This article originally appeared on
AlterNet.
A
new crop of global super-rich is pouring into the United States,
changing the economic landscape from Manhattan to Los Angeles. They’re
driving up the price of real estate, pushing out the middle class and
going on buying binges that would make Gilded Age robber barons blush.
First
they want the hotel room — perhaps the storied, $15,000-a-night
penthouse at the Fairmont San Francisco, where guests receive honey made
by the Fairmont’s own honeybees. JFK was rumored to tryst there with
Marilyn Monroe. Next they want the shopping spree, snapping up
million-dollar diamond Chanel watches and $1,000-per-ounce perfume. Then
they want to buy a home in their favorite playground —maybe a $90
million pad at Manhattan’s behemoth
One57, where they can pay negligible taxes yet enjoy the full menu of New York City services.
For
the new ultrawealthy, ordinary toys will not do. Once upon a time,
owning a super-charged sports car was a symbol of wealth to a certain
breed of balding Floridian. But today’s young global gazillionaires
require something with a little more flash, like a
gold-plated Lamborghini,
which costs $7.5 million and even has its own Twitter feed. Brett
David, the CEO of Lamborghini Miami, has been selling top-dollar cars
for a long time. But even he is shocked at the number of items he’s
selling to overseas buyers, from Argentines and Venezuelans to a new crop of Russian and Chinese shoppers.
To help us understand this new breed of 1 percenter, CNBC helpfully launched a brand new series on Jan 22 “
Secret Lives of the Super Rich.”
Starting off with a sycophantic chant of “money, money, power, power”
over cheesy opening credits, the show is a full hour of nonstop
douchiness (two episodes aired Wednesday back-to-back), featuring eager
commentary from CNBC’s “wealth editor” Robert Frank (yes, such a job
title exists).
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For most Americans,
half of whom live at or near the poverty line,
this is something like a safari through a foreign country that
strangely exists in your own backyard. You’ll probably never attend the
Breeder’s Cup, the “richest two days in sports,” but you can gawk at the
adventures of Justin Zayat, a 21-year-old NYU student and son of racing
tycoon Ahmed Zayat who manages million-dollar horses from his college
dorm room. You may never own a home with a poolhouse bigger than a
McMansion, but you can follow a pair of Russian oligarchs, Irina and
Joseph, as they tour a $15 million Gatsby-era estate on Long Island
where they can, among other things, ascend a spiral staircase looking up
the butt of a three-story stuffed giraffe. Home collectors, we are
told, are the new art collectors.
Among the nuggets of wisdom I
gleaned sitting through this journey to the land of Richistan was that
rich people really, really like taxidermy. Let’s think about this for a
moment. Does being surrounded by the corpses of majestic animals give
the tycoon a buffer against the existential fear of death? Most of us
poor souls walk around just trying to survive, but perhaps the
super-rich, who have all their basic needs met and then some, end up
with an amplified anxiety about death that fills in the psychological
real estate usually devoted to wondering how to pay for your kids’
college. Hence they load up their apartments with stuffed alligators.
The global elites seem to spend a great deal of time wondering how to survive an apocalypse — you might call them
Billionaire Doomsday Preppers.
They want high-security buildings where their identities are protected,
complete with panic rooms and stockpiles of food and water in case of
emergency. In case there’s a Third World meltdown, they want a First
World stronghold. If death comes, at least they have maid service.
Attending
to the psychological quirks of the rich and powerful who don’t want to
accept death has a venerable tradition that goes back to the pharaohs,
who liked to hit the afterlife in a solid gold mask with an army of
embalmed servants. More recently, the field of cryongenics has arisen to
stoke dreams of immortality among the wealthy (whole body freezing is
the most expensive, but at a discount they can just freeze your head).
Maybe
the new bumper crop of billionaires signals the need for a whole new
industry: terror management consulting for the 1 percent. The expert
could provide a full menu of death-denying services, from customized
trips to Brazilian jungles where ayahuasca shamans can help them conquer
their fear of dying to a full roster of apocalypse simulations
conducted in the privacy of their own home.
If none of that works, at least the super-rich can look forward to a million-dollar funeral, such as the one a
Chinese businessman just put on for his mom,
complete with a 600-musician marching band and gold-plated cannons
firing out the final salute. You can’t take it with you, but you can die
trying.
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