What it's like to staff the home of a billionaire

https://www.thecut.com/article/staffing-billionaires.html

by wallflower • 2 years ago

70 118 2 years ago

neom• 2 years ago

Recently I was chatting with a friend who has a net worth in and around there (made his money in mining/exploration), he was in a kinda bad mood and I asked what was up... he was supposed to be flying to Italy, but his crew where late putting his USA Yacht away and they hadn't arrived in Italy yet to get his Europe Yacht unpacked and ready to go. I hadn't really considered before... he employs 6 people full-time to travel around the world and deal with his boats. Very different problems from my problems anyway, heh. :)

yieldcrv4• 2 years ago

yeah that would be annoying

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

bxparks• 2 years ago

I don't understand. Your friend has a catering business that throws parties for wealthy people? Because wealthy people don't get enough parties? Or did you mean metaphorically. In that case, what kind of metaphoric "welcoming parties" are missing from wealthy people's lives?

hnthrow289570• 2 years ago

Well, you need to be in proximity to wealthy people to get that information, and that's why it's under served. There's not really a public clearinghouse of unaddressed wealthy-people-problems to inform this market that I know of.

lumost4• 2 years ago

I believe that these issues were handled by retainers historically. You would employ someone, then that persons children and so on. Thus some knowledge of these problems was built-up over time.

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.

mozman• 2 years ago

A good friend of mine built a niche to go into high value homes and test all electronics / internet before the owners arrive.

In addition to cleaners, landscapers, people attending to cars, etc.

He makes quite a good living.

hermitcrab6• 2 years ago

They then realized that their two dogs weren’t allowed in the apartment, so they purchased a £10 million property opposite the apartment called the dog house, purely for the dogs.

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

Geeek• 2 years ago

I am not sure why someone would downvote this. It is 100% revolting and indicative of a really rotten system that allows this to happen.

gv832• 2 years ago

yeah, it was way better when you worked the fields for a duke who had dibs over your underage wife for the first night of marriage. and don't forget the round robin slave labour in the castle! and don't forget to set aside some grain for the taxes, who cares if this year has been bad and it all goes to the duke...

capitalism has its faults, but these platitudes about rotten systems really miss the mark.

jjtheblunt• 2 years ago

They DID spend that money right back into the economy.

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!

interstice• 2 years ago

Buying property is a pretty bad way to put money into the economy, though partly dependent on your locations approach to capital gains (where I am it’s untaxed).

snapplebobapple9• 2 years ago

Your needs and wants are not a claim on my life. My life is my own. If you want to feed your money into whatever you define good as, go ahead. Dont expect anyone to cater to your whims with the fruits of their labors though.

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.

chpatrick• 2 years ago

This attitude leads to the state of society today in the US.

_factor2• 2 years ago

It’s not the fruit of their labor. It’s a combined effort they’re disproportionately benefiting from due to the aforementioned policy failures/corruption.

dwb2• 2 years ago

A lot of us would dispute that anyone that rich "earned" their money. $1bn is an absurdly disproportionate compensation for any one person's work, whatever they do. It may be legal, but it isn't right.

Aerbil313• 2 years ago

The essence of your argument is "I don't believe in the same moral values you do."

lumost4• 2 years ago

The definition of "Earn" is what most genuine observers would debate. By definition, any interest/dividend bearing asset is a claim on a portion of societal output. As the majority of wealth in the US is now inherited, a rational individual might challenge whether such assets were "Earned". It's easy to take the opposite claim that those "Earnings" are the property of those who produced via income, or even those who consume via net savings.

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.

eganist4• 2 years ago

Your needs and wants are not a claim on my life. My life is my own. If you want to feed your money into whatever you define good as, go ahead. Dont expect anyone to cater to your whims with the fruits of their labors though.

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.

whatshisface3• 2 years ago

Your life is your own if you're on a remote island somewhere, but as long as we're living with you, please don't replace a middle class family in the city with your dogs...

seanhunter• 2 years ago

Reminds me of John Lennon. At the time he was singing "Imagine no possessions" he had an entire floor of the Dakota building[1] just for his and Yoko Ono's fur coats.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dakota

ajross5• 2 years ago

Imagine how much good you could do with that money.

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.

rhaps0dy• 2 years ago

With £10M? I mean, some good, surely. But not really a lot

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.

hermitcrab6• 2 years ago

You can build a small school in a third world country, such as Nepal, for £10k. So you could build somewhere around 1000 small schools (or a lesser number of bigger ones).

marnett3• 2 years ago

I agree jealousy can be present when the Have Nots look at the purchasing decisions of the Haves.

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.

passion__desire3• 2 years ago

If you were to flatten a Mt. Everest and spread the material over the earth's surface, it would raise the height by 1mm.

But having such resource concentrated could spur individual risk taking and effort and thus innovation. e.g. Elon Musk

voisin2• 2 years ago

Diminishing returns. What extra risk do you take at $1b versus 100m? Now 10b vs 1b? Now 100b vs 1b?

Now, 1m vs 100k.

We should focus our systems on increasing more people from 100k to 1m rather than 10b to infinity.

toomuchtodo4• 2 years ago

Our greatest success was letting Elon get as far as he did. Our greatest failure was not removing the power the wealth enables once he weaponized it.

[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.

dutchCourage• 2 years ago

I think most people would like fewer Elon Musks, not more. Your Everest example also assumes that giving an unfathomable amount of money to Musk is more beneficial to society than using it for other purposes. I find that hard to believe.

bruce5113• 2 years ago

> I find that utterly revolting. Imagine how much good you could do with that money.

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?

Epa0955• 2 years ago

If the money stays in the bank it can at least belendt out and used for productive stuff. If the billionaire instead decided 'I will use 50 million to make all these people do something which is a complete waste of time' then he had used his money-given power to waste a bunch of people's limited time on earth.

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.

creer3• 2 years ago

That money replaced the other owner's wealth in that house. What changed? What changed for you? What changed for us?

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.

demondemidi3• 2 years ago

"I mean, when you see the principal renting a chalet and spending over £1 million on a week’s holiday, and then you look at the full spectrum of the household, it can be jarring. You’ve got the housekeepers who might’ve come from a less developed country"...

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.

ghaff• 2 years ago

The definition of conservative is flexible. The first category is probably not willy-nilly flying private jets and having a lot of dedicated personal staff today.

So, in that respect it does seem different from the other categories. Of course, priorities play a role.

medler• 2 years ago

Sounds like Richistan by Robert Frank

hilux• 2 years ago

I don't know exactly how much money my friends and relatives have, but I suspect that several are in the second group, and none inherited that wealth.

A book written in the 2000s may pre-date much of Silicon Valley wealth creation.

demondemidi3• 2 years ago

August of 2000 is right when the first round of paper millionaires suddenly weren't. I was there with the rest of my peers looking at our options sheets going "damn... almost."

ChainOfFools2• 2 years ago

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.

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.

demondemidi3• 2 years ago

You’ve got skill with words.

oldtownroad• 2 years ago

The article is fiction. The company launched less than a year ago. The founder claims that the company has had more than 100 clients, in less than a year? Pure marketing fiction — I doubt more than 10% of this article is true.

codetrotter• 2 years ago

Could be fiction. But could also be that the people that launched the company have contacts going many years back prior. Not every company is started from zero.

pakitan2• 2 years ago

Not sure if fiction. But right from the start smelled like a 'submarine' PR fluff.

jwnin• 2 years ago

Same site that published the story about the woman who 'got scammed for $50K'. https://www.thecut.com/article/amazon-scam-call-ftc-arrest-w...

apsurd2• 2 years ago

i read the whole story. is it made up? what's wrong with it? it's at least, well written.

EchoChamberMan• 2 years ago

https://archive.is/TiiWA

thunderbong• 2 years ago

Reminds me of this -

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2s9u0s/what_do_i...

What it's like to staff the home of a billionaire

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