chipwood" is common knowledge. But back in the day, poor and rich alike wouldn't look twice at either, but opt for solid wood furniture.
It depends on your background. I grew up in Russia in the 90s, back then it was considered cool to put plastic panels on the walls of your apartment. Fresh and modern look, easy to wash, clearly superior to wallpaper. It was called "euro-renovation" as opposed to soviet-style or "grandma" apartments.
Hopefully I think this has changed though. Or I have become grumpy who knows.
Touch panel oven tops is my main hate object in this regard.
Well, everything falls under "unless someone tells you" in the grand scheme of things.
But as far as furniture knowledge goes, it's of the most basic type, not something "just the rich would know".
Some others are very hard to observe yourself (e.g. the poisonous effect of lead) but by now they are embedded into the collective consciousness.
My worry is with things that are neither. In this particular context these are things that you know if you grow up in a rich/middle-class family, but hard to come by if you become rich/middle-class later in life.
Mahogany and teak was in fashion around here for a while and oak went out the door.
Oak was considered cheap so we painted it. The fashion then change to lye treated. Then we went with soap treated oak.
And then one day Ikea came into fashion.
Price is an important function of choice. But we should not discard the fashion trends.
Rich people might have good sense. Or they may have a sense for fashion. But they are still just people like the rest of us.
So the "unless someone tells you" really rings true to me. Rather than equating rich with good and hence equating good sense with common sense - I think it is a really interesting question.
What opportunities and choices are not obvious to us have-nots?
I never believed that that getting rich would make me happy and solve all my problems. But I am quite sure that I would get a nicer set of worries and problems than I have now.
Would I like to experience that for just a day? No, thank you. Ignorance can be a bliss.
It is one of those Schroedingers cat like questions.
That's the point. Most of it is flaunting waste of labor or materials.
Imagine how much labor it took to keep everything white from getting dusty and sooty in the era of coal and wood stoves and lamp and candle light.
The display luxury category: anything by LVMH, Birkin bags, limited edition sneakers, Ferrari, etc
The "better product for more money" category: Miele, wood furniture, Lexus etc
Birkin bags are also actually better products for more money, they can last quite a while with minimum care. They are display goods for sure but there is a qualitative difference between a good quality handbag from certain brands and a much cheaper one.
Just as an example, my wife's only handbag is a balenciaga bag that she's had for 12+ years, she's been using it to carry back food from restaurants, put anything she needs in it, etc... and it's still in good shape. In the end, her bag has cost her so far 60 usd/year.
So yes, it's not obvious to people not in the know but even products that seem to be display luxury category can actually be worth it from a quality perspective.
You've been jonesing for a fancy luxury item since you first laid eyes on it (Birkin bag, some European watch, a supercar).
Now that you're rich and have enough to pay for the item in cash, you decide to head to their fancy store and treat yourself.
Once you get in the door, you're faced with the cold splash of reality - luxury goods are not available off the rack/off the shelf, even if you can pay for cash on the spot.
You have to prove to the company that you're a loyal customer before you can purchase the object of desire.
How? You have to buy several of their products.
see https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/buying-an-hermes-bag and https://www.wired.com/2014/10/herjavec-ferrari-laferrari/
How hard can that be? So hard that people have sued - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/style/birkin-bag-hermes-l...
P.S. The markup on these luxury goods is high - https://www.businessinsider.com/dior-italy-labor-investigati...
Some time in 2017/2018, I was in Decathlon and needed a bag for the other stuff I bought. Picked up a cheap rucksack for a single digit number of Euros, possibly €2 but it was ages ago now and I can't remember exactly.
It's still going fine, around 1/200th the price per year of your example.
People don't buy such crap because it "lasts log". There's tons of products with same or better quality than Birkin bags, better leather and materials, and so on, that are cheaper. It's the brand that sells.
I find it such a weird argument. Ok, your furniture from 1900 is still doing great, fantastic. The problems are:
1. Your great-grandfather had a different sense of esthetics, so shit just didn't fit your modern apartment.
2. You moved to a different country, and shipping fees of the furniture were ten times the cost of brand-new chipwood furniture (literally).
3. The furniture was designed with usage in mind that simply doesn't exist in modern world.
4. It was made specifically to fill a certain room. Your new place has a different layout. Deal with it.
These arguments are even more true in the context of technology. "Look, my grandma's black-and-white TV is still working!"... great? I'd rather have a modern 4k OLED, but I guess that's just personal preference. Not to mention how having expensive things makes you a prisoner of these things. If your cat ruins Ikea cabinet, you'll be angry for a day. If your cat ruins your family heirloom, you'll be pissed.
You don’t want your home to feel like an ikea catalog surely!?
I do. Now what.
Who wouldn't? The people that arranged the furniture in those renders have a much better idea of interior design than I do.
Thankfully my wife also has a vote on things.
Anyway one prime example I can see - we have rather bigger kitchen, and storage is its prime function. Anything below waist needs to have pullout drawers, its supremely more practical and simply more efficient for storage. You don't need to go on your knees every time you need something deeper in bottom one. For older folks this is an absolute must. Good luck finding any older kitchen that has that. Same for any drawers ie for clothing.
And there are much better modern tricks than just this very basic one.
That is the reason for the fixation on IKEA: the "decent" part. If their peers are Target, Walmart, then to be sure IKEA are decent.
Even during assembly though I've had joints fail such that the finished piece of furniture is, say, 90% structurally sound. But then trying to disassemble the piece so I can move ... I'm lucky if I am able to disassemble it without additional component failure. And then the re-assembly after the move also takes its toll.
Sadly I've come to see IKEA furniture as disposable (I sure don't see it in the local Goodwill). And that is the problem with IKEA (and Target, and Walmart) furniture: it goes direct-to-landfill with a move.
I have a few old Ikea pieces for that.
1. OP finds it "much more pleasant to use" which I believe includes the aesthetic side. "your modern appartement" is your take, but is it? and how old modern? There's an universe of different styles that have been implemented in the past, in a multi dimensional sense: it may be influenced by the state of the art of that time (available tools, wood...), the vogue (not necessarily correlated with state of the art) and the context (unique fancy piece for someone wealthy that paid for, unique simple piece for your family, small series by a semi industrial workshop).
2. True, however your old chipwood furniture may not be newish enough for the next householder so A. he/you needs to ditch it B. buy a new one. With a quality furniture you often can re-sell it at almost the same price you bought it, there's no devaluation but only a seller commission if you don't want to bother.
3. I have in front of me a drawer that was build by the gran-gran-gran-pa (yes!) of my wife and... drawers are drawers. Same for stools, bed or tables. I understand your point as there's usages that are lost like furniture-like-clock but some others weird stuff still come back every time because they actually are clever [0]
4. I'm not sure what you're talking about: integrated kitchen (and so) are made to fill a certain room, not the wooden furniture I'm familiar with that you can literally place where you want. New place and not enough space ? Sell it (the the new owner or someone else) and buy another one that fits better. You hardly sell a cheapwood furniture. Moreover, moving to new places have other drawbacks to deal with that you take into account when making the decision. I'm not arguing you sloudn't move, but it's a process that isn't always trivial. For exemple many US residents won't be able to bring their tank-car aboard for legal and/or practical reasons. Or their digged swimming pool. Or whatever if they move to inner Tokyo.
TV => The image quality is wined by the news devices image, however ss you mention "expensive things" I'd like to point out a B&W tv is probably way cheaper and robust that and the 4K OLED one. But there's room for choices in-between, and I a agree the argumentation works better with furniture than electronics.
CAT scratch => That's the beauty of the made-to-last furniture: Wood ? sand it, a bit of varnish and you're done. Fabric ? tear off the piece and nail a new one. They're not museum pieces but day-to-day home helpers.
Where would you even find such a thing other than as a curated, carefully expensively maintained antique? Sure you can buy them second hand on Ebay, but the shipping costs of CRT TVs are pretty big. Everyone has a "flatscreen" TV because that's the default cheapest solution.
Shipping and handling costs are a big factor in the death of large, heavy traditional items.
Is that a thing wealthy people buy but ordinary people know nothing about?
Same for induction cooktops, but I digress.
Measure their temperature and take note in your notebook. Put another cup away from the microwaves but in the same environment to serve as control. Measure its temp and put in a notebook
. Turn off any air-conditioning or fans in the kitchen, any sources of heat, you know the drill.
Turn on your microwave oven for a long cycle (10, 15 minutes) measure temperatures in 1 or 2 minutes interval.
Plot everything and compare against control.
So as long as the gaps on the doors and panels of the microwave are still aligned right and the door closes somewhat tight (only a couple of mm gap) you're still trapping the extreme majority of the energy in the box.
Electromagnetism is weird.
Not much in the Reddit reply checks out for me. It's true that the $700M guy socializes with "Senators/Congressmen/community leaders." He travels a lot, and comfortably, but has no ownership in a jet. He retired young-ish and no longer works so maybe that's why. He doesn't flash his wealth around except to women he likes, and it's an absolute magnet for them, he gets pretty much any woman he wants to sleep with him simply by being a decent guy who's also worth $750M. I mean, they know that as long as he's dating them they will have a life of permanent luxury travel and not have to work, so not a surprise.
But beyond that he's pretty unassuming, doesn't flash his wealth, and mainly just likes to talk about finance and give people business advice.
The $10-30M people don't seem much different from me. Their contingencies for dealing with potential financial catastrophes run a lot deeper than mine. Their property is worth more and they do travel a bit more frequently and lavishly than I do. Idk nobody I know is doing this stuff where they're really fixated on getting into the best restaurant in town, or they're totally inaccessible except through their "people" and personal assistants.
I don't know a lot of it sounds like a type of person I don't associate with I guess, maybe I am not flamboyant and rich enough. I know there are rich people out there who spend like this guy describes; I interact with them very occasionally and briefly; I'm sure I am super boring to them; I question whether they remain that rich for very long :)
I don't know anyone who hobnobs with celebrities nor wants to. The comment is 10 years old, maybe Hollywood has lost its cultural cachet. Eureka, that's it: this is probably a post about Hollywood people.
"Liquid net worth", I'd assume.
He seemed a pretty regular guy, very friendly: kids playing in the pool. Nothing out of the ordinary except as many house employees as adult guests (and house employees where calling guests by their name).
I happened to know the artist Jeff Koons: not a big fan of the "inflated balloon dogs" but I do like his ballerinas. Well... Turns out the dude had one house destroyed then rebuilt to accommodate a 3 meters high Jeff Koons sculpture of two ballerinas.
I don't know exactly but I take it that's a $15m sculpture. I'd say most people don't know who Jeff Koons is and most people have no idea that some people shall just level an entire house just to have an architect redesign a new house, at the same place, so that a sculpture can now be admired from the living room, kitchen and garden.
He's got several paintings from Basquiat too. He's actually in the top 200 of the world's top art collectors (I found that out by googling his name after having been to his place).
And he's got his art pieces sprinkled around the world, in his many properties.
> The $10-30M people don't seem much different from me.
Definitely not very different. One little fantasy I saw not one but two people in that range do is buy several times the exact same car. Identical. Same config. Then they use one as a daily, and put the the others at different vacation places they have: so they land, take a cab, then get to enjoy the same car. Weird but I've seen two people do it, so I take it's a thing? One had identical Range Rover, the other identical Lexus.
Not real petrolheads: rich car petrolheads are actually going to own fancy stuff like old Ferrari 250 (even if "just" a GTE), old GT40, old Porsche, etc. which every body expects rich people to have if they're into cars at all.
But yup: buying x times the exact same car when times comes to change cars is kinda just weird.
Triples is best.
Is it?
I'm on my second iPhone 13 mini, this one being the replacement after the first died of a drop. There are two more stored in the attic, each preconfigured with the accessories I like and with a SIM from my provider in the box. So if anything happens to this phone, as soon as I get home I just break out #3, restore the latest backup, activate the SIM and assign it the number, and I'm back in business at the same old stand.
An iPhone 13 mini with the accessories I like (case and charging adapter) is about $300. That's amply worth it to me, a couple times over, to never have to think about how to replace a cooked phone and get back into communication with my family and the world. Nothing special about the phone, it's if anything unusually unassuming. It's just the phone I happen to like (since 2021 when I concluded it no longer made sense to keep keeping 1st gen SEs alive) and thinking about phones is something I only like doing when I want to. That's the problem this money solves, and I have the money available to use this way, so why not?
Scale the dollar amount up a few orders of magnitude and the necessity down by the same amount, and sure, I see how it makes sense to "just" drop an identical set of wheels at every one of your pieds-à-terre. What did the funny sweary smoking man in the movie say? "You learn to spend what's in your pocket."
But that's what makes it "weird". Most people can't afford to do that. As you point out, it mashed a certain amount of sense, but we're in the midst of an housing crisis. People who have enough money to own, not just multiple houses, but so many cars that they got tired of different cars so they just bought more of the same? Weird because I've never done that.
How many iphone 13 minis have you used concurrently, and in how many different locations did you own them? Byb your own admission, you only use one at a time.
Of the 261 words in your comment (archived at https://archive.is/Vfx9Z#selection-161.6-184.0), none of them mention that you see it as "grotesquely flagrant consumption", so reads like the meme about the temporarily embarrassed millionaire.
I will say, this no longer appears to me to qualify for the name I suggested a few minutes ago. Oh, the statement remains false, only I now no longer believe you competent to defame. Have you had a meal today?
It feels like a bit of a tautology, but I think has some reality to it as well. When you're steeped in a more frugal mindset, it can be hard to remain rational or detached when analyzing consumption patterns "just a few orders of magnitude" larger...
If I had to guess, I would say I've been braced by someone whose morning was complicated by treating "take with food" as a little too much more of a suggestion than an instruction. No judgment. Nothing I haven't run into before.
I have not done these things when I had less money and now I think removing minor hassles with extra money is worth it. At another order of magnitude of money I'd definitely acquire multiple copy of things I need.
I love your go-to bag example which I wished to have but never did. In a weird way because I have more time to pack but not much resources or time to travel anyway.
It's not about concurrent use at all. It's all about availability. I had my simple, trusty Logitech keyboard and mouse. And 2x more of each, in a box, in a cupboard. I'm not using them. But I have the comfort of knowing that if either fails, I'm back up again in two minutes. That, for me, is comfort.
Now, if I had two workplaces (for example home and the office) would I carry my hardware between places? If I can't afford to buy two of them, yes. But if I can afford to pay 20€ twice, I'll have one keyboard at home, the same keyboard at the office, and so. That, for me, is comfort.
Now, scale the keyboard for 20€ to a Lexus for 40k€. Same thing.
I’m still having the 12 mini, so that’s why I’m not investing into having exactly the same. More likely I’d go with 13 mini, if this one would die suddenly. Or whatever else be on the market by that point. Theoretically, that can happen in 5 years. I’m holding the phone till it’s physically killed, or is unbearably slow.
I maintained five iPhones SE 1st gen from 2016 through most of 2021. Toward the end of that time it grew noticeably more difficult and slow to source model-specific parts and tooling. This time around, I know how to plan ahead more effectively. I had a 12 mini, but knowing Apple only drops a good small phone every half decade to keep us weird nerds interested, when the successor model came out I immediately upgraded.
I don't expect a real problem even in the worst case. The US is a huge internal market and has enough local internet to function. But for $300 flat I would otherwise just save anyway, why not hedge twice while I know I can?
https://www.autoweek.com/car-life/but-wait-theres-more/a1704...
classy mfer lol
(note that they owned the parking, so its moot if they parked on a reserved spot on private property of theirs)
I guess not being localizable by press/random people is a nice plus if you can afford.
but didnt he buy always the same model?
I guess we both where right at different points in time ;)
Eh, pedantry, but you'll find that building and occupation codes dictate a certain number of disabled parking spots. You could argue that a spot that is ostensibly this, but "everyone knows" is Steve Jobs' spot, is not a disabled parking spot.
(But yes, odds of the City of Cupertino taking any issue with this whatsoever are entirely zero.)
> "From 2019, California joins most of the other states in the nation by requiring newly bought cars to be issued temporary license plates."
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/07/steve-jobs-loophole-clo...
https://folklore.org/Handicapped.html
(Apple personnel @ the time probably unaware of that technicality. Story says it wasn't fixed)
> he seemed to think that the blue wheelchair symbol meant that the spot was reserved for the chairman.
lol
I can readily believe this does happen at the right level of wealth, but there's something deeply absurd and humorous about someone sending a vanguard to their second or third home before they arrive.
My very typical American suburban home on a 0.2 acre lot is better built, has better views, parking, heating, cooling and so on than a 3 generation rich (from my standards) cousins' home in India. However they do have half a dozen servants at home and I have obviously none here.
So it does sound weird that people seek even further from developed world middle class point of view.
Unless you had reached a level where you were having almost everything in your life managed by assistants, and you were the type of person that wanted to give up all that control, then have “your car” ready to go whichever house you were at would be the lower mental overhead solution.
Most people don't really like it, but find it to be the best option to go from A to B quickly. If you involve other people, be a driver or a renting business, you add complication and cost.
I would 100% buy my old car again in like new condition vs getting a new one if it was a feasible thing to do.
Not really, decision fatigue is a thing.
My colleague actually took me out car shopping a couple of weeks back, to the Ferrari showroom because apparently to get some models, you need to be one of their favorite customers or a referral from one. We also visited a Lamborghini showroom next (which apparently didn't have such restrictions). But deciding between their cars was so tough, and I really wanted to get an EV instead for my daily driver, that I just ended up renewing on my rental Honda Civic for a few more months lol. I could buy these cars, but I tend to be vested in things I buy, and suffer from FOMO for not buying the rest, so might as well postpone the decision to when I can afford to hold them all together and give them time to maintain them.
There's also the real problem with rose tinted glasses. For example, I was a huge fan of the Testarossa ever since I was a kid, but just one drive inside one showed me how badly designed it actually is in the interior.
I would totally do that if I could. I have done it with shoes when I've had the good insight of thinking about it. I do it often with clothes when I find a good product that suits my needs. And I wish I could do it with my very-average-but-reliable car.
I'm dreading the moment I have to buy the next one and take the risky decision.
I am very fortunate to have an above average salary for where I am from, but what surprised me from going to pretty much broke to quite well off, is that my life didn't become flashy, it just became VERY comfortable with normal, everyday things.
The cumulative inflation for the past 10 years is 35.6%, not 7x as you imply.
Without taking a stand on which metric is better for social and lifestyle comparisons, the grandparent poster said 'valuation of assets' rather than inflation. Per Yahoo Finance (https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/%5ESP500TR/), the S&P500 is about 340% of its mid-2015 level on a total return basis (reinvesting dividends).
Today's $700-millionaire would have been a 'mere' $200-millionaire in mid-2015 if invested fully in equities. That allocation is probably ballpark reasonable, since with that kind of net worth investment horizons are very long (multiple generations of inheritors) and the investors themselves can be nearly risk-neutral rather than risk-averse.
I appreciate the correction, but that's still nowhere near the 7x that the OP was talking about.
My wife has an uncle that uses his access to wealth and some connections to meet and develop friendships with sports players. It's not even that expensive but you do have to have the personality to be somewhat charming and have the ability to exploit connections. Once you have an in, you can extend that to others. If I had his money, I'd move out to the middle of the woods and never talk to anyone. I just depends on what you like to do.
The referenced reply is dull. It's very pretentious but just reiterates common knowledge, it doesn't convey any useful information.
I disagree strongly - its not a multiple-gold answer that is now being linked to years later for no reason. I read it years ago and have always remembered it - one of those rare internet comments that I think is a classic informational moment, well-written and illuminating.
The problem is that if an Ikea furniture lasts 15 years then that's enough. People no longer need 50-100 years furniture, because nobody wants to inherit old stuff anymore.
Life's circumstances change faster and buying quality often isn't worth it. Maybe a Miele dishwasher last twice as long at double the price. But it will become old after 10 years even so.
I'm going to challenge this assertion: did anyone, ever? Looking around in my parents' house (retirement age), there's no furniture from their parents (post-WW2). I don't remember whether my grandparents had any furniture of their parents in use either.
I do recall going to the charity shops and finding older wooden furniture; while I recognize it as better quality as what you can get today, at the same time it's no longer useful today. TV cabinets (with doors) for CRT TVs and video tapes, writing tables, those kinds of things are obsolete. Tables are timeless though.
But also, over time a lot of that old furniture was either destroyed or bought up and exported. What you find in the charity stores near me today is mostly 90's and onwards.
Yes. Pre-railroad people mostly didn't move and inheriting furniture was extremely helpful. Go back earlier and the cost of buying your own furniture would have been prohibitive.
My parents are both 70+, they have 3 big cabinets from their parents, made from solid wood. I’d not mind having them in the right place. They look and handle great, only the drawers could use some finetuning ;)
A modern mattress won't fit on the old fame and will be more comfortable. If you replace the stuffing of the old mattress maybe it will be as good.
sighs.
I have tried new beds (granted, not as expensive ones) and they were worse than the 40 years old spring bed I have.
This somehow a point in your question, but I leave it to others to figure out what.
Grandpa donated the letters to the local historical society so they are accessible, though I'm not sure how.
And my wife inherited three pieces from her parents and they make up much of our dining room, and her uncle gave her two pieces that he made by hand, and that did not fit into his new house. I was dubious about the stuff from her parents, but it’s beautiful if dated and we’ve gone with a very “eclectic” decorating style, no room has to look like any other room. And now I’m very grateful for all of it.
My electric standing desk and chair being one of those modern things that costed a couple of thousands but i got secondhand for a combined 200. The desk is built like a tank. For the chair i replaced the cracking armrest covers with leather.
I also have some hardwood old tables and cabinets that are a couple generations old and as functional now as they were back then.
So yes, people do want to inherit the old stuff. I have some IKEA stuff (the beds were just too big, and mattress sizes are different), it just can't compare.
It... won't support the new dishes that come out in the 2030s?
Like, other than energy efficiency (and this is basically already into diminishing returns for appliances like dishwashers), what must-have progress are you expecting?
I'm not even joking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43463200
> It says options with an asterisk—including Rinse, Machine Care (self-cleaning), HalfLoad, Eco, and Delay start, are "available through Home Connect app only and depending on your model."
This is happening now.
Don’t buy—well just like cars they are taking that less-profitable choice away.
For example, the microwave. Older microwaves have a cumbersome enter time, hit start procedure. Newer microwaves also have a "quick start" button for 30 seconds which you can just press four times to get it to go for two minutes, or enter the time if you need it to go for a while. Hardly the stuff most people will replace a microwave for, but definitely a feature expected of newer microwaves.
As far as dishwashers, there are also styling changes to consider - the white plastic of the 80's looks dated now and a chrome front looks modern. who knows what 10 more years will bring, stylistically? You may not be stylish, but for some, that's their bread and butter.
Has no place in a dishwasher.
> and in the near future, arms for self loading and unloading
Pure fantasy for now; if it's ever not pure fantasy, go ahead and replace the dishwasher, I suppose?
> Older microwaves have a cumbersome enter time, hit start procedure. Newer microwaves also have a "quick start" button for 30 seconds which you can just press four times to get it to go for two minutes, or enter the time if you need it to go for a while.
... I'm 40, and every digital-control microwave I have ever used has that 30 second quick start button. So, okay, maybe that was an advance in microwave UX in, like, the 80s, but it was apparently the last advance.
How old are we talking about? My microwave is exactly like that, and it is about 15 years old if not more.
QS-QS-QS-QS-Start
2-0-0-Start
"Cumbersome"?
But that's not the point, it's usually not pleasant to find and press the buttons on the microwaves machine. Mashing the corner button a bunch of times is a nicer experience.
If it weren't the start button doing double duty as "+30 seconds", I would put my microwave in a more accessible location - space I rather put other stuff in.
And I am happy with it. Pretty much prefer it to using buttons.
Just rotate it to about 30, done.
It also has the instant 30s button which my wife seems to prefer to the rotating input.
When we redid our kitchen our fitter had to argue with our whitegoods supplier for us.
The guy in the shop couldn't understand why I wanted a built in Miele fridge-freezer over what ever generic he wanted to off load. His argument was that nobody would be able to see the logo so it didn't matter and we should just take the cheaper item.
My argument was that the Miele was much more energy efficient and would be running 24/7.
Given that enegry costs have risen substantially since then I think I made the correct choice and that the difference in purchase price has more than been offset.
High end furniture is the kind, like goodyear welted boots, where you keep it forever and reupholster it every 10 years.
Don't believe the hype. I got an apartment full with Miele kitchen equipment (from the previous owner, but less than 10 years old). They're nothing special, and I got a lot more random errors on the oven ("please contact service", tried that once, they were as clueless as you'd expect) than in my previous Siemens kitchen.
There is nothing on those higher end versions which make them worth anything close to the markup on the Bosch 800 fridge.
If I'm going to spend almost 2X, you better give me at a minimum fully metal and glass construction (almost no plastic). I get slightly more metal and slightly (very slightly) stronger plastics. That's about it.
What a scam. Don't buy Miele or gaggenau. If you want a truly high end fridge, you'll need a built in made by someone like subzero or its competitors.
Who in first world developed countries, that is smart, competent, and capable, wants to take a ho-hum salary to develop home appliances? From an economic and financial perspective, it doesn't make sense for Germany to pump out high quality innovative home wares. The brightest German minds aren't working on stove tops, nor should they be.
It makes way more sense for emerging economies to dominate in the space, and unsurprisingly China now seems to be the global hub of mid-tech manufacturing, with lots of innovation in this space.
Sometimes they're overpriced (Miele is), sometimes they're expensive to maintain (try get a stain out of marble), sometimes they're not durable (think of cashmere sweaters). There is no secret sauce that tells you whether the price of something you buy is a proxy for its qualities. And when you buy something expensive, you're kind of pissed when it breaks.
That's why many wealthy people go for the expensive luxury shit at first, like buying a Porsche, or a 30k kitchen remodel, only to go back to good old Toyota and ikea kitchen, cause they're just as fine and a fifth of the price / maintenance.
You usually learn those things the hard way.
Nowadays, the trend is that people buy the cabinet frames from Ikea, and then buy the doors, handles, and bottom support from someone else who makes more durable ones.
The thing is that with Ikea, I kind of know what I get. From a custom kitchen cabinet maker, I could get something that lasts a lifetime, or something that wears quickly.
So they do have perceived quality of being more expensive but more long lasting goods.
I bought it because they have a good rep. But I’ve owned this dishwasher for 15 years and it’s still going.
My Fisher and Paykel fridge I’ve had for 20+ years and it’s never needed any maintenance whatsoever. To me that’s pretty amazing.
The design itself has some "German overfeatured" idiosyncrasies to me. Like, when the wash is done, a little stick extends out of the top of the machine pushing the door open to vent. But then, when you tug on the door to open it, you can hear a little geared motor spin and retract that stick. Just more stuff to design, add to BOM, and to break.
Isn't this also down to age? That is, stuff like that built 100 years ago is - in my head - better quality.
However, this may very well be survivorship bias - of course anything built 100 years ago still around today is good, because anything that wasn't as good is long gone. Like my ikea furniture will be as soon as I try to move it.
I'm referring to my consistent experience of buying both laminated chipwood and veneer wood things, then seeing the former disintegrate within 5 years and the latter last 10 years with no visible damage.
It's all good now, I just wish it didn't take me 10 years to gain this knowledge. On another hand if I got it much earlier it wouldn't benefit me either because I could only afford cheap stuff anyway.
It's a 100% surviorship bias. The knockoff "ikea" style flatpack dresser that I assembled (incorrectly) when I was 12 lasted 20 years, and only finally went away because I was moving in with my girlfriend and we could afford slightly more "real" and coordinated furniture. It would have continued to work for longer.
The stuff that lasts 100 years is primarily just whatever is bought by people who treat their stuff well. That has vastly more impact than any product design excluding the modern planned obsolescence and negligence with electronics.
Basically any Toyota can make it to 250k miles, but the Million Mile Lexus is still impressive to people because it tells you about the history of the car more than the manufacturer. If you want to know what cars will make it to 1 million miles, you don't look at reliability stats, you look at what was bought by middle aged wealthy men who were good friends with very careful mechanics.
Of course a brand that sells appliance commuter and family hauling cars to people who are generally rich enough to buy enough extra capacity they're not flogging it and just pay to have it well maintained is gonna have them go to high miles. The first owner or two are basically "free" from a wear and tear perspective.
Meanwhile the average Nissan is getting driven hard right off the lot, missing fluid changes and the owner's kids are doing WWE in the back seat all right off the lot.
Unless you really wad it up any car will keep going until you stop maintaining it and get in a maintenance hole. If you never neglect to maintain it you'll never be in a hole where the sum total of needed maintenance is more than it's worth barring exceptional circumstances relevant to specific models with exceptionally high costs or low values.
This. It's equally funny and sad when I see new luxury cars with heavily scuffed rims. I don't care how well engineered the car is, it's not going to last.
No thanks. I’ll take something that is less so but will work for years without complaint.
Further anecdotally (from a guy who works at an appliance store) there is a difference in quality between Miele stuff made in their German factories and stuff made in their newer Eastern European factories (often their 'budget' line).
i'd pay not to own Miele
Also miele has too much marketing hype. Want the ultimate appliances? Buy professional equipment. Like washing machine that are used in hotels.
Just what I thought and wanted to add.
I guess if an appliance is used each day for several hours, that will last a lifetime in my home for use once or twice a week.
Downside: Professional kitchen equipment is also optimized for being easy to clean. Could be a problem if you don't like pure stainless steel very much... ;-D
Which is why the rich are terribly undiscerning purchasers: the downside for them is some wasted pocket change. The time it took to consider the purchase already earned them more money than they will spend.
The appliances themselves however absolutely are built and designed to be serviced regularly to meet their expected lifespans.
What do you think a service contract is?
Should be called dish sterilizers. They won't get dirt off - in industrial kitchens everything is rinsed first and then put in.
Home dishwashers get just as hot as the industrial versions (if you turn on those cycles - might not be allowed by modern code, but older ones do), and use harsher chemicals because they are expected to get clean after food that has dried on for a few days.
Oh yeah they will. We used to wash car parts at the end of shift before cleaning and draining the machine.
>in industrial kitchens everything is rinsed first and then put in.
Because you'd be cleaning out the dishwasher strainer grates thrice daily if you didn't make a min-effort attempt to reduce its garbage intake.
One, there are things you can do with veneer that you cannot be done in solid wood. You can resaw a board to get a book matched panel in solid wood, but you generally cannot get a four-way match because of either pattern shift, not enough thickness to start with, or basically creating veneer the hard way. This generalizes to radial matches with more pieces. That's the most basic example. There are many other things you can do with veneer that are impossible to execute in solid wood. See here[0] for more examples.
Two: professional equipment is not usually built to the customary dimensions of a private residence. A commercial range is a hell of a lot deeper than standard counter depth (about 24" in the US, probably 60cm or thereabouts in Europe because it's based off of how far you can comfortably reach). I looked into this after getting spoiled cooking on a commercial range once. It's not the cost of the range that kills you; it's the cost of the kitchen renovation to accommodate it.
There are vendors that build closer to professional quality appliances sized to residential standards. We lucked into a used Capital range a year ago for a number of dollars we could afford. It's built a lot better than a strictly residential unit and has a weight to match.
[0] https://ctfinefurniture.com/ I am unaffiliated other than owning his excellent book, which I regularly consult when I'm doing veneer work.
The dishwasher sanitizes the dishes via very hot water and thorough coverage, but does not really clean anything. It has high temperatures and high throughput - 5 minute cycles. Basically a completely different use case and probably unsuitable for a home.
If you are rich then you can buy something that is 20 times more expensive and lasts twice as long. The efficiency doesn't matter as much when it's chump change either way.
But your comment on Meile, nice kitchen cabinets, sounds like you're looking only for what the next tier above you is enjoying. (And go Bosch for the dishwasher, BTW.)
No, not really. These are examples of things I know from N+1 level. I'm curious to hear about N+2, N+3 and so on. Some of the points shared in this thread fit nicely, like "buying identical cars in locations you visit often". Or something like "don't by 488, find a used 458 instead -- it's more fun for lower price" would be appreciated.
The original post instead just rambles like this: "I know rich people, let me tell you how rich they are. You wouldn't believe it. Like, really really rich. Like they have their own island, you know".
I don't see how that's useful.
The original question still stands: What do insanely wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about?
By the definition of the question I can't know the answer myself: I am "ordinary people" so I must know nothing about it. So what's left to me is to suggest parallels at the level I do know something about.
Another example of a "middle class thing", not related to things or appliances: services, in particular moving. I changed flats many times in my life, more than 10. I used to pack, load, unload and unpack everything by myself and at some point it started to take 2-3 days of my time full time. Then one time I contracted an end2end moving service (you just give them the keys) and I would never ever go back.
Recently a friend of mine was moving and asked to help to load the truck. After an hour of sweating I asked why he didn't contract someone -- this idea just never crossed his mind. A year later he was moving again and was grateful for the advice.
Surely, rich people enjoy services that would never cross my middle class mind? A governour for the child maybe? Well I would never know.
That's very much country dependent. I live in a country where anyone middle class has a house keeper either from Phillipine or Indonesia (cost about 10-15k usd a year if you're not an asshole and don't pay the lowest possible salary). That housekeeper's work is to take care of the children and do the housework. Upper middle class people have two. Then the next level up is to also have a private driver.
Governor/Governess is after that, I know two people who do it, they hired someone directly from UK for about 45k usd a year. That person takes care of their child and helps with education/homework etc.. Main advantage compared to the housekeeper is that the governor is more educated and so will be able to actually teach things to the child. But it's not necessarily super common and I know plenty of rich parents who decided not to do that and instead invest more heavily on tuition/activities and later (starting from 9-10 years old) summer camps at Oxford, Cambridge, John Hopkins, etc...
There's a pretty good saying about 10$ boots that last a year or 100$ ones that last 10 years
If you're well enough, you can probably afford more things that you can use anyways, so it makes sense to optimize for those that give you the most kicks for your bucks, even if they're technically more expensive.
Miele are German in fact.
I love how similar all latin-based languages look like at the roots
Castles are old. And drafty. And need a LOT of renovations to bring them up to a modern standard. So he had immediately set upon this work, hiring contractors, picking out high-end appliances, arranging for the import of Italian marble countertops...
And once the place was looking nice, he threw a housewarming (castlewarming?) party, and invited all the folks from the neighboring castles. And at this party, he was regaling one of the old-money guests with how nice the downdraft range was, and how it really felt special with the new counters.
"Fascinating.", replied Old-money. "I have never been in my kitchen."
English aristocracy really knows how to cut someone to size when they feel like.
This, thankfully, only works when the recipient of the cut-down lacks self-assuredness.
If Mr. New-Money Castle Owner wears pride in knowledge & expertise on his sleeve, then no amount of snobbery will have an impact.
This is a textbook example of why you can't get a serious answer to anything nuanced on a vote based platform. The low common denominator stuff that is easy to agree with gets everybody clicking the right-think button and to the top it goes. Anything with nuance or controversy gets buried.
Even this comment I am replying to probably wouldn't have wound up where it is did it not pay homage to the god of groupthink by cheerleading for Meile, though any other brand the upper middle class likes would have fulfilled the same rhetorical purpose.
I do wonder what household appliances these homes have that Enes Yilmazer shows on his YouTube channel. It seems it's always the same huge black/silver color washer and dryer.
I'm uncomfortably enamored with this dishwasher. (Bought it over a Bosch as the percentage needing repair in the first year was 8% instead of 12% and I was flat done with it.)
The dishwasher is fully enclosed...the typical DW is open at the back with all the guts just barely contained in an open structure.
To balance the dishwasher, you slide it into the nook and turn two bolt heads that have a mechanism that raise the back of the dishwasher after it's set in place.
There are instructions on how to install matching cabinet faces...the buttons are on the top of the door...if you want zero indication you have a dishwasher, they'll accomodate.
While the drawers(?) are well thought out and can take a lot of dishes, it shines when you're entertaining, it flat SOAKS UP dishes and flatware and has cycles to safely wash crystal. We never seem to use this.
It has pucks full of detergent, a load now a days costs about $1.80...more than I'd like, but the simple avoidance of pouring soap and having a sixpack delivered when you need it is a crazy luxury.
5 years in and it's been faultless.
The convenience outweighs the cost at this point. I'm not proud about it.
That seems.. fine? Why spend a bunch of money/effort on dressing up something that'd get seen for a few hours max?
>It has pucks full of detergent, a load now a days costs about $1.80...more than I'd like, but the simple avoidance of pouring soap and having a sixpack delivered when you need it is a crazy luxury.
Is pouring out detergent powder really that much of an advantage? At best you're saving a few seconds because you don't have to portion out the soap. Using loose detergent also means you can sprinkle a bit outside of the dispenser, which improves the per-rinse cycle. That means you're getting a worse wash by using tablets, because there's only detergent for the main cycle.
Enclosing the dishwasher keeps the internals dust free...
It was awhile before I noticed, unlike every other dishwasher I'd ever owned, it didn't have a big heating coil sitting in the bottom of the dishwasher, the water heater is elsewhere.
Listen, the goal is not to convince you. I would never have purchased it had COVID not done what COVID did to the supply chain. But there are subtly significant differences between this and a $500 plastic Memorial Day special.
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness."
That being said, I've noticed that a lot of clothes that I bought 10 years ago or so are of pretty high quality compared to today, (and no, they are not rich man's clothes). Some of them I actually have been wearing for more than 10 years now.
I'm sitting at a tech office right now wearing a pair of boots that my father made for me in 2015 - regardless, they're absolutely spotless and I'd wear them to a formal event without hesitation. Every 6 months or so when I'm by his store I shine them up and put in a fresh pair of leather laces. Every 3 or so years, he re-soles them when the soles eventually wear out and lose traction. Eventually they'll require a rebuild, but they've got probably another 5-10 years of daily wear in them before that. I've got a few more pairs I swap between every so often, like a pair with OD green canvas that looks nice with khakis, but these solid black ones are my daily wear.
While 10 years sounds like a good run for boots, my father has a pair at ~35 years old now that he still wears frequently. IIRC they've been through one or two rebuilds and few re-soles in that time.
Were these commodity sneakers, I'd be purchasing a new pair every few months. Even nice running or trail shoes only tend to last a few hundred miles in my experience, but I've put tens of thousands on these and will get ten thousand more easily. Re-soles and rebuilds aren't free, but they're less than a replacement and put years of lifetime back on the boot. They're also comfortable as hell and fit me like a glove.
So in short: yeah, rich men do wear the same pair of boots for 10 years, or even far longer.
Are you these guys? One techbro recommended these to me and my cofounder and I've never looked back. Your boots are going places, literally!
Edit:- Changed link to direct.
I took them in to be rebuilt, but after inspection they said the stiffener had come loose, and nothing could be done. Here have your expensive and now broken boots back.
I'd assumed when I got them I'd be wearing them for decades, and at least a few rebuilds. Maybe there was something wrong with that specific pair, but I did have a goodyear welted sole randomly detach from a pair of six month old city shoes from the same firm. And yes I had been looking after my shoes (frequent cleaning and polishing, always using shoe trees, skipping days between wears, etc).
When I had a pair of Church's fall apart I put that down to them no-longer being a quality brand, but now I don't think you can guarantee a long life just as the shoe was expensive and from a reputable brand. I have many shoes that have lasted better (and now since covid I don't wear polished shoes daily), but that does sometimes feel like luck of the draw.
Church's was unfortunately bought by Prada, and is now a fashion brand more than a traditional high quality shoemaker.
(but with compound interest and market growth, ...)
If you find a good pair of boots, you can probably buy again without going through the investigation of an equivalent replacement.
That something to appreciate when you find something good.
Expect ~$400, and it's easy to spend $600 without much effort.
That said, look at my comment above in this thread; they do really last 10 years or more, so the investment is well worth it.
Hell, Schott will sell you a pair of made in the USA goodyear welted boots for 300$.
After punishing them heavily with hiking, working (concrete, dust, mud, stones, rocks, metal, paint...), running, sports, climbing... they are quite weathered but as good and comfortable as new. I just wish I could buy the same exact ones again.
But on the other hand, consider running shoes - most modern ones, even the expensive ones, will wear out in a few hundred kms and are usually non-repairable.
I had ikea stuff that:
- bubbled when liquid spilled on it
- scratched easily
- had screws loosen over time. basically all of them
(this was non-kitchen stuff, I just haven't bought a kitchen from them)
That's... pretty standard in Europe
If I were wealthy, I’d be getting solid hardwood…
Central Vac's are easily 4X as powerful for often the same price as the over priced Miele stuff.
You also need to be able to afford the higher up front price. Sam Vimes boots theory of socioeconomic unfairness in practice.
Ultra rich should make giving back a structural part of their lives and businesses.
In case you want to look those up, I know for sure that FaceGym masks were popular with the affluent demographic for a while.
The two that were most interesting were the travel-related (guided trips in exotic locales w/ profiles and resumes of the local guides), and oddly specific and highly-focused catalogs (gardening, specific types of home goods). The one that really stands out was a catalog with hundreds of different brushes-- each with a very specific purpose (and many with carrying cases and other accessories). I had no idea there were so many different brushes.
Some others. www.nomadicexpeditions.com www.geoex.com - Digging the 22 day train trip through the Silk Road for $50k
How about around the work via private jet? https://www.smithsonianjourneys.org/tours/around-world-priva...
Like, when buying a new bicycle I have to spent lots of time figuring out the tradeoffs between what I want, what I can get a different price points etc, as buying something wrong will set me back and be a while until I can try again. But for a reach person, they can just buy the top spec of everything, and if they don't like it just buy from a different brand.
Of course, since I'm interested in cycling, this nerding is a bit fun. But for loads of stuff it's just a hassle. Like our oven recently broke down. Then I had to spend a few evenings researching what to buy, how to get it delivered, what to do with installation etc. If I had more money, I could just tell someone to fix it, and "get me the best one".
A friend of mine has a friend that's a fancy lawyer and I went camping with them once and the lawyer had the best of the best of camping stuff. Like he just went to REI and was like "give me the best of whatever I need to camp this weekend." It's possible that he weighed the pros and cons of some of it, but I sorta doubt it. The tent fabric felt like silk and was the lightest weight of anything I've ever seen and I camp a lot of with a wide range of people that can afford nicer stuff. The tent didn't even have any branding on it. My friend was telling me about this bike the guy had, and it's basically carbon fiber everything probably $10k at least. He had wrecked his old bike and gave it to my buddy that would have just needed to get a few parts and have it assembled at a bike shop and it was basically too expensive for my buddy to justify it.
Another example is how inheritors of the Walton fortune helped build tons of biking infrastructure in an Arkansas City [1].
I wish more ultrarich people would compete on building thriving communities, instead of maximizing their own personal luxuries and walling themselves off from the world. Silicon Valley is a bit of a deranged version of this, where different companies create their own little kingdoms of community for employees, while the broader community ends up being rather dull and uninviting.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_animation
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/us/how-an-arkansas-city-b...
Nearly 10% of Americans are millionaires (at least at the household level, not necessarily per-person). It's around 6% for UK and France.
To me that suggests rich people buy privacy and the only info available is some random reddit comment
This was the one that made me question the whole post. I don't for a second believe this respect is genuine. This isn't about the person you are, but the money you could spend on whoever's kissing your ass.
I mean if you can delude yourself into thinking it's genuine I'm sure it can be enjoyable, but I for one am confident anyone "up there" is scheming something. Political and economic chess. I'd rather just be wealthy enough but unknown.
For example, things like handmade leather shoes, solid wood furniture, or even high-end kitchen tools like Miele or Sub-Zero appliances can feel like overkill until you’ve actually used them. Then you start to appreciate the craftsmanship, the reduced hassle, and the longevity they offer.
Curious if others have had similar experiences – what’s one “expensive” item that genuinely changed your perception once you owned it?
Also these things are not really that expensive compared to 5-10M person.
Try Bora coocktops
I had to purchase appliances for apartments and the first wave of products were breaking within a couple of years. I ended up purchasing appliances from high-end European companies in the second wave of appliances and haven't had issues for 3 years. The original ovens had 3 out of 5 failures before people moved in. 2 of them broke because the flimsiest plastic door latch protruding about 1" from the door broke. The doors of the oven could be removed with no tools. The company said they could send me new doors for a cost and that I could schedule a video call with the factory to learn how to re-install an oven door.
I also doubt my accountant could answer appliance quality questions. The could probably give a depreciation table.
Anyway:
1. Good midrange Japanese cooking knives. I got one on a steep discount, and now I understand why people pay a premium for them. I even bought a second one.
2. Good brands of Chinese engineering equipment. I bought a Siglent oscilloscope instead of a Hantek / Uni-T one. Before that, I had only bought the cheapest tool sufficient for the job.
I found as I've reached middle-age, I just have a bit less energy to spend struggling with things I use daily. So in these roles I appreciate something that's better quality than I strictly need. I don't come from wealth, and am a notorious cheapskate even by local standards -- but those two things were able to change my mind!
The tech billionaires don't wear anything branded or flashy besides their $1M watches, just good and well fitting clothes.
It is definitely aimed at rich people just not billionaires. But yes these brands become commodity from a certain point...although one has to be rich to be fully dressed in those clothes and change / rotate every day.
As a reminder you said “almost anything highend / luxury becomes a commodity.”
Or look at this way: $5 million throws off $200k/year (pre-tax) with a “safe” pull rate of 4%. Ok so now you want to buy a luxury car, that’s over $100k. You’ve spent most of your annual income on one car. Hardly a commodity!
$5 million is enough to sustain an upper class income in most metro regions. But a long way from commodifying luxury.
There is a reason rich people lease a lot of times and buy things with borrowed money that they'll never have to pay back.
... I mean, I think your _needs_ are met at a far, far lower level than that.
Having friends in high places can also help if you happen to run into legal issues. Though there is growing scrutiny around this.
There are only 100 U.S. senators at a time. In contrast, Forbes estimates there are about 900 billionaires in the U.S. alone this year.
And it is extremely difficult to become a Senator. Many very rich people have tried and failed to win election to the U.S. Senate. It’s not as straight forward as success in business. Politics is somewhat like magic. It’s extremely difficult to predict what is going to attract votes when. A lot of very confident rich people have been humbled this way.
Politicians are also demonstrably popular in ways the very rich are not. You only become a Senator if hundreds of thousands, to millions, of individual citizens vote for you (depending on the state). Congress overall is unpopular, but individual politicians are fairly popular to their own constituencies. Again, this is not something you can just buy, and many very rich people are thirsty for this kind of public validation.
Finally, Senators have real power, at least collectively. If enough Senators agree on something, the police will make you do it. Rich people want to shape those decisions if they can, yes, but many also like the feeling of being “close” to that kind of power. Since most will never have it themselves.
The above goes for the president even more. And for many state governors too.
This is from 10 years ago. Multiply all values by some factor that I am too lazy to estimate, but a good bet would be to try to follow asset inflation rather than consumer prices inflation.
Ultra-wealthy people also do that but they're trawling through Sothebys or Christies - eg: https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/luxury/books-&-manuscripts/b...
They don't have time to read - say - a lengthy biography about a Civil War general but they can purchase their diary or letters - people who are interested in wealth preservation, especially across generations, are trained to disdain the ephemeral. They like primary documents and depending on their age/interests, cool stuff like first edition comic books or vintage niche Chanel clutch bags.
As impulsive or indulgent as it may seem - eg: I just saw a counterfeit version of Dante's Le Terze De Rime on there for $159,000 USD - the purchase are all investments and as such treated as a tax deductible by your team of accountants. If you purchase a bottle of Romanee St Vivant as an investment but (whoops) drink it - that $16,000 is a business loss. Or maybe a trust fund loss.
And once you start spending at a certain level on sites like those and others, there are extremely nice people who would like nothing more than to invite you to private showings, arrange a private briefing to bring you up to speed with whatever topic you'd like to learn more about or help you select the right gift with which to blow the mind of a business rival or someone you're courting.
I thought that reddit piece was weird. Why would the ultra-wealthy mess around with 'masstige' kitchenware appliances? They wouldn't even have a brand on their dishwasher - it would be commissioned by an architect or interior designer quietly maintained at regular intervals by an appliance engineer who has been either supplied-by your core op-secs team or thoroughly checked out by them etc etc.
I'm not sure that I buy this. It's not simple to make a bespoke appliance like a dishwasher that's better than a very high end mass produced one. Where did you get the idea that this happens from?
Custom wine cabinet? Sure.
As other pointed out, they often just have the mass produced appliance if they are not trying to show off.
Cathode Ray Dude on Youtube talks about this in his videos about the Niveus media center computer https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2OPrGBxkD0
The rich do not give a single fuck how it functions. They have never even thought about that or considered it. If they bought a dishwasher that sucks at washing dishes, their staff will deal with that. If they bought one that breaks after a few months, it will be replaced and they probably will never know. They haven't even stepped foot in this house in months anyway.
The rich are not discerning purchasers because they do not have to be, and they think their time is way too valuable to care about simple things like "Am I spending too much on this" or "Will this widget actually work as advertised"
I _absolutely_ do not buy that very rich people have custom dishwashers. Like, _why_? There's no way it could be as good as a mass-produced unit; you benefit from massive economies of scale on the design, there, along with lessons learned from previous models.
If theres one thing all the wealthy people in my life have it is in fact _time_, which in turn means that they take their leisure activities really, really seriously.
I also mean 'don't have time to read' to be a bit sarcastic - as in it's not a flex to read the best-selling biography of whoever that was reviewed favorably or might win the Pulitzer - but having acquired the guy's letters - that even the biography author could not get - that's your one-up.
There's also the evidently more ascetic end of the billionaire spectrum - eg: Peter Thiel, Michael Burry - who don't seem to be interested in luxury, as such.
Damn, that's me, and I am not even worth a million.
I mostly can't because I have to work and getting 4-8 weeks off at a time is impossible.
I like to pretend that all I really want is to go skiing, but it turns out I also want to live in a nice house and be with my family. And for some reason I actually want that more.
"Contemplate the objects of this people's praise, survey their standards, ponder their ideas and judgments, and then tell me whether it is not most evident, from their very notion of the desirable and the excellent, that greatness, and goodness, and sanctity, and sublimity, and truth are unknown to them; and that they not only do not pursue, but do not even admire, those high attributes of the Divine Nature. This is what I am insisting on, not what they actually do or what they are, but what they revere, what they adore, what their gods are. Their god is mammon; I do not mean to say that all seek to be wealthy, but that all bow down before wealth. Wealth is that to which the multitude of men pay an instinctive homage. They measure happiness by wealth; and by wealth they measure respectability. Numbers, I say, there are who never dream that they shall ever be rich themselves, but who still at the sight of wealth feel an involuntary reverence and awe, just as if a rich man must be a good man. They like to be noticed by some particular rich man; they like on some occasion to have spoken with him; they like to know those who know him, to be intimate with his dependants, to have entered his house, nay, to know him by sight. Not, I repeat, that it ever comes into their mind that the like wealth will one day be theirs; not that they see the wealth, for the man who has it may dress, and live, and look like other men; not that they expect to gain some benefit from it: no, theirs is a disinterested homage, it is a homage resulting from an honest, genuine, hearty admiration of wealth for its own sake, such as that pure love which holy men feel for the Maker of all; it is a homage resulting from a profound faith in wealth, from the intimate sentiment of their hearts, that, however a man may look,—poor, mean, starved, decrepit, vulgar; or again, though he may be ignorant, or diseased, or feeble-minded, though he have the character of being a tyrant or a profligate, yet, if he be rich, he differs from all others; if he be rich, he has a gift, a spell, an omnipotence;—that with wealth he may do all things."[0]
There is a reason that money specifically, and not sex or knowledge or socializing or other good things that can get out of hand, is worshiped as a god by so many.
[0] https://www.newmanreader.org/works/discourses/discourse5.htm...
Relevant Andy Warhol quote: "Sometimes you fantasize that people who are really up there and rich and living it up have something you don’t have, that their things must be better than your things because they have more money than you."
https://core100.columbia.edu/article/excerpt-philosophy-andy...
Also worth pointing out that we are commenting on reddit posts. Reddit is the last place anyone should seek advice beyond how to do something or find info about hobbies.
I seen and lived this until I got my wake up call.
I was regular upper middle class, I would laugh at people who thought I was poor for having an Android because I could easily afford a $1000 iphone, I just didnt want it.
Then I got into philosophy and inevitably Stoicism, where I found happiness within.
Then I read too much philosophy and realized the promises of such ethical philosophy were harmful to my own well-being. I went full Nietzsche and realized that spending money was a demonstration of power. As Thomas Hobbes says: 'Fame makes more fame, power makes more power.'
Thus, pointless lavish spending does have a point, its to demonstrate power, which grows power.
I genuinely feel like 30+ years of my life I was tricked into a religion of modesty against my own interests. Meanwhile, the people I mocked, rappers/rich people/etc... had the right idea. Or at least right in my current set of Values.
(And if you disagree with my values, prove I'm wrong, best of luck, there is nothing backing pure reason, and if you want to be an empiricist, we have peacocking)
Consider that there are very powerful people out there who might not even carry a phone with them at all and see that as beneath them. It's a matter of values, not money.
> I could easily afford a $1000 iphone, I just didnt want it.
Rich people are also capable of thinking this? They're just people, man. They're also totally free to not care about anything they don't want to.
One of the forms of power is success power, another is riches (more here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm#link2...)
By showing you can afford lavish things, you are demonstrating success power and riches. This makes people do whatever you want, or at least tilt the scale closer into your favor.
I think Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, then reading Will To Power would very much get you up to speed. Other authors, Hobbes, Machiavelli, maybe Stirner, maybe skip to Callicles in Plato's Gorgias. Even ChatGPT can probably get you started on Nietzsche.
Whereas most people work to live, and prefer boundaries between the two, worklife is an intertwined way of being.
Brunch with your business partners, afternoon shaking hands on a golf course, dinner with a senator, placing bets on Wall Street, a penthouse suite at the resort hotel where you’re keynoting, hosting a fundraiser at your home…
- how to buy stocks, what ETFs are, what a 401(k) is, etc.
- hiring people to clean your house, do yard work, etc.
- traveling out of the country, or in many cases, how to take a plane to a part of the country that's too far to drive
- how financing works, ranges from personal credit cards to mortgages, and thus what TCO means. The number of people I grew up with who were fine with 12% on a car loan and what that meant to the final cost of the car is flabbergasting
- how to buy high-quality (expensive) stuff vs brand recognition (expensive) stuff
some anecdotes:
- a friend of mine recently did retire after 30 years in the government, wanted to buy stocks, had no idea what a brokerage was
- another guy I know, an airline pilot who grew up in a broken home and ended up with a business degree, figured out how to buy stocks, but didn't know what index funds were or that they exist outside of his 401(k)
- perfectly middle class people who will spend all weekend cleaning their house and doing yard work, and hate it, who thought hiring a cleaning person and lawn mowing guy would be too expensive ($35k-50k/yr)
- a lot of people I know are afraid to travel to non-English speaking countries even if they've been outside of the U.S., they can't fathom that you can get by in most places with English, a translate app, and pointing and smiling. Even tourist friendly places with plenty of English signage and English speaking help like France or Japan are unfathomably exotic
I think the main problem now is that these are "unknown unknowns". People don't even know to know what a 401k or similar is and thus don't know that there's something to dive deeper into there. That missing piece is very hard to solve.
I've had it myself where I run into something in my career, for example, where I'm introduced to a concept I wasn't aware of that I now use to underpin serious decision making about something like application architecture. Had I never had the opportunity to initially find out about a problem/solution, it would've made it notably harder to get better.
All the things you lists are things I personally associate with familial education. Most of those things were taught to my by my family, having grown up in a middle class home. If my parents hadn't had the opportunity to learn about those, neither would I. It's a familial/potentially class (depending on the situation) based learning opportunity, purely based on the education your family was able to receive (whether formal or not).
School is also a place to inject these concepts (personal finance specifically), and I did have a great experience with the personal finance elective at my high school when I was in 9th grade.
Tangentially, I don't think that's a perfect solution (but still important) because teenagers will absolutely ignore/tune in the info out. When people say they wish that had learned how to do their taxes in high school, I agree in principle and I do think it should be taught, but I also believe most teenagers (at least around me growing up) wouldn't have payed any attention. It doesn't mean we shouldn't teach it, but educating a teen is hard.
> All the things you lists are things I personally associate with familial education.
I absolutely agree. Or some good mentor. If your entire family runs paycheck to mouth, the likelihood of somebody able to guide you towards a low fee brokerage that provides you with the financial advice to differentiate between different investment instruments is vanishingly small. Even people who make it into white-collar jobs with 401ks are likely to only vaguely understand that it's something more than a weird savings account they can't touch.
Investment takes a certain kind of stomach and can be a very expensive training exercise. Lots of people don't do it well, even highly sophisticated and educated investors.
I remember we spent a couple weeks on stocks and bonds in a class in middle school, but basically zero time on personal finance, how loans work, how to read legal paperwork, run a ledger, etc. Those have almost always been a "learn on the job" thing since I've been alive.
Including business overhead, licensing, insurance, etc you're at 35-50k for a year of 32 hours of labor a week with the upper end a w2 employee and the lower end an illegal.
Original value looks correct.
Most people have a cleaner or lawncare crew come like once every couple weeks for a couple hours, they're not hiring a full-time employee for their 3 bedroom house on 0.1 acre lot.
I could easily hire people to do it, but I sweat bullets everytime I am guilt tripped into letting a neighbor kid mow the lawn because I know if he gets hurt I'll lose everything (renter's/ homeowners insurance usually doesn't cover unlicensed contractors).
-- some random top google result for umbrella insurance
There is some seriously crazy stuff in America. Like guys who go around asking mom & pop shops to use a normally private bathroom "for an emergency", then sue the shit out of them because it's not considered handicap accessible and now that they let the public use it it is now a public bathroom. The effect is a lot of places would rather you shit yourself than open themselves up to lawsuit.
I've seen this before, and I remain incredulous.
We learned about stocks in 4th grade and did a mock exercise picking stocks and tracking their performance over a few weeks. We did calculations on mortgage interest and investment returns in middle school math class. Every news source has a finance section and talks about stocks regularly. There are advertisements for brokerages on every TV commercial break and everywhere else ads are found. Every company I've ever worked for had a mandatory training about the 401k as part of employee onboarding and usually ongoing mentions at least once a year. There are a zillion personal finance websites, podcasts, blogs and youtube channels.
It seems like if an alien landed in the US or a time traveler arrived here, they'd learn about ETFs and 401ks within the first 24 hours whether they wanted to or not.
People have to be actively, intentionally avoiding learning these things or actively tuning it out or forgetting, because they're dead simple and information about them is incredibly easy to find.
The equivalent for a real world person would have been to
1) know what a brokerage was
2) find one
3) drive there and fill out some paperwork to make the account
4) deposit a paper check or cash at the location
5) get a phone # with a specific broker at the brokerage
6) subscribe to a local paper with the stock section
7) watch one of several thousand stocks, and write down by hand the movement of the stocks to see if you could set a strategy
8) maybe buy subscriptions for some investment magazines, a few hundred dollars per year
9) decide the time is right, call your broker, leave a message with his secretary to get back to you
10) wait for that to happen, then place your order. your broker would then charge you a percentage (up to 3% of your trade!) as their fee
11) Angry men in a pit in NYC would yell at each other for hours to make the trade. The trade would be communicated on scraps of paper with hastily written numbers, then shouted over a phone on the trading floor
12) wait for your broker to send you physical mail with your certificates or a record of ownership showing that the trade closed several days after you placed it with him
13) go through a similar process to sell your stock certificates, but then have to self track capital gains for your taxes
Can you name a single reason why you think a poor person living paycheck-to-meal would even know about or wish to participate in this?
Things got better with the internet, which didn't exist for most people until I was an adult (I know because I helped start an ISP), it still cost $30 trade electronically and settlement still didn't happen for days. So somebody making hundreds of dollars a month would have to lose $30, just to make a bet of whatever they were able to scrimp together over months, in the hope it would turn into more than $30 so they could sell it and make money above the trading fee.
Again, why would a poor person, who may not even have a bank account, be a participant in this?
So, to help with your incredulity, why would somebody, who is from a poor family, with not a single person around them trading stocks, most without full-time employment, take a brief class when they were 10, retain those precious handful of classroom hours, until they get lucky enough to have disposable income decades later and suddenly decide "I'm going to trade ETFs" <insert rich yacht buying cat meme picture>
Most people don't work in companies with a 401k, or even with any benefits at all. Why would they be familiar with managing one? Next time you eat out, trade some tips with your waiter on how they diversify their retirement investments. Ask them which ETFs they like, and if any have especially low fees, or do they pursue a market segment strategy. What's their opinion on I-bonds? Maybe they have a prediction if Cathie Wood is a cook or not?
I'd wager walking down Main Street USA and asking people in their 30s and 40s what stocks they own and what an ETF is would be get you a lot of blank stares.
Not saying I am "super wealthy" but we've paid a lot (but no obscene amounts) for a few things that felt kinda like "rock-star" treatment. Anyone can pay for these.
One example is my wife and I flew to Venice for a long weekend and hired a speed-boat to transfer us from the airport to our hotel. We literally walked up to the pier, threw our carry-on bags in the back, jumped in and roared off. I have this enduring memory of seeing some of the people who were on the same flight as us lining up and waiting for the water-bus thing as they watched us just speed off into the literal sunset. It wasn't crazy-expensive but totally worth it.
Another was we paid for an "escort" at an airport in Peru - they met us at our hotel, took us to the airport in a taxi, basically pushed us past the huge lines of people waiting for check-in, argued in Spanish with someone behind a desk, and then pushed us past more lines of people until we got to the front of the line for security where we said goodbye and waited for our cattle-class flight. Again, this was not a huge amount of money but saved a bunch of time and stress.
Generally speaking, tl;dr, I find paying a little extra for not having to wait for things at airports and hotels and theme parks and that sort of thing is what makes the every-day difference for me.
Getting wafted past the lines of people waiting for things or someone just sorting shit out for you so you don't have to are the day-to-day things that being in the top 95-98%ile of the population wealthwise makes all the difference. You save the time, and get that little zing of excitement/awkwardness as you are taken past the lines of others waiting.
Not as fancy, but my wife and kid met some friends in chicago, and the friends sprung for a water taxi to get them all from one side of town to the other. It's not even that expensive, but not something we'd just spend money on vs walking a bit and taking a train or bus.
But I think I am self conscious enough that I am always asking if I should really be doing or buying stuff that I can perfectly afford. Do I really need that new phone? I have a perfectly serviceable phone, what do I really get from these stuff that is totally within my mean.
However, it is more nuanced than that. For example, I think VVIP SHOULD be taking private flights instead of commercial ones. Should CEOs of big companies really be sharing flights with literal whos across the Atlantic? Probably not. But should these private jets have indoor tennis court or whatever it is they have? Also probably not.
I always wonder how rich I'd need to be to just buy a new phone. I always get the step down models and use them for years, only upgrading when they stop working well or I get forced to upgrade when they change network technologies. I could afford to buy any phone I wanted right now, but it seems like such a financially dumb decision.
Is this useable phone? Yea. How much more annoying should it get before I could justifiably get a new phone?
see https://finance.yahoo.com/news/michael-jordan-sells-massive-...
If you're in the Los Angeles area, you can visit the bakery yourself or if you're in the USA, you can order a cake from them - https://www.goldbelly.com/restaurants/doans-bakery/white-cho...
N.B. No affiliation with Tom Cruise, Doan's, or Goldbelly.
Flamentono2•8mo ago
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.
malfist•8mo ago
jbverschoor•8mo ago