WTF is wrong with rich people, Part Deux

I should probably make this an annual column. Come to think of it, I will.

Typical billionaire Hamptons cottage

Well, one thing that’s wrong is they have too much money.  In the case of the billionaire class, way too much money.  They are emerging from their year-long coronavirus slumber out here in the Hamptons.  They are out on the roads driving automobiles they have trucked up here from their winter quarters in Palm Beach.  Yes, we have giant tractor-trailer trucks with canvas sides coming through our towns laden with the very latest in bespoke Ferraris and Aston Martins and Porsche GT3’s.  The giant trucks drive out there on West End Road and Lily Pond Lane and Further Lane and they pull to a stop and they disgorge their pampered cargo onto the groomed driveways of the so-called “cottages” along the ocean – you know the kind of cottages I’m talking about, the 10,000 and 20,000 square foot variety, the cottages with an even dozen bedrooms and 20 bathrooms and kitchens the size of tennis courts, the kind of cottages that cost more to air condition for a single three-month “season” than you or I earn in three years.  The cottage dwellers, in their glove-soft Tods driving shoes and casual baby-blue striped open neck shirts that cost more than you or I pay in rent even in this day and age, they drop the tops on their Ferrari 812 Competizone A roadsters and push a button and their 830 un-boosted horses rumble to life and they push another button to shift the transmission into Drive and then they rumble down the streets of this seaside town at a maximum of 30 miles per hour until they reach Main Street and then they drive around and around passing other 812 Competizone A roadsters driven by other extremely rich guys who are doing exactly the same thing, which is looking for a parking spot, and when they achieve one of these oh-so-rare parking spots, which this year they have to pay for with an app on their smartphones, they pitty-pat in their Tods driving shoes into one of three Ralph Lauren boutiques and they buy yet another casual open-necked striped shirt – or maybe two or three! -- that cost more than you or I pay in rent even in this day and age.  That’s pretty much what they do, and then they repair to the restaurants that charge more than enough to pay your electric bill for a couple months for a single bottle of champagne and serve three perfectly grilled shrimp and four asparagus spears for the price of another electric bill, and all the while they are making more and more money, because billionaires make money even while they are not “working” at whatever the hell it is that they “do.”

The other thing that’s wrong is they have Gulfstreams waiting for them out at the East Hampton Airport in which they have arrived from wherever it is that billionaires spend their time when they are not “relaxing” in their Ferraris as they negotiate the traffic out here.  I am convinced one of the greatest threats to the health of our nation and our democracy is the private jet.  Before the arrival of the private jet, even millionaires – there didn’t used to be enough people worth a billion dollars for there to even be a category of wealth colloquially referred to as “billionaires” – yes, even millionaires worth 10 or 20 or 30 million dollars had to go to the airport and plonk down a Gold Card and buy a plane ticket on a commercial airline in order to travel. 

But the Gulfstream private jet and the Falcon private jet and the Lear private jet changed all of that.  Billionaires, some of whom own two or three Gulfstreams, can pick up the phone and within moments arrange to put themselves in the air.  They can literally break the bonds of the earth with the tap of a finger on their iPhone. 

And that is where we find ourselves today, reading yet another story on the front page of the New York Times about the misbehavior of yet another rich person, in this case, one Michael Larson, the man who runs the private hedge fund in Kirkland, Washington, that “manages” the 130 billion dollars that Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, has somehow accumulated.  Don’t feel bad if you haven’t heard of Michael Larson until now.  Neither had I until I read the headline in this morning’s Times: “Culture of fear at the firm that manages Bill Gates’s fortune.”

What is the nature of the “culture of fear” at Cascade Investment, you might ask?  Well, it’s the same “culture of fear” you’ve heard about at any other place where very, very wealthy men make lots and lots of money:  it’s the culture of fear of sexual harassment and racism and nasty, bitter, open retaliation against anyone who crossed Mr. Larson, of course.  From the Times today on Mr. Larson: 

“He openly judged female employees on their attractiveness, showed colleagues nude photos of women on the internet and on several occasions made sexually inappropriate comments. He made a racist remark to a Black employee. He bullied others. When an employee said she was leaving Cascade, Mr. Larson retaliated by trying to hurt the stock price of the company she planned to join.”

That’s right:  Mr. Larson threw a special kind of rich-guy temper tantrum.  He “shorted” the stock of the firm his employee was leaving to go to work for in order to hurt that firm in the only way he knew how, which was with dollars, of which he had many and the other firm (and the departing employee) had far fewer.

In other words, Mr. Larson broke the conventions of normal human behavior, because why wouldn’t he?  Why should conventions and laws apply to you when gravity doesn’t?  When you can simply press a button on your iPhone and fly away on a Gulfstream, like your boss did when he paid a visit to someone like, say, Jeffrey Epstein?  Why should you behave yourself in the office when the Billionaire in Charge doesn’t behave himself and sends suggestive emails to young employees soliciting relationships (read: sex out of marriage)?

Indeed, why should any billionaire behave himself when he can hire lawyers and pay PR firms and undertake spurious “investigations” of his own behavior by highly-paid factotums that of course exonerate him?  Why behave yourself, in other words, when you’re rich enough to get away with practically anything?

When you reach a point where you can’t have enough bedrooms, you can’t have enough toilets and showers and soaking tubs, you can’t have enough Gulfstreams, you can’t have enough Ferraris that you don’t even drive back and forth to Florida, you have them fucking trucked, hell, you can’t even have enough casual open-necked striped shirts that cost more than the rent on someone’s apartment, well then you’ve reached the point that WTF is wrong with rich people is WTF is wrong with capitalism, which is that it is a system of relations between people that is constructed purely of money.  Not rules.  Not laws.  Not feelings.  Not even contracts.  Just money.  Because money is everything -- getting money, having money, spending money, showing off money. 

WTF is wrong with rich people is WTF is wrong with the whole shebang.  Money can’t buy you happiness, but money can buy you a country, and sadly, we’re the ones selling it to them.