You were a fast collegiate-level runner, became a wealthy financial adviser, who now has three sons who are doing well in high school long distance running.
What do you do? You convince one of your old running buddies, who now coaches elite runners, to coach your son. The son sets the national high school indoor record for the 800m.
Son decides to go pro after graduating high school.
Then Covid19 hits. Access to outdoor 400 tracks is limited. What do you do?
You build an 8 lane 400m track with running surface to match the quality at the site of the Word/US track and field championships. Cost: ~$4M
You hire the best coaches for your kids. Coach needs a place to stay nearby - no problem, buy a townhouse for him to stay at. etc.
I really like this post since it shows how very little there is for the wealthy to buy other than status goods.
The life of the rich, other than status, is very much like the life of upper middle class. The same phones, the same digital entertainment, the same appliances in their homes.
We have very few items for the rich to buy. Honestly, it is a problem it breaks incentives and it drives the rich more towards status goods which help no one since they are zero sum.
We should have expensive products which actually improve lives.
SJC_Hacker · 3h ago
I'd say it really depends on the mentality of the very rich person
The very wealthy are going to fly private. Upper middle class could swing this on a case-to-case basis, but not regularly and especially if not if they frequently travel
Other than that, the main difference is the very wealthy having a mentality of getting people to "take care of problems" to a much larger extent. For example, routine tasks like cleaning. An upper MC person might have a weekly cleaner at best. But they still have to load/unload dishwasher, do their own laundry, etc. A very rich person has a full-time housekeeper.
The very rich have circles of people they rely on to take care of problems. Like having "a lawyer" who they go to for and have known for years. There seems to be much more of a sense of personal relationships / loyalty. Almost like the old feudal oaths.
Animats · 3h ago
> The very rich have circles of people they rely on to take care of problems.
At the higher levels, there's a "family office" which takes care of such things.
All bills go there, and anything that needs to be done, they take care of.
The first big one was the Rockefellers', which was in Rockefeller Center in New York. (That turned into a business. Now it offers Being Rich as a Service.)
JumpCrisscross · 2h ago
Family offices manage investments. Personal staff are typically separate.
vjk800 · 2h ago
> Other than that, the main difference is the very wealthy having a mentality of getting people to "take care of problems" to a much larger extent. For example, routine tasks like cleaning. An upper MC person might have a weekly cleaner at best.
Pfft... amateurs. I've solved the same problem by just living in filth.
rglullis · 3h ago
> A very rich person has a full-time housekeeper.
So does any middle class family living in a developing country with high economic inequality.
drewcoo · 1h ago
And it would be heartless not to. Those housekeepers need jobs and incomes.
naveen99 · 3h ago
I would pay to avoid flying : private or public…
lwo32k · 2h ago
> which help no one since they are zero sum
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.
47282847 · 2h ago
In my experience roaming many different groups, the ones who do not signal status typically are the most powerful/influental. Their membership is safe; they don’t need to signal status, or rather, signaling it draws too much attention (annoyances by those seeking to gain status by affiliation). I remember reading a study about this some years back to find my own findings confirmed.
The people I know with a net worth over 10m do not display it. Why would they want to. It only has downsides and no upside. Same applies to other forms of status/rank/belonging.
(Not contradicting your points, merely adding to them.)
If you want to experiment with that, try to NOT match other people’s style AND radiate a deep sense of security/belonging/entitlement. Do not hide your (other) insecurities; those with status don’t have to hide their authenticity. This may sound like a contradiction at first, but you can develop an universal sense of belonging that remains authentic. You will be surprised which people will suddenly find you to talk with you, once you stop seeking their attention.
mpweiher · 31m ago
> the ones who do not signal status
> 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
HardCodedBias · 1h ago
Not to be trite, but signaling status is only complicated due to animals/humans making it complex. These are games and they are zero sum games.
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.
amarcheschi · 3h ago
I knew a son of two entrepreneurs with a ~30m yacht, they own a (ex) monastery they use, either for parties, events, or as a residence
They have Miele appliances, but having "same appliances" doesn't make justice to the fact that there are deeper differences. Yes, they're status goods, but I think one's life might greatly improve by being very wealthy - even if your life can still be shitty as a wealthy person
never_inline · 3h ago
If I were rich, I would have a personal data center, an aeronautics lab, a tropical farm, mediaeval fort, things like that. Not this yatches and crap.
bombela · 3h ago
And I would sell tickets (at a loss, ). Because whats something cool if nobody witnesses it.
LaundroMat · 2h ago
Why sell tickets then? :)
tryauuum · 2h ago
to filter out people completely uninterested in the topic
In fact they depend on the upper middle class in order to have those things. I'm thinking about cell phones. Nobody can have a cell phone unless enough people can afford them to create an incentive to build and improve the infrastructure.
maxerickson · 58m ago
The other piece is that there's no incentive to keep prices out of reach.
There might be reasons for high prices, like costly manufacture, but no one is going to refuse to expand their market by 10000x if they are able to bring costs down.
candiddevmike · 3h ago
Same thing with 401k enrollments at businesses. Management gets way more of a benefit from them than the wage slaves, but needs to maintain a minimum amount of people enrolled.
SoftTalker · 3h ago
The very wealthy had mobile phones years before they were commonly available/affordable. The only things they can't have are things that are technically/physically impossible. A Gilded Age railroad titan could not have had a mobile phone. But the wealthy had them in the 1940s.
analog31 · 1h ago
Sure, but they were giant beasts with limited functionality. My first boss's wife had one for her real estate business. It came in a shoulder bag. The investment that produced today's smart phones and infrastructure required broader access.
BurningFrog · 3h ago
Without people to buy from, money is worthless.
immibis · 2h ago
Sometimes it's fun to realize that if we all just decided dollars were worthless, they would be. There'd be nothing the government could do about it.
Crypto ain't it, though. Even the better-scaling blockchains still don't scale very well. I've heard of a few different mesh-network currency projects, and I wonder if any of them could scale by essentially giving each user their own blockchain. However, in a mesh-network currency, you still have to find a conversion path with enough capacity, and pay a fee at each step, so maybe that's not it either.
doubled112 · 2h ago
I’ve tried saying this the other way around to people and I’ve only received blank stares. Maybe I should describe it like that.
Money is only valuable because we decided it has value. It can’t really do anything for you except be spent. It isn’t like a log, which could be burned, or ground into paper, turned into a weapon, etc
analog31 · 59m ago
My viewpoint is that money is a technology, and people will choose whatever technology works for their use. A technology can be designed so that some favored uses are much more likely than others. For our government money, those uses are as a medium of exchange, temporary store of value, and tool of government economic policy. Also, some money transactions are delimited by regulations.
People already choose that their government money is worthless, e.g., the people of Venezuela and Russia. They will risk prosecution to move their wealth into assets valued in dollars or euro's. Even in the dollar and euro zones, people use other technologies for storing and exchanging wealth. Most wealthy people don't store their wealth directly in dollars already.
The value of government money is based on expectations about the future behavior of the government. This is at least a little better than being arbitrary or a collective delusion, in the short term. There are already ways to bet against it if you want.
JumpCrisscross · 3h ago
> We have very few items for the rich to buy
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.
HardCodedBias · 3h ago
These are mostly positional items.
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.
sarchertech · 3h ago
I stayed at the 4 seasons a few years ago just to give it a try. Not even remotely worth it. The only real difference I noticed was the obsequiousness of the staff.
If you want hotel employees to kiss your ass and pretend to respect you, then this is the place for you. But the quality of the room wasn’t noticeably better than other places I’ve stayed.
I will give you a good example of something that most upper middle class people can’t afford or at least can’t afford frequently.
Disney World VIP tours. My wife has family who are club 33 members and they gifted us a VIP tour as a wedding present. The tour guide drives you around to the different parks and walks you backstage through tunnels and hidden areas to get you the very front of any ride you want to go on.
JumpCrisscross · 2h ago
> the quality of the room wasn’t noticeably better than other places I’ve stayed
I broadly agree with you on their hotels. But I’d note that Four Seasons doesn’t compete on room quality, but service. If you planned your stay perfectly they shouldn’t outperform. But if you forgot something, or need help with something weird, they have a habit of being halfway legendary. (Colleague left his suit at home. They had one made overnight. Concierge apparently knew a suit maker’s cell.)
JumpCrisscross · 3h ago
> four seasons isn't materially better than the hilton next door
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.
rangestransform · 2h ago
These days I feel like I’m getting nickel-and-dimed more at the grand Hyatt than at Hyatt place
vidarh · 3h ago
I clicked through hoping for something interesting and different, and got the same impression.
So... More plus influence.
I think the only thing listed that people with less money don't really "know about" is how much perspective changes with staff. You know people have people, but not necessarily how it changes things.
I'm on the very low end of that - I run a small DevOps consultancy and can, now employ a few people in low cost countries, and though I've managed large teams before, having unilateral ability to set people to work on things because I want them is a game changer, and it's hard to get used to asking for things instead of doing them.
The rest feels like things everyone knows, if not directly then from TV and movies.
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.
canucker2016 · 58m ago
In Bill Gates's post about changing his charitable giving goal to give most of it away in the next 20 years, he references Chuck Feeney as someone he admired.
Until he was 75, he traveled only in coach, and carried reading materials in a plastic bag." He did not own a car or a house and wore a $10 Casio F-91W watch
He gave away most of his fortune and required recipients not to reveal the source of the donation.
Gud · 1h ago
Bill Gates gets a lot of hate for good reason.
His business practices killed off a lot of good products. BeOS, anyone?
candiddevmike · 3h ago
Yet people still hate the thought of a "maximum wage" or limit to wealth. Everyone should have a life of comfort, not just those who won the lottery or were born into it.
nativeit · 3h ago
We should have 90% top marginal tax rates instead.
HardCodedBias · 3h ago
How about we do the exact opposite?
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.
jjcob · 2h ago
That's the current status quo, isn't it?
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.
ifyoubuildit · 2h ago
> The same phones, the same digital entertainment, the same appliances in their homes.
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.
david38 · 1h ago
Little, but largely impactful in certain circumstances
* money for health care
* education
* money to walk away from a bad job
+ money to hold you over for extended periods during hard times
squigz · 1h ago
> We should have expensive products which actually improve lives.
We do. It's just that "wealthy" is far past the point of diminishing returns when it comes to buying high-quality expensive items.
No, we don't need to come up with things for the rich to buy just to fix their incentives. We should be asking ourselves how to decrease wealth inequality, not how to make it more fair to those on top.
Immortalin · 3h ago
> We should have expensive products which actually improve lives.
Maybe the super rich should take up training LLMs as a hobby.
globalise83 · 3h ago
That's literally the case already: each tech oligarch has their own toy AI company.
cess11 · 3h ago
No, we should get rid of the rich. They all became that way through exploitation or crime so it is moral to redistribute their wealth, and obviously so if unions or other democratic organisations are strong enough to do it.
criddell · 3h ago
What are the major crimes or exploitation that Warren Buffet is guilty of?
ofcourseyoudo · 1h ago
This is a great answer.
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.)
canucker2016 · 1h ago
Automation is for less wealthy rich people - so the company can serve more users.
When you are rich, you get a real person who speaks your language well and has the authority/power to get things done.
Brings to mind the famous Joseph Heller quote: "At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, 'Yes, but I have something he will never have … enough.'"
I saw that Reddit post a while back. It’s interesting, but I wonder how much it really applies to all of the super wealthy. There are certainly billionaires and centimillionaires who reject that lifestyle out of hand (I know I certainly would). The average person doesn’t know their name and they prefer it that way. Even the local billionaire near where I lived for a while was pretty modest, all considered (his kids not so much). I was surprised to see him and his family sit down next to mine at a restaurant one day. Could overhear him talking about the local farmers market and commenting about the tomatoes of the season haha
macNchz · 3h ago
There is certainly a wide spectrum in how people behave, and an important factor is also how they would like to be perceived by others. Rundowns on how wealthy people live will tend to overindex on the behavior of people who want others to know they’re wealthy.
As an example, there’s a culture among what people refer to as "old money" families in the US northeast (with generational wealth from long ago), wherein they tend to avoid seeming outwardly wealthy or really talking about money at all…generally aiming to project an unpretentious vibe, eschewing designer clothes and driving 20 year old Volvos, but still spending vacations at long-owned family getaways worth tens of millions, flying first or charter, and send their kids to specific, expensive schools to socialize with others of similar backgrounds.
borski · 3h ago
What wealth buys you is the freedom and opportunity to make that choice. It’s not that you have to use your influence; it’s that if your local billionaire whose name nobody knew decided to make a phone call or two, people would still pick up his call.
That isn’t true for your local plumber.
Loughla · 3h ago
The local billionaires here own a large family business. The founders (parents) were great people. They lived life poor for the first 50 years of their lives. They were super down to earth.
The next generation are mostly good people. They're involved in politics at the state level and have some philanthropic organizations that really do good work with zero strings attached.
The grandkids, who all have known nothing but having immense wealth are garbage humans. They're entitled, awful, mean spirited assholes. Every. Last. One. They frequent local businesses, and the number of times I've heard, "don't you know who I am" is astounding.
The business mostly runs itself at this point, but I genuinely fear for the future in this area. There's already undercurrents of the family using its connections to bail out one of the grandkids when he was drunk driving. I believe the first murder will happen within the next decade.
The grandparents would be absolutely horrified if they saw what their family was turning into.
martinpw · 28m ago
> 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.
steveBK123 · 3h ago
Having worked at a few 100~1000 person companies run by billionaires, this tracks.
Most of the difference in lifestyle is the quantity and quality of housing they can afford, and having people to take care of problems for them. But they ALL universally have messed up personal lives with multiple messy divorces, embarrassing affairs, NYPost Page Six appearances, etc.
The one thing you'd think it gives them is freedom, but they all pretty much end up working til they die so I don't know. I'm not sure if the money breaks something in their brain, or their broken brain is what leads them to chase the money. Likely some of both!
There's some level where you can afford 2-3 nice residences, flying private, and not lose your damn mind. I've seen some of the billionaire's lieutenants achieve this balance. Basically being able to be fabulously rich but anonymous. Like the Bill Murray quote about people who want to be rich & famous should try just being rich first.
I think these guys I've seen are probably in the bucket the reddit OP marks "Net worth of $30mm-$100mm". Adjust that upwards for inflation and also to account for many of these people being in VHCOL areas so maybe it's like $50-200mm.
TMWNN · 3h ago
>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.
>"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."
> There is literally nothing you can't buy except. Love.
I feel like Elon is finding this part out the hard way lately.
junon · 3h ago
Given what we know about how he goes about making children, I don't really think love is the objective with Elon.
hshshshshsh · 3h ago
There are no objectives. Just conditioned patterns one adapt to survive childhood.
notahacker · 3h ago
You'd think he'd have enough accolades without shooting for the title of "world's most fecund incel"...
neilv · 3h ago
> There is literally nothing you can't buy except. Love. Sorry to sound so trite, but it is nearly impossible to have a normal emotional relationship at this level. It is hard to sacrifice for another person when you are never asked to sacrifice ANYTHING. Money can solve all problems for someone, so you offer it, because there is so much else to do. Your time is SOOOO valuable that you ration it. And that makes you lose connections with people.
That, and being surrounded by fawning yes-people, and the drugs?
In the worst cases (and there are a few, currently), you decide that you should be in charge of everything, democracy is a mistake, and that you are the person to destroy it.
Who has time for love, when there's so much ego to give.
No comments yet
ubertaco · 3h ago
I think much of human history (not just recent US history, but that's a prominent example on folks' minds these days) proves that the biggest differentiator that the wealthy can buy is complete immunity from any sort of legal consequences.
Even if you don't already live in a high-corruption society, you can either spend some of your wealth introducing that corruption (which pays dividends), or you can just go somewhere else that's already high-corruption and bribe your way into immediate permanent residence.
Live in a democracy? Just buy public opinion by leveraging your wealth into a highly-profitable propaganda network, which will also give you an appealing platform for opportunist would-be government officials, who will then owe you, making your bribes cheaper. Maybe you can even just directly blackmail or entrap them along the way, so you don't even have to pay.
Live in an autocracy? Buy enough weaponry and PMCs to insulate yourself or even rival the government itself, or just buy the autocrat's favor directly.
Live in an oligarchy? Psh, your work is already done. Just use the system as it's designed: to be exploited by your vast wealth.
busymom0 · 3h ago
One of my favorite lines from the tv show Billions is:
> 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.
All that wealth is great, and may even make a difference if you catch cancer. Or not.
One famous chap who is nailing it is Shatner. Strive to be spreading joy like that guy, whatever your means.
candiddevmike · 3h ago
Shatner has always been a jerk, the joy you're seeing is manufactured PR for a man who is worried about his "legacy" like any of the other older rich.
kstrauser · 3h ago
Does that make a difference to people outside his personal circle, though? An extreme example of this is Bill Gates, spending billions to cure diseases. Maybe he’s only trying to buy his way into heaven, but I bet the people cured by his medicine couldn’t care less about his motivations.
add-sub-mul-div · 1h ago
I agree in the case of Bill Gates. Shatner, however, is just some Hollywood (reported) asshole. I do lose respect for a celebrity like that even if I'm not personally interacting with them.
kstrauser · 55m ago
I get it, I do. My opinion on Shatner was that he was a jerk to his coworkers a long time ago. I don’t follow him super closely, but most people chill over the course of 50 years or so. I do hope he has.
mjevans · 3h ago
I don't know much about anyone, but the 1990s Star Trek captains were more my speed.
Picard, Sisko (spelling), Janeway
I hope none of them are bad people IRL, they didn't give that impression on the little screen.
InMice · 3h ago
index funds?
leftcenterright · 3h ago
So, no wealthy person is buying a physics lecture or investing in experiments to better understand the nature of this universe we live in? /s
btw does anyone know if places like Fermi lab, CERN receive donations from the super-wealthy?
Government labs, not so much. But universities and independent research institutions, sure. For example, the Perimeter Institute is considered to be one of the top theoretical physics institutions in the world, and it exists because Mike Lazaridis made a ton of money from Research in Motion (aka BlackBerry) and decided that Canada needed a top tier theoretical physics institute.
lokimedes · 3h ago
I was part of the ATLAS collaboration at CERN. We had an annual collaboration meeting in Copenhagen, perhaps in 2012 or so. Poul Allen’s yacht was moored in the harbor, across from the venue. It as the high point of CERN hype, and we knew that he was a patron of the sciences. So a delegation (our spokesperson etc.) was sent with some ATLAS merchandise to greet him, and perhaps suggest a sponsorship of some student activities.
Allen was a uniquely generous person when it came to science, but historically, science is a gentleman activity for men og free time, so it surely happens.
lokimedes · 3h ago
Personally, the freedom to pursue my scientific curiosity is the only motivation to seek wealth.
If I by virtue of satisfying wealthy people’s interests in fundamental physics could sustain my life and research, I wouldn’t care about accumulating wealth for myself.
analog31 · 3h ago
I don't think directly, but wealthy people occasionally "buy a building" at a university, or fund an endowed professorship.
auntienomen · 3h ago
Jim Simons did in fact fund Brookhaven national lab directly at one point. His foundations and friends continue to fund a variety of scientific endeavors. But we don't have too many scholar-turned-philanthropists around, unfortunately.
SoftTalker · 2h ago
Occasionally? It's very common. I guess for an individual wealthy person it might be occasional or a one-time thing.
azlev · 3h ago
With billions, can I be Batman?
Balgair · 1h ago
I'm going to honestly answer here.
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.
Flamentono2 · 4h ago
Wrong question, boring answer.
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 · 3h ago
You don't have to read or engage with something you don't like.
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...
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.
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.)
Pfft... amateurs. I've solved the same problem by just living in filth.
So does any middle class family living in a developing country with high economic inequality.
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.
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
https://g.co/kgs/tgHhdkD
You aren’t alone
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.
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.
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.
So... More plus influence.
I think the only thing listed that people with less money don't really "know about" is how much perspective changes with staff. You know people have people, but not necessarily how it changes things.
I'm on the very low end of that - I run a small DevOps consultancy and can, now employ a few people in low cost countries, and though I've managed large teams before, having unilateral ability to set people to work on things because I want them is a game changer, and it's hard to get used to asking for things instead of doing them.
The rest feels like things everyone knows, if not directly then from TV and movies.
I 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.
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Feeney
He gave away most of his fortune and required recipients not to reveal the source of the donation.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.
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.
Maybe the super rich should take up training LLMs as a hobby.
But I'm curious what the answer would look like if every strata in it was not "things you can buy" but "things you can do with the money" ... if the "IMPACT" section was delineated at each level.
One of the things I envy the most about my rich friends is their capacity to be generous. They can materialize their compassion on a regular basis without having to balance their budget.
I'd like to see what that looks like at each of these wealth levels.
(One funny thing I noticed is that I have multiple friends with virtual personal assistants now, at middle class levels of weath/entrepreneurship... definitely not a rich man's thing anymore.)
When you are rich, you get a real person who speaks your language well and has the authority/power to get things done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-net-worth_individual
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10651136-at-a-party-given-b...
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.
That isn’t true for your local plumber.
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.
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."
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...
I feel like Elon is finding this part out the hard way lately.
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.
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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.
> Chuck Rhoades: Walk away.
> Bobby Axelrod: I should. But then again, what's the point of having fuck you money, if you never say, fuck you.
https://youtu.be/upfyoQdc_r4
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.
btw does anyone know if places like Fermi lab, CERN receive donations from the super-wealthy?
No, because Batman isn't a real person with real constraints.
Sure, I mean, if you have a $1B, then you get to have a lab with gadget people making cool shit and you can buy a fighter jet and a personal submarine and you have the detective agency too.
But you don't get the rogues gallery of super villains. You don't get new knees every week. You don't get to save your local city, because the problems are mostly the problems that the people cause themselves. And solving all those problems makes you a tyrant, not a hero. And even then, the problems are the same we've had since before history.
This is why in the real world, we have philanthropy mostly aimed at education and the alleviation of extreme poverty and diseases as the main outlets for the billionaires. Because it's the only thing we think that works at all.
I guess, if you really wanted to be Batman, you could fund yet another study that would state how best to give away dollars. But, without even having to look, I know that there are a few dozen of them out there already and they all pretty much say the same thing: that it's muddy and hard to discern, but maybe if you squint, education and making sure people have food and shelter.
To be Batman, you already can do it. It's mosquito nets for the poor, it's giving that bum a $100 and an hour, it's volunteering with prisoners to get them to read, it's making sure your kids' classmates have a snack before the test, etc.
So yeah, the real world Batman is a boring stressed-out Mom that's active in the PTA, her church/community-center, and local politics. Real World Bruce Wayne is Steve Rogers before the serum.
I 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.