What it's like to staff the home of a billionaire
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Sorry if I confused this story with something else.
I have a friend that basically throws the high net worth welcoming party that’s missing from people’s lives
identify a friction and cater to it, this is an underserved field because people are not willing to validate wealthy people’s problems, or specifically invalidate them
there is no round of applause or red carpet for them, no “wow dude you made it”, and people are fine with that….. until you present them with that specific thing and new circle of socioeconomic equals that also like that specific thing
thats a friction he solves and it is very lucrative
I think you understood fine, its the entertainment and hospitality sector
The intent of the party is not to celebrate a birthday or occasion, but rather to get introduced to a new social group of similarly wealthy people.
The service would also construct a guest list and so on for you.
So you wouldn’t need to invite your old social circle, who probably now hate you because you are so rich! LOL ;-)
Yes, this sort of thing does sound utterly grotesque to a generation that can’t find a place to live or afford rent!
But here we are, and if there is money to be made from this, then it’s good that someone is making it! :-)
TLDR; we hate it when our friends become successful.
I think you should give the questioner the benefit of the doubt,
"I have a friend that basically throws the high net worth welcoming party that’s missing from people’s lives" was a little hard to parse for me too.
Seems like an interesting business though which demonstrates we often don't know what problems are out there in wait of a solution.
Thanks for sharing.
I hadn’t really thought about those sorts of social problems and how you solve them!
Unfortunately, if wealth inequality continues growing - these will be the most lucrative problems to solve. I'd be quite interested in whether there have been studies of where market forces begin to stop existing.
In addition to cleaners, landscapers, people attending to cars, etc.
He makes quite a good living.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2s9u0s/what_do_i...
Absolutely disgusting.
I like my exploited labor to be hidden through two or at least three layers of abstraction so that I don't have to feel sick about it: like electronics or clothing or produce harvesting or ... just about everything produced at scale. But scale feeds the wealth of billionaires' theft so my sarcasm is ourobourean.
I seem to recall reading a book about this back in the 2000's. Wealth was split into three groups:
1-10 million
10-100 million
100-1000 milllion+
The first group tends to be very conservative, as they worked extremely hard to amass that wealth (recall this book is from like 2003, not today where there are over a million millionaires in the US, albeit paper).
The second group tends to be inherited wealth and is more liberal.
The third group is absolutely cuckoo bananas. Once you cross the into the near-billion/billion range, you live in a bizarre fantasy world curated to your every whim.
Maybe David Brooks wrote it? I can't for the life of me remember, but it was fascinating. There was a woman who paid a young lady $100k a year to sprinkle birdseed around her house so that her indoor cats would be able to watch the birds. And there were a number of stories of kitchen staff servers who do nothing but show up and serve food in highly choreographed ways, but still need to go to a finishing school for a year to do this.
So, in that respect it does seem different from the other categories. Of course, priorities play a role.
A book written in the 2000s may pre-date much of Silicon Valley wealth creation.
Whenever I need a dismal reality check I remind myself that in our country, the people who for the most part can least afford to throw hard earned money into a fire have been habituated to do so gladly, willingly and regularly in a roughly weekly sacraficial ritual which has the effect of minting a new member of the class such as you mentioned above, from scratch, six to eight times a year.
These people, usually from backgrounds not exactly experienced in managing such sums, promptly (on the advice of lawyers) vanish from the face of the Earth for all intents and purposes, except for the generation of another pulse of trashy Instagram bougie bragging by various second and third order beneficiaries of this sudden transfer of wealth.
I find that utterly revolting. Imagine how much good you could do with that money.
"Every billionaire is a policy failure." Patagonia’s founder Yvon Chouinard
capitalism has its faults, but these platitudes about rotten systems really miss the mark.
I mean, someone is, because that is the only way to get billionaires.
But it's not us or our kids, at least.
HN is great for getting a little window into how the rich sociopaths in this culture live.
When folks write ahistorical fantasy, as you've done here, it's a very useful picture to help understand what kinds of really bad things folks are capable of thinking about the world.
Also, concentration of wealth doesn’t reverse without action - so your initial remarks on fiefdoms and feudalism may not be too far from where we find ourselves in this century, which king do you bend the knee to: House of the dragon, Zuckerberg, or House of the camel, Musk?
I just believe that technology and innovation and creative destruction (in the schumpeterian sense) can (as they did) bring better resource usage which in turn drive better lifestyle for everyone.
I'm not sure where I would go from here; my brain is wired to my country problems (which is not usa, I hail from europe) which are completely 0 opportunities to actually get rich + complete domination of old money due to compound interest unstoppable force.
Heavily taxing inheritance in every form could be a start, but I'm not an expert in policy.
Do you mean to compare spending it versus giving it away?
Or would it be less revolting if they had listed the house on Airbnb or something?
Please explain.
That quote from Chouinard is awesome!
On top of that, there's annual property taxes for London. I don't know if there's any discount for primary residences, but they wouldn't be getting it for a property just for their dogs.
this is the fundamental problem with society today. Everyone thinks they have a claim to goods and services they did not earn and hate people that earned them, rather than pushing for antitrust enforcement to break up market power that allows incompetent offspring to stay rich rather than lose their wealth and return to average wealth where their capability says they belong.
What exactly is your policy prescription here.
The service fee would be set so that the return on capital was equal to the overall growth rate of the economy. Naturally, it's higher, which makes it mathematically inevitable for a few family offices to end up owning everything. (Also from Piketty.) If the risk-free rate was 3% this year and the GDP grew by 2%, your service fee would be 1%.
A lot of wealth is multi-generational and nepotistic (i.e. do we really think Jim Walton would have got the job if he wasn't the son of the founder, and even if he did, would he have earned as much as he has?).
A better solution is much more effective antitrust enforcement through both breaking up monopolies/oligpolies and outlawing contract abuses by oligoplies as we see them (i.e. the myriad of things amazon puts in their seller contracts to ensure the prices elsewhere are always near amazon's price).
You asked the wrong question about Jim Walton. You should ask would Jim be able to pull off the same level of wealth accumulation if walmart had been broken up so that it could not have abused its market power for the last 30-40 years? Probably not, because he's probably not great at creating businesses people want to spend money at. You could say the same thing about guys like Bill gates (he would be worth at least 10X what he is currently worth if he had just kept his microsoft stock instead of diversifying bit by bit each year). When you look at it, it's almost always the market power abuse that is the problem, not the wealth per se (notable exception is Elon Musk, who has knocked it out of the park on multiple companies in starkly different fields, kind of impressive).
It's the right question about Jim Walton, and there is a question about breaking up Walmart on top of that. Walmart can still be broken up in a world where inheritance tax exists!
> On top of that, to enforce them requires a level of privacy and personal liberty abuse that is counterproductive.
Disagree with this - forcing billionaires (or anybody for that matter) to provide details of their estate for tax purposes is pretty well-trodden territory.
It is the wrong question about Jim Walton because it only matters if walmart is still the obvious oligopoly abuser it is. There is a huge difference between someone who managed to get big enough to abuse market power in one space and collected monopoly rents to amass a large fortune (The waltons, bill gates, etc.) and the guys who appear to be excellent managers and have grown massively society improving businesses in disparate industries (currently only Elon comes to mind, I am sure there are other but they are rare enough and/or have stuck to a single business that they grew large enough to extract excess profits that I can't think of any other semi proven names). The good managers you want to be as rich as possible because they are deploying that cash well, the other guys not so much. This translates into much more concern about the children of the super rich (which is correct) but to which you are trying to solve with an inheritance tax, which will just make things worse and slow growth. It's far better to break up the monopolies/oligopolies/regulate away the most obvious abusive contracting and let time do it's thing to get the junk offspring back to normal wealth levels.
You don't get it. Reporting requirements are quite invasive now and they aren't working. The level they will have to get to to actually make an inheritance tax work is a place that is far too much power for the government to have and won't end well (because that level of power has never ended well in the hands of the government). You are trying to solve a questionable problem (billionaires) by feeding an obvious, terrible, and literally deadly problem with massive historical precedent (government power).
It doesn’t solve the underlying issue of wealth distribution.
It’s not particularly ambitious.
For our democracies to survive we must put many different taxes in place to counter the rich get richer, and the perverce gathering of power it causes. There won't be a single policy to fix it, and actually finding a good compromise which helps growth instead of hindering it is hard (especially giving the constant lobbying from the rich).
Personally I am quite for a high inheritance tax, but it's definitely not enough. I have no problem with JK Rowling being rich. But I don't think it makes sence that she has a wealth 1000000 times what a teacher makes in their lifetime. And it certainly don't make sence that her child (if she has any) should receive a wealth that size.
Why? What number do you think “makes sense”? Once you pick that number, do you think it’s correct when you compare it to a teacher’s income in the DRC?
https://slate.com/business/2015/04/top-tax-rates-why-its-abs...
[0] https://www.madisontrust.com/information-center/visualizatio...
At some point there is absolutely no additional contribution made by one's own personal merits toward the amount of wealth that they generate, it's just a snowball effect with the same little pebble in the center of the ball that started it, sucking up and bashing through everything in its path.
The fine balance between income and savings are well understood through inflation/deflationary cycles - however there are less understood profit cycles. There are many historic examples of the political problems which emerge from too large of a profit burden - such as the French Revolution, Shogunate, Bolshevik's, and arguably the US revolution and Soviet Dissolution.
I’m curious about your assessment of what fraction of wealth was inherited one and two centuries ago, and how you’re measuring the total stock of wealth.
Holding legal title to a thing is one extremely culture specific subset of wealth; being healthy, consuming goods and services is another, having status in your communities of choice is yet another, and control of the levers of societal power is yet another.
I am deeply skeptical of the claim that a larger fraction of titled wealth is now inherited than it was centuries ago, and I don’t see how you’d measure these other forms of wealth in a meaningful way.
I don't see the purpose in comparing billionaires quantifiable wealth to other forms of wealth considering the high probability that billionaires are wealthy in all other forms as well.
https://www.investopedia.com/more-billionaire-wealth-achieve..."
- it’s a survey. Rich people do not generally agree to do surveys. It’s a survey done by wealth management businesses looking for new clients
- it’s a survey across an incredibly short time period, 9 years
- it contains the quote “While more of new billionaires' overall wealth was generated by inheritance, the number of new self-made billionaires still surpassed the number of new billionaires who inherited the money.”
Finally, most of the effect this link claims to measure is in mainland China. I do not think billionaires inheriting assets is the main policy failure of mainland China, and it doesn’t seem very relevant for a context where you said “As the majority of wealth in the US is now inherited”.
The profit cycle is just a dumber way of saying the natural outcome of a free market is monopoly, which leads to rent seeking and above marginal cost pricing. A revolution is the dumbest way to solve a monopoly, we have plenty examples of antitrust being used too effectively pre renquist supreme court and there's no reason we can't get back that direction.
What's the foregone consumption on 1 Billion+ dollars of inheritance? These are sums that outstrip anything but the most conspicuous consumption. An individual who inherited such a sum could live with such consumption their entire lifetime.
>antitrust being used too effectively pre renquist supreme court and there's no reason we can't get back that direction.
This is likely a prime reason for US resilience to political instability. Recent moves have been to print money to make up for the short-falls induced by wealth concentrating at the top. However this only works provided that the folks to which wealth is concentrating fail to spend the wealth.
I think increasing antitrust enforcement and breaking up obviously monopolies/oligopolies is the actual thing we should be doing, it will b far better for society with far more immediate effect and without the outside profits from the private coercion that is an oligopoly it will alleviate some of that large profit you are complaining about being concentrated in a few hands.
This quote is interesting, as it supposes that you'll ever be in this position (and you may be. It's HN and I haven't opened your bio). Many people think the same way, which leads into my point:
A lot of policy failures arise from voters being wooed away from the certainty of a social safety net by the idea of obscene wealth. And therefore we end up overborrowing for infrastructure when we should be taxing based on how someone benefits from it.
> Everyone thinks they have a claim to goods and services they did not earn and hate people that earned them
Not everyone, only the people who recognize that the infrastructure that enabled someone's success still needs to be paid for, and that many of those who thrive on such underlying infrastructure refuse to pay for it.
Your preference for "certainty" may not be the OP's preference. The leap from their comment to "the idea of obscene wealth" is also troubling. It is entirely possible to have different preferences, without implying that the person wants "obscene wealth".
To me, policy success would be that we get to make choices - whether they lead to us living modestly and having to deny our family opportunities that wealth might buy, or whether they lead to you living with the margins that allow you to provide your kids the leg up.
That being said, because I enjoy helping people (and I enjoy the positive network effects of many policies indirectly) I am often willing and happy to help and/or pay taxes to provide services I don't get the full direct benefit of.
I don't think you are right about a lot of policy failures stemming from people misjudging their ability to make lots of money. I think many policy failures come from idiotic first principles driving ideas around maximizing social welfare without taking into account who is paying for those policies because policy that has no/minimal direct or indirect benefit to the tax payer will be something the tax payer actively tries to avoid and often that avoidance comes in shitty political forms that only partly avoids the bad spending while also negating most of the benefit to the people not paying the taxes.
Instead we should be making some reasonably conservative assumptions about what the benefit flow to each tax payer looks like, targeting a net positive benefit to every tax payer and maximizing social welfare along that indifference curve
Since it's a core belief of yours, you should keep voting that way, whereas I'll keep voting to make sure the social safety nets exist since fairness and successful bootstrapping are never guaranteed.
Also, your vote is utterly ineffective other than annoying one time relocation penalties if the burden of dealing with this country becomes too high (not to mention, if you are in the usa both your options are coopted by people not good for me or for you). It would be far better if instead of thinking legacy social contract thoughts you started thinking in marginal cost and benefit terms.
With £10M? I mean, some good, surely. But not really a lot. Is there something you have in mind, specifically?
This kind of logic is just jealousy. "They have money I don't and spend it on things I don't value" is true of every entity wealthier than you. It's true of your consumption too: how many $7 lattes have you purchased that could have fed a whole family, as it were? It's true of corporations and bureaucracies and governments too, which is why libertarianism is so tempting.
But there's no world where everyone agrees on what stuff we should value, just like there's no world (or at least no feasible world) where people aren't able to spend wastefully, because both of those are at their core subjective decisions.
You could outright transfer it to some of the poorest people in the world (via https://www.givedirectly.org/, you'd add ~5% to their total cash transfer amount). They could then invest it in whatever they need.
Again, my point is that this is all subjective. You're simply saying that you don't value the ridiculous dog house and that they should spend that on something else, but they probably do spend on the thing you want already, or something very similar.
You don't get to tell people how to spend their money for the same reason they don't get to direct your own wasteful spending (which surely exists, right?). That's just standard western liberalism, you don't seriously disagree?
Or is that a thing you like seeing pictures of westerners building/staffing?
Most development programs like this are donations to westerners to have exotic experiences that end up providing very little value to the communities they purport to help.
Your fellow respondent who mentioned GiveDirectly was at least advocating for a use of resources that has a strong chance of being net positive for the ostensible recipients.
Quite likely. Certainly if you include other developing countries, as well as Nepal.
There are small communities in Nepal that get very little help from the central government. Also much work still to be done to repair damage from the last earthquake, especially outside the tourist areas.
>Most development programs like this are donations to westerners to have exotic experiences that end up providing very little value to the communities they purport to help.
Many of them are. However there are organizations like https://thejunipertrust.org that spend 98% of donations helping the intended recipients. Also they employ local to do the work. Which means money goes into the community which also makes the local community more invested in the project.
I understand GiveDirectly is also an excellent charity. But (egotistically) it is nice to be able to point at a picture of a school and think 'I did that' (or, at least, financed it).
Why would it cost anything to get 'the local authorities on board' to build a school - unless the country is totally corrupt?
Economies don't work like this. They never have. If money was all it took to eradicate poverty then poverty wouldn't exist. Inequality in opportunity is an endemic problem with entire societies.
Including our own! Because that's exactly what you're complaining about: our society is set up to allow for billionaries and you think it should be fairer and that all that money should be easy to spread around more equitably. But it's not, and it can't be in any feasible way. You don't get that it's 100% cognitive dissonance to believe that Nepal is any different? The only difference is the scale of the numbers.
Yes. Sponsored the build anyway. I didn't lug the bricks miles from the nearest road!
>Do you have a link where I could?
>You want 1000 schools you need 1000 schools worth of raw materials and 1000 crews to build them and roads to get all that stuff there and utilities to be extended to cover it.
If you had $10M to spend, then building 1000 small schools probably wouldn't be the best approach. For the reasons you say. But I don't have $10M to give.
>our society is set up to allow for billionaries and you think it should be fairer and that all that money should be easy to spread around more equitably
Yes. Rich people should be taxed more. Not a popular viewpoint on HN, I'm sure.
>But it's not, and it can't be in any feasible way.
We could fix it, if we wanted to. But the billionaires have the power, and they don't want it fixed.
>You don't get that it's 100% cognitive dissonance to believe that Nepal is any different? The only difference is the scale of the numbers.
Nepal is a poor country with chronic inequality. But, because it is a poor country, your dollar can do a lot more good there.
https://thejunipertrust.org/jt_projects/bampti-kindergaten-s...
(the total cost was around ~£12k, of which we donated £10k).
And I also agree that there is subjectivity in the decisions in whether the wealthy are self-indulging kings of the globalized era, or examples of the spoils the geniuses or innovators can achieve as they bring value to earth.
But the billionaires can justify their despotism and self-indulgence to the masses as they are marched to the guillotine. And the intellectual discourse on the subjectivity of hedonistic decisions be silenced. The French aristocracy learned the lessons of royal restraint the hard way.
"The French revolution was good, actually" is quite a take...
But having such resource concentrated could spur individual risk taking and effort and thus innovation. e.g. Elon Musk
Now, 1m vs 100k.
We should focus our systems on increasing more people from 100k to 1m rather than 10b to infinity.
Capital expensive projects like SpaceX require lot of money and wouldn't be possible by a group of 1000 individuals putting 1m into the bucket. Too many cooks.
My point is that the vast majority of billionaires seem to spend their money not taking massive risks for the betterment of humanity but rather they buy islands and jets and art and blah blah blah.
[Edit: Removed a statement that was interpreted in a way that was not intended] The concentrated wealth is undemocratic power (which is of course appealing to some mental models), it is not magic number goes up that is the concern.
As sibling comments says, optimize for innovation from more people, not enabling billionaire kings. Millionaires are fine; comfortable, and mostly harmless. Billionaires believe themselves to be gods, untouchable. This is a policy failure.
(If you’re wondering which part, re-read your comment and imagine it was about your father.)
You and I have experienced life differently. Regardless, I have edited my comment to err on the side of caution, thank you.
I’m not trying to give you a hard time, I was just genuinely surprised.
But I’m a fan of agreeing to disagree, so; agreed.
Genuine question from a high empathy human. As I said above and to reaffirm my position: It's definitely not "something bad should happen to this person," (not good, I don't support this at all, and have said it nowhere in this thread) but "at least eventually they won't be here to cause the harm they cause." I don't believe that idea to be in poor taste, but I am happy to be challenged on it.
Kissinger comes to mind, picking from an extreme example for argument's sake.
“I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure." -- Clarence Darrow
> It’s also a bit depressing.
This is an understatement of current state. And yet, we go on. I hope this subthread has helped build context and explain my position with regards to the statement you took issue with (and that I removed out of an abundance of caution), which is not from a place of malice, but more pragmatic resignation.
One thing that this metaphor does not illustrate is that you cannot spread a billionaire's wealth in cash to the population to pay for rent and food. Nearly the entirety of that wealth is in shares of operating corporations. You would have to find other people / suckers to whom to sell the shares - in exchange for which billions in cash? Or you could liquidate the operating corporations, getting pennies on the dollars (again from whom?) and putting all the workers out of their job.
Either way, Musk et al are convenient targets but - aside from building SpaceX and StarLink and providing entertainment, they are irrelevant to your life.
I don't begrudge rich folk spending their money. I begrudge those who don't spend it.
When a billionaire spends money, it ultimately goes to people. Staff obviously, but also the entire supply chain for that staff. If they drop a million on flowers, we'll that goes yo flower sellers, who pay the flower growers, and do on. In other words it -is- doing good, its the economy.
Now I'm not advocating for trickle down economics. Thats not my point. But is it better to die with a billion dollars, or is it better to be an ex billionaire who dies broke?
In the end it's the money actually used in their life which is the actual manifestation of their power. Some of them might use it to do good, but if it's just decadence then those money do more good in the bank.
Firstly billionaires don't have "cash" in some bank account. (They are more likely to borrow from banks than to have deposits in banks.) Their assets are likely to be in property or stocks etc.
Secondly there isn't a "limited" amount of money for people to borrow. Its not physical. As a first approximation you can treat the lending ability of banks to be unlimited (at least for Joe's like me.)
For the latter I must admit that I don't really know how it works in the US. In my country banks have rules about the ratio between debt and capital, and if someone put in 100 million it would absolutely mean that the bank would be allowed to lend out more.
But in any case the point is pretty much the same! That the billionaires money do more good where they are, not when spent on frivolous shit.
There are million lot of people (all the way down the food chain) that benefit from what you call "frivolous".
Indeed there are whole industries that could be categorised as "frivolous" depending on your point of view.
Flowers for example. Loads of people are employed growing, transporting, storing, selling, arranging them, yet nevertheless we have them, and people buy them.
Is me buying flowers any different to a billionaire buying a yacht?
You buying flowers is a tiny bit of vote for someone making flowers, giving you happiness. Someone buying a dog chef is a significant vote (enough for a whole worker) for... two happy dogs?
I don't think about employment as a 'gift' from the ones employing. The dog chef could, and would, have done something else if they did not cater to a couple of dogs. The billionaire gets to make another human waste their production because they have such immense voting power with all their money. And yes, the dog-chef might be happy, or maybe they are just a wage-slave doing what they can to survive.
What did change is the previous owner was taxed a boatload (yacht load?) on their capital gains on the house. And the new owner was taxed another yachtload on the capital gains they had to realize (selling shares) in order to buy the house. A lot of that capital gains tax was most likely postponed until someone's death - but still correct. Depending on the country, it's likely more than half the purchase price of the house went into taxes because of that transaction. Which is one of the reasons such purchases don't happen all that often (does that make you happier?)
But you can find solace in Victor Haghani's remark that most inherited wealth disappears in shockingly few years. Because most people are terrible at judging and managing investments (when they care at all). When with even with no-brainer investments it would keep modestly growing from generation to generation. See The missing billionaires - A guide to better financial decisions, Victor Haghani and James White, 2023.