You’d be surprised at how these billionaires hire people

October 29, 2024 12:35 PM

When you meet these people, most of the time, you’re going to be disappointed. Either because they’re mean, or they’re just not like what you thought they were going to be like. The Hollywood publicity machine creates a certain image, and it’s very rare to meet a celebrity who is genuinely an amazing, brilliant, kind, humane person to everyone all the time. from What It’s Like Being a Billionaire’s Personal Assistant [The Cut; ungated]
posted by chavenet (63 comments total)

I have just written an entire series of romance novels in my head. My god, the paragraph about recoveries alone is a spin-off series.
posted by jacquilynne at 12:46 PM on October 29 [7 favorites]

It seems like no one is better off with all that money and privilege. Not the folks it is taken from, but even those taking it seem miserable.
posted by Carillon at 1:00 PM on October 29 [15 favorites]

I do contract work for some local gentry types and yeah, this, but to scale
posted by toodleydoodley at 1:02 PM on October 29 [3 favorites]

I have no idea whether this guy is a good personal assistant, but he's a brilliant self-promoter. He is currently in the business of matching PAs and clients, so I can understand that he wants press, but he also want to impress both potential PAs and potential clients. I guess the crazy stories - whether true or false - might impress people who want the jobs, and the warnings might scare away those who think it would be a cushy job. But rich people want discretion above all. Maybe he thinks they won't be scared away if he doesn't name names, or maybe they don't care because he's making it up or embellishing it. Or maybe being in the spotlight is fun enough or helpful enough to make up for losing clients who don't want their dirty laundry aired, even anonymously.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 1:04 PM on October 29 [3 favorites]

Look, this is entertaining, but-- what's that gentle jangling noise? Why, bless me, it's about half of my bullshit detectors going off all at once! Oh, that darling little glass windchime? That's the one that rings clear and true whenever the phrase "former military special forces" appears in print. And the "everyone can be bribed" cowbell is ding-donging away, as well. Golly!
posted by phooky at 1:09 PM on October 29 [24 favorites]

Every billionaire is by definition a sociopath in my book. That kind of money can't be earned. Yes that includes your favorite billionaire.
posted by SaltySalticid at 1:11 PM on October 29 [24 favorites]

Every personal assistant to even low-level CEOs I've met have had a look in their eyes like they're indoctrinated in a cult and have at least three shivs concealed on their person
posted by credulous at 1:30 PM on October 29 [16 favorites]

The article is fascinating, not least because it unwittingly makes a very good case that there should be no billionaires.
posted by zompist at 1:31 PM on October 29 [19 favorites]

yeah, that is an interesting read. I'm happy to say that I live a life completely insulated from that sort of wealth or the mega-wealthy. no one should have that much money, or imagine that they are so privileged. I can't even wrap my head around it.
posted by supermedusa at 1:48 PM on October 29 [6 favorites]

The Hollywood publicity machine creates a certain image, and it’s very rare to meet a celebrity who is genuinely an amazing, brilliant, kind, humane person to everyone all the time.

I'm sorry is... is this what people actually think billionaires are like? Is this like that thing where people don't understand what movies mean and take all the wrong lessons from shit like Iron Man?
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 1:52 PM on October 29 [10 favorites]

I was on a team hired to do some work for a billionaire once & found the dude tedious, self-important, obsessed with some weird ideas that he wanted to implement in a way that made no sense, also he'd change the spec every like three days & I'd have to scrap everything & yeah EXHAUSTING

that's my only data point but fuck working for billionaires afaict
posted by taquito sunrise at 1:52 PM on October 29 [8 favorites]

I know someone who has worked in the households of ultra high net worth folks before and I think the thing that many of them have going on that regular people don't is a sense that they should never have to compromise or accept less than exactly what they want. This comes out in some wild ways - loving the look of a stocked fridge even when they know they're leaving for six weeks and nobody will eat the food, or my "favorite", someone who wanted a kid but whose partner didn't, so they just had a child through a surrogate and maintained two entirely separate households, one with the partner and one with the kids and support staff hired to raise them.

It's wild to imagine having that kind of wealth, to be able to just buy your way out of any issue. You get why so many of these guys get so obsessed with life extension. There are so few things money can't buy.
posted by potrzebie at 1:54 PM on October 29 [40 favorites]

I know someone who's had this job, albeit a level lower-- running an agency matching PA's with mere multi-multi-millionaires and C-Suite occupants at smaller companies. These stories all sounds pretty familiar, just scaled up 10x or 100x.

At the scale of royal families, these people's activities don't fall into the scale of personal consumption. It's an industrial-grade entertainment-and-pleasure operation for the benefit of those few. It takes a similar level of orchestration and expense to organize and move people and equipment for a large music tour. The article expects us to be impressed by the level of expense, or, like, how much attention is paid to the details of the experience. That's not impressive, we do that in the entertainment business all the time. What's perverse, is that's for the sole benefit of that one little entourage's momentary enjoyment, rather than 50,000 people at a concert or 50million people watching a film.
posted by hovey at 2:00 PM on October 29 [18 favorites]

Extreme money is so warping that you can say “this person has never been told no” and instead of immediately saying no to unreasonable demands and helping the person understand reality, you bend over backwards and remove your soul to keep them in their bubble.

I’ve never known billionaires but I do know very wealthy families and yeah, pretty much everything in the article tracks, just scaled down a bit for my experience. The thing is, a significant chunk of those multi millionaires are no longer such, because they have carefully carved up the golden goose and distributed it purposefully among family, charities, scholarships, and endowments. Because it’s possible for them to do so, and see the massive impact of their better choices. But billionaires, unless they are literally buying countries, could work every day to rid themselves of their wealth in the exact way they deem correct, and it would take a lifetime. To speed it up, they would have to relinquish control of exactly how the money would be used, which of course is unthinkable. Because nobody has ever told them no.
posted by Mizu at 2:15 PM on October 29 [15 favorites]

Even further down the pyramid, I have friends with high-level IT jobs that bring in over $100,000 a year, and while that's not nearly enough to warp their humanity, I still marvel at their ability to, for example, just walk into a grocery store and buy anything that looks interesting without even giving it a second thought. It's alien to me.
posted by Faint of Butt at 2:31 PM on October 29 [12 favorites]

I'd never really considered before how exhausting and tedious it would be to be very rich. So, this was interesting. I have super plebian tastes, I don't give a fuck about fancy restaurants, I'd just wear cargo shorts and go for dim sum. I don't think I'd be very good at being super rich.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 3:47 PM on October 29 [5 favorites]

I'm sorry is... is this what people actually think billionaires are like?

No, although you could be forgiven for thinking so because the OP used that pull-quote, which was a bit confusing. But I think the person was talking about how the celebrities are that they have come into contact with as a result of proximity to billionaires, not how the billionaires themselves are perceived.
posted by axiom at 3:56 PM on October 29 [1 favorite]

…it’s very rare to meet a celebrity who is genuinely an amazing, brilliant, kind, humane person to everyone all the time.

To be honest, it isn’t that common to meet anyone who is that wonderful all the time.
posted by TedW at 4:04 PM on October 29 [16 favorites]

What an extremely sad way to live. Fancy being so...stunted, I guess, that you need to have your towels rolled a special way, not because you have sensory issues or because you enjoy organizing things but because you just are so rich that you have never developed the psychic resources to deal with anything else.

Also, I have noticed that many very rich people spend a lot of time in hotels and decorate their homes to look like hotels and spas, both things that I was raised to believe were a bit vulgar, frankly. Again, it seems sad to live in such a way that the very best home you can imagine for yourself looks like a fancy place of business.
posted by Frowner at 4:18 PM on October 29 [20 favorites]

Hotels are just so corporate and boring...

Just came back from a road trip from Seattle to LA. Stayed in many hotels.

One out in the Central Valley where the TVs didn't work. I had checked in pretty early, mostly for timing reasons, but wanted to sit around and watch TV all afternoon/evening. Rude desk clerk told me to stop interrupting so he could say what he wanted. Offered me a $20 discount. Fuck that. I don't care about $20. Get someone to fix your Internet. (Did have four feral/outdoor cats hanging out by the pool courtyard, one of which was very friendly and accepting of scritches...)

And that is where you are when you have plenty of money.

Billionaires? You probably couldn't find a way to spend that kind of money. Nothing matters how much it costs when you have a billion dollars. A billion is a really large number.

But requiring this kind of obsequience and pampering? Just no
posted by Windopaene at 4:54 PM on October 29 [2 favorites]

It takes a similar level of orchestration and expense to organize and move people and equipment for a large music tour.

There's a book titled Billion Dollar Baby that was written during and about the last tour that Alice Cooper did with his original band, all guys that he knew during high school, when they were really popular in the early-mid 70s. One of the tour personnel--either the tour manager or the assistant tour manager--was talking about one of her duties, which was rounding up the band to leave the hotel in the morning. One of the group, the lead guitarist, who was acknowledged to have a drug problem, was the worst, having to have someone start hammering on his door about an hour before leaving. Alice was fine, never a problem (despite putting away a case of beer a night)--but then she stops herself and says, "But we're just talking about getting up in the morning."

And that was a band that was only really on top for a few years. Imagine having orders of magnitude more money, for decades. No wonder he cites a $250K salary for a personal assistant.
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:22 PM on October 29 [3 favorites]

"And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human."

-Count Zero (1986), by William Gibson
posted by AlSweigart at 5:23 PM on October 29 [38 favorites]

Every personal assistant to even low-level CEOs I've met have had a look in their eyes like they're indoctrinated in a cult and have at least three shivs concealed on their person

Funny you should mention that (only pointed towards the end you wouldn't think maybe)
posted by symbioid at 5:33 PM on October 29 [2 favorites]

It was opening weekend, seven o’clock on Friday. The movie was sold out in every theater, and the client wanted to see it privately. So I went to the movie theater and I talked to the GM and I said, “Listen, I’m prepared to pay you $5,000 for the favor, and I will buy every seat.”

Incredibly, we live in a society where this is taken as some kind of cool, glamorous amazingness - wow, this person can spend $5000 plus the cost of a theater of tickets on a whim and has the power to get whatever they want!!! - instead of as just about the most fucking pathetic display you can imagine. This person wants to see a movie right away now even though this very same movie will be showing widely in coming days, just like a four year old, but unlike a four year old they're a grown-up and thus can't be distracted from their dumb whim by putting on Blue's Clues.

Bad enough to live in a huge house that someone has decorated for you to resemble a commercial space, bad enough to be unable to handle towels that are folded rather than rolled, but how much worse to be unable to wait fifteen hours to see a mass market movie?

I mean, at least the very rich in Gibson novels are entertainingly weird - these people are just destroying the planet so that they can see Iron Man III the night that it opens. Man, you realize that after they destroy society, they'll have a compound with a bunch of people in shock collars catering to their whims, and their whims will be the most idiotic soft-baby bullshit you can possibly imagine. The bandits cannot sweep down from the hills and overwhelm them soon enough.
posted by Frowner at 6:26 PM on October 29 [30 favorites]

I can't find my copy of Count Zero. Ugh. Nor Necromancer, but, whatevs on that. Just got back my copy of The Peripheral from my son, who didn't read it...

But now I can reread it, and the Agency.

Have to finish Blitz first, (third of the Rook series, which if you haven't read, you should).
posted by Windopaene at 6:45 PM on October 29 [4 favorites]

Your son needs to read it. It's his best work since Pattern Recognition. I've taught it, twice now, to college students, as an exercise in what it means to interpret a text and how SF works through estrangement. Five women and one dude have cried in class about the Jackpot.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 6:49 PM on October 29 [5 favorites]

I can't get any of my family to engage with The Peripheral.

No one will watch the Amazon prime show, (Wilf was not a badass black man named Wolf, but I digress). I have watched episode 1 about 4 times. And I agree. It was pretty great.

Pattern Recognition was great. Didn't like Spook Country or Zero History very much.

Can't wait to reread The Peripheral
posted by Windopaene at 6:56 PM on October 29 [2 favorites]

It’s odd to reflect that dictators of autocracies, people like Kim Jong Il and Saddam Hussein and Vladimir Putin, are the only people likely to have greater senses of entitlement than these billionaires, and more warped ideas of what they can demand other people do, yet paradoxically have to be more tied into the real world of consequences, because of the greater risk they face of ending up hanged by the next régime.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 7:09 PM on October 29 [4 favorites]

I'm happy to say that I live a life completely insulated from that sort of wealth or the mega-wealthy.

you may wish to sit down for what I'm about to tell you
posted by ginger.beef at 7:29 PM on October 29 [18 favorites]

^Am I actually really rich?!
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 7:42 PM on October 29 [7 favorites]

Not all billionaires: 11 Frugal Habits of Warren Buffett. Now of course much of this is his PR schtick (using coupons at McDonald's, etc.). But it does say something about him that it's the image that he wants to present.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 8:03 PM on October 29 [4 favorites]

Pattern Recognition was great, Spook County wasn't as good but still okay, Zero History was an improvement and a satisfying end to the 'Blue Ant Trilogy'. Have to wonder if Bigend would be an example of how seemingly-invulnerable billionaires would act when they realize they're in a situation where they're now very vulnerable indeed...
posted by gtrwolf at 8:35 PM on October 29 [3 favorites]

I was chatting with some people on $PlatformApp the other month, and the topic of "What you do if you woke up with a billion dollars" came up and my immediate answer was:

Get extremely upset. Immediately go into hiding. Figure out how to get a trustworthy lawyer and and accountant, who also know how to find more trustworthy lawyers and accountants. Then maybe try to figure out how to give most of it away as trusts to do something good.

Besides the fact that there shouldn't even be billionaires, suddenly having that much wealth without a plan is a fatal liability.

Even at 1% non-compounded interest that's 10 million a year accruing. And no one with a billion dollars or more is getting a 1% ROI on a billion dollars in assets even if they're boring put it into a plain old savings account, CDs or bonds.

10 million a year is someting like $27,000 per day.

What about 50 billion dollars at 1%?

500 million a year. $1,369,863 per day.

Seriously? What the fuck?
posted by loquacious at 8:38 PM on October 29 [13 favorites]

Rude desk clerk told me to stop interrupting

I LOLed.
posted by agentofselection at 8:48 PM on October 29 [3 favorites]

Look, this is entertaining, but-- what's that gentle jangling noise? Why, bless me, it's about half of my bullshit detectors going off all at once! Oh, that darling little glass windchime? That's the one that rings clear and true whenever the phrase "former military special forces" appears in print. And the "everyone can be bribed" cowbell is ding-donging away, as well. Golly!

what is particularly implausible? i mean, once special forces people leave the special forces they still need a job, you know?
posted by Sebmojo at 8:58 PM on October 29 [2 favorites]

we Three Kings be stealin the gold.
posted by clavdivs at 8:59 PM on October 29 [3 favorites]

Incredibly, we live in a society where this is taken as some kind of cool, glamorous amazingness - wow, this person can spend $5000 plus the cost of a theater of tickets on a whim and has the power to get whatever they want!!! - instead of as just about the most fucking pathetic display you can imagine. This person wants to see a movie right away now even though this very same movie will be showing widely in coming days, just like a four year old, but unlike a four year old they're a grown-up and thus can't be distracted from their dumb whim by putting on Blue's Clues.

i thought the pathos came through loud and clear.
posted by Sebmojo at 9:02 PM on October 29 [1 favorite]

hold on. Has anyone tried distracting Elon Musk with Blue’s Clues?
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 9:06 PM on October 29 [9 favorites]

hold on. Has anyone tried distracting Elon Musk with Blue’s Clues?

Is that what we're calling ketamine these days?
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 10:15 PM on October 29 [14 favorites]

in my experiences dealing with the wealthy, the biggest difference i've noticed amongst them is old and new money. new money tended to be louder, more demanding, more apt to remind you that they do in fact have a lot of money. old money tended to be quieter, more miserable, not especially ostentatious but so removed from our realities of everyday life that when confronted with small realities of our lives they simply cannot conceive it

in the end they're both perpetually unsatisfied with having to share a planet with the rest of us peons and are in a constant struggle to bend the world to their whim so it's a wash i suppose
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 3:10 AM on October 30 [7 favorites]

This article made me want to take a Silkwood shower.

What a gross way to live for everyone who touches this circle.
posted by archimago at 5:23 AM on October 30 [1 favorite]

When people have that much wealth, it has to go somewhere, almost exclusively to great harm. Obviously people like Elon Musk are using their vast wealth to manipulate elections and promote far right ideas - and you can see why this is bad because they have the money to promote ideas that not only advance their material interests but appeal to their stupid little ids, Elon being the most divorced man in the world promotes fascism because he is upset that he can't control his exes and children like they're robots, etc.

But even when they're not trying to create fascism because of their personal hatred for the women in their lives, their money sloshes around and distorts real estate (of course) but also art, medicine, basically everything, because huge amounts of money are going into capturing the business of a very small number of super-wealthy people. If everyone had some folding money, we'd get decent products and housing because we'd be the customers, but because the ultimate most favorite bestest customers are the super-rich, everything gets shittier for most people.

That said, you really have to tax and tax and tax and probably march on landowners with pikes to keep wealth from concentrating over time, so this is an inevitable feature of capitalism, not merely a distortion. In theory, one could tax and tax and tax, etc, and keep society fairly flat, but in practice this is difficult over time.
posted by Frowner at 7:28 AM on October 30 [9 favorites]

hotels and spas, both things that I was raised to believe were a bit vulgar, frankly.

The kind of hotels and spas that regular people go to are. Not the kind that these folks are imitating in their homes.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:35 AM on October 30 [1 favorite]

The idea that homes shouldn’t be decorated as commercial spaces is really interesting. I think it’s considered gauche because it’s impersonal and cold. Like your manhattan brownstone should be tastefully updated with respect for its history and to display decades of international collecting not gut renovated and populated with whatever is at DWR right now.

But I guess again that’s old money vs new money.
posted by jeoc at 9:02 AM on October 30 [3 favorites]

Well, all I'm saying is that when I see Architectural Digest or whatever and the "spa-like" ambiance is pointed out, it looks vulgar to me because it looks like a bland commercial space, even if a very expensive one with expensive fittings. It's the commercial nature, the preparation for throughput even if throughput of the very wealthy, that makes it so unattractive. You don't want your home to look like a hotel or a spa, fundamentally, because your home is the home of an individual. It's not a pipeline for high-net-worth individuals to get pore treatments. It doesn't matter if you're talking about your local Aveda or some rarified chi-chi space that costs tens of thousands of dollars a treatment; it's the whole "wanting your house to look like a business" thing that is so grotesque. Better a house in bad taste - even if that means gold toilets, etc - than a house that looks like a high-end retreat center.

Of course it makes sense that in this age of financialization and more and more accelerated travel (for the people who can afford it) the way to show your wealth is not to show off, eg, antiques or anything individual but to show that your property is a very successful commercial entity, so yes, it is exactly like some pointless grifter beauty treatment place or secretly undercleaned hotel suite. Or like a rental, a high-end rental - your home so expensively bland that any other rich person could in theory be renting it by the night.
posted by Frowner at 9:14 AM on October 30 [4 favorites]

I continue to be amazed that such a huge portion of humanity wants to be ruled be these unbelievably deficient narcissistic sociopaths. I just don’t freaking get it.

It’s a wonderful thing that 99% of us don’t have to ‘by your leave m’lord’ to decide what to wear in the morning (sumptuary laws shout out) or any other aspects of our lives.

Is their hatred of the ‘other’ so much their core being that they WANT theses human shitstains to rule them and their loved ones if the ‘other’ is made to suffer and suffer?

JFC said shitstains invented an app! They’re not the best of humanity. They’re the worst.
posted by WatTylerJr at 9:28 AM on October 30 [3 favorites]

“hotels and spas, both things that I was raised to believe were a bit vulgar, frankly.

The kind of hotels and spas that regular people go to are. Not the kind that these folks are imitating in their homes.“

No, we really mean regular hotels and spas. A former client of mine (again, local gentry level, no idea where the money was from) had a 13,000 sf waterfront home that looked like it was finished and furnished with the leftovers from the I75 interstate conference center holiday inn. My first day there, I rang the bell bc the front door didn’t open like it was supposed to after I input the gate security code. The really annoyed PA let me in, saying “the front door is unlocked after you input the security gate code.”

And it was. The mistake I made was pulling the front door instead of pushing, bc as we all know, commercial front doors open out (fire code), whereas residential front doors open in (children and groceries in arms). Man that place was ugly
posted by toodleydoodley at 9:39 AM on October 30 [9 favorites]

Well, a lot of the time, rich people buy houses with an eye to "can I host parties other rich people who don't know me very well will attend in this space?" as a key differentiator. Like, if I wanted to host thousand-dollar-a-plate presidential fundraising dinners here, would this house accommodate that? If my child's private school wanted to have a meeting for donors at my house, would they feel comfortable and welcome here, or like they were intruding in someone's residence? And do I have spaces for all of them to park?

So at a certain echelon of wealth, yes, a house that has at least an entertaining space that puts one in mind of a conference center makes a certain amount of sense. You want a little personality to come through, but not too much. Especially if you have kids, there has to be kind of a clear "parlor" area that you keep nice all the time or that can be very easily tidied up, in case you need to host something at short notice.

I feel like most modern homes have absorbed these sorts of formal spaces into "great room" situations, since for most families they are a colossal waste of space, but a lot of rich people do still need them, and it is totally reasonable that they decorate them in a generic, inoffensive, "no you didn't interrupt my life to be here, I didn't need to be using this room anyway" style.
posted by potrzebie at 11:15 AM on October 30 [2 favorites]

Local gentry isn't billionaires tho? It's old money v new money probably but also the distinction between (for lack of a better way to phrase this dichotomy at the moment) rich v wealthy.

I guess I just mean, I don't think most people are taught to think of the most exclusive spaces in the world as vulgar-looking. Certainly I was not, I was absolutely taught that the less your house looked like anyone lived in it, the more tasteful it was.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 11:37 AM on October 30 [2 favorites]

I mentioned upthread that local gentry is lower on the scale than billionaire. It’s like multi-hundred millionaire. But I’ll say it again — that house was ugly. Furnished out of what looked like an office furniture catalog, although probably not, and decorated with art that had no complement or relationship from one piece or collection to the next. It was obvious that they were all market-based investments and they were all placed or hung indiscriminately around the home with no attempt to curate or coordinate at all.
posted by toodleydoodley at 12:13 PM on October 30 [1 favorite]

I mean, I also relied on The Preppy Handbook to “blend in” at my private high school but I have no illusions about rich people’s actual taste, which I think is actually a skill that you have to cultivate
posted by toodleydoodley at 12:15 PM on October 30 [3 favorites]

IDK how relevant it is anymore, but the first piece of media that came to my mind is The Queen of Versailles. Incredible (and incredibly entertaining) documentary which has a 95% rotten tomatoes rating. The link above is to the Fanfare discussion.

While the people in this movie are not *billionaires*, they are nevertheless unfathomably rich. What made me think of this movie when I read this article is the In-N-Out burger incident and the movie theater incident. This movie really leans into that exact alien dissonance of ultra rich people doing "normal people" things going to "normal people" places, but doing it in a truly fucking bonkers way that resembles a spectacular trainwreck.
posted by MiraK at 1:37 PM on October 30 [6 favorites]

I imagine most of them as versions of the Twilight Zone kid. He didn't seem all that hapy.
posted by gottabefunky at 2:11 PM on October 30

I'm curious: since each member of the billionaire family can't tolerate being told no, what happens if they have conflicting wishes?

If the billionaire dad wants the whole family in Aspen for Christmas, but the billionaire mom and kids refuse, and the billionaire father-in-law insists on everyone spending Christmas on the superyacht, and each of them can't take no for an answer, how does this get resolved? Is there a pecking order of who defers to whose whim (based on money)? Or they have a screaming argument?
posted by sandwich at 2:17 PM on October 30

One family I was traveling with for three months, they had profound inherited wealth and they just wanted privacy, even from each other. So we were getting these big villas that were very quiet. Each person would go to their own wing, with their own kitchenette and fridge, and we’d keep it stocked with what they wanted and they wouldn’t have to see anybody.

That's really sad.
posted by kirkaracha at 2:17 PM on October 30 [1 favorite]

While the people in this movie are not *billionaires*, they are nevertheless unfathomably rich. What made me think of this movie when I read this article is the In-N-Out burger incident and the movie theater incident. This movie really leans into that exact alien dissonance of ultra rich people doing "normal people" things going to "normal people" places, but doing it in a truly fucking bonkers way that resembles a spectacular trainwreck.

IMO, they are kinda silly. You can rent an entire theater pretty easily, for corporate events.
Maybe short notices makes it bit harder, but not that much harder.

$1m for a month in a hospital wing sounds downright affordable (haha US medical care), and $10k for an In N Out bill - a busy In N Out (all of them in CA) probably makes 5-6X that every day. So they paid the normal revenue rate for an In N Out for 1-2 hours.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:58 PM on October 30

Spa or no spa, even my billionaire house would have a cat-scratched couch.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 3:30 PM on October 30 [2 favorites]

An incredibly well-groomed cat
posted by gottabefunky at 3:41 PM on October 30

No, your cat would have their own house.
posted by Mizu at 3:55 PM on October 30 [2 favorites]

Couch subscription
posted by clew at 5:38 PM on October 30 [2 favorites]

We know someone who was involved in charity fundraising, and that put them in touch with a bunch of very, very rich philanthropists. Most of those were dedicated traditional Catholics, and billionaire-meets-Catholicism made for some very interesting people. Over guy had a chapel in his garden with a live-in priest so he could have mass every morning.
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 3:28 AM on October 31 [3 favorites]

The board chair of an arts org where I worked was not a billionaire (or even close to one as numbers go) but a millionaire many times over. I got the sense was an OK guy and I think he put deliberate effort into not being like this, but the money still had a deranging effect on everything about his life in a really weird way, both in terms of heightened scale in his hobbies and tastes, but also having his name on a business turned his personal life into a brand. The former is tacky, but aspirational in a way. The later seemed miserable. I don't think he had many, if any, personal relationships that didn't involve people trying to get money or prestige out of him, or vice versa. Friendships were a kind of business merger, or else an appeal for patronage. Everything had a transactional undercurrent just because of the weight of money present in the room, no matter how small the stakes.

I think he liked me because I never tried to get anything out of him. I sorted out his tickets for shows the same way I did everybody. I told him the truth about how sales were going and whether I thought our shows were any good. The fact that he seemed to find that refreshing sort of bummed me out. I was still his employee, after all.

Wealth on that level is toxic for everybody. I would have cashed in my chips and retired early with WAY less money than he had, but he was still always working to grow it.
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 9:53 AM on October 31 [2 favorites]

Jeff Bezos wrote response to the chaos he created by squashing the WaPo editorial staff's Harris endorsement. It's a mealy-mouthed rationalization that tries to hide behind the abstract principle of journalistic neutrality. His tone is sort of hurt and surprised, but he never once acknowledges the actual reason his decision caused 200,000 subscribers to cancel*, and I found myself wondering does he even know? I'll bet he's surrounded by yes-men who fawn over him all day and never tell him when he has a bad idea! What a pathetic situation. The closest I'll ever come to feeling sorry for him.

* you can't trust a paper that's going to suppress stories to appease a dictator
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 11:25 AM on October 31