9 obscene ways the rich spend their money
Trophy "wife bonuses" are the least of their offenses. At least one billionaire simply refuses to die
Topics: AlterNet, David Murdock, Private Islands, richard branson, Space Tourism, Business News
“Rich People—They’re Just Like Us!” tabloid magazines assure us, and that’s true, at the mitochondrial level. Otherwise, F. Scott Fitzgerald got it right the first time: Rich people are not like the rest of us, and they’ve put a lot of stopgaps in place to make sure it stays that way. I don’t even mean the way they own 43 percent of the country’s wealth domestically and more than 40 percent globally, or how they control the political process, or even how they’ve managed to jigger the justice system so they can literally get away with murder, though those are all related points. I’m talking about the lifestyles and spending habits of the rich (and sometimes, but certainly not always, famous), which are a world—and many, many dollars—apart from the rest of us, just the way they like it.
So in “honor” of the .001 percent, who have not been honored nearly enough, here’s a list of what probably amounts to a mere .001 percent of the bajillion things rich people spend their money on that the rest of us simply can’t afford. The big-ticket items they favor run the gamut from kooky to enviable to evil. But the important thing here is, you can’t afford them.
1. Trophy “Wife Bonuses.” According to Wednesday Martin, who calls herself a “social researcher” and says she has studied “the lives of women from the Amazon basin to sororities at a Big Ten school,” “wife bonuses” are exactly what they sound like: large, earned, annual monetary payments from millionaire Manhattan husbands to their immaculately coiffed, hard-bodied, perfect child-rearing, gala-throwing wives. (Followup pieces in other sources seem to verify Martin’s claims—if perhaps not all of the details, the general idea—including this one, which quotes Manhattan lawyers for the very rich, and this one, by an Upper East-Sider wife who claims to be a bonafide wife bonus recipient.) Martin, who married a rich Upper East-Sider and relocated to the neighborhood to raise her children, claims to have assimilated into the UES’s “Glam SAHMs” (or “glamorous stay-at-home-moms”), and says she learned about wife bonuses from actual recipients. In a recent New York Times piece, Martin describes how a rich i-banker or hedge fund manager might reward his wife handsomely for “how well she managed the home budget [or] whether the kids got into a ‘good’ school.” The wives, most of whom Martin says have college degrees but have opted out of careers and thus have no outside income, gain some financial independence, while the husband gets a picture-perfect family. Everybody wins, especially sexism and the 1950s.
2. Hunting endangered animals. In January 2014, the Dallas Safari Club, a “hunters’ rights” organization, auctioned off a permit allowing its holder to travel to Namibia for the chance to kill a black rhino, less than 5,000 of which currently walk this Earth. Oil heir and Texas hunter Corey Knowlton bid $350,000 to win the prize, and this May made the promised kill. He’s just one of several very rich hunters who’ve made the news for doing what they love: murdering beautiful, exotic animals that are in very short supply. A couple of years ago, pictures began floating around the Internet depicting Donald Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr. posing with their own lifeless bounties, including a leopard, a buffalo and an elephant, the severed tail of which young Don Jr. holds, alongside a bowie knife, in his hand.
There has been outrage around each of these cases, but the most unwanted notoriety was thrust upon Rebecca Francis, who previously hosted a show on NBC called “Eye of the Hunter.” Francis’s website is a showcase of her kills, but it was a photo of Francis lying next to a giraffe she had slaughtered that caught the eye of Ricky Gervais. The comedian tweeted the photo, along with the message, “What must’ve happened to you in your life to make you want to kill a beautiful animal & then lie next to it smiling?” What followed were several thousand retweets, threats upon Francis’s life, and the question of whether Francis was being targeted because of sexism toward women hunters. (In response, Gervais tweeted: “We need to stamp out this terrible sexism in the noble sport of trophy hunting. The men & women that do it are EQUALLY vile & worthless.) For her part, Francis—much like Knowlton, the Trumps and other hunters of exotic wildlife—defends herself as a “conservationist,” claiming she kills ailing, troublesome animals and that the money for licenses goes to preservationist efforts. In other words, we—the absurdly rich “we,” anyway—have to kill endangered species so they can live. Yeah, I know—it doesn’t make sense to me, either.
3. Buying up private islands. I’ll be the first to admit that if I had the money to buy an island paradise of my own, I’d be on that, STAT. There are plenty of titan-of-industry billionaires and comparatively pauper celebrity millionaires who have invested in beautiful remote islands. Too many to list here, but here’s a quick rundown: Johnny Depp has a place in the Bahamas called Little Hall’s Pond; Celine Dion owns Île Gagnon off Quebec; Eddie Murphy owns the Bahamian island Rooster Cay; billionaire Larry Ellison owns 98 percent of Lanai, the sixth largest Hawaiian island. Sir Richard Branson bought Necker Island, in the British Virgin Islands, for a paltry $180,000 back in 1979. Today, if you’d like to rent out the island—its tennis courts, pools and staff of 60 are part of the package—it will run you about $64,000 a night. Ted Turner has owned St. Phillips Island, off the coast of South Carolina, since 1979. (Though word is he’s been unsuccessfully trying to dump that thing for years, even slashing the price to $24.8 million.) Leonardo DiCaprio, in partnership with another investor, purchased a Belizean plot they dubbed “Blackadore Caye, a Restorative Island,” where they plan to open a luxury “eco-conscious resort.” Mel Gibson owns an island off Fiji called Mago Island, which sounds about right, since all the brown people were displaced from there in the 1860s.
But the prize may have to go to Sheikh Hamad bin Hamdan Al Nahyan, of the Abu Dhabi royal family, owner of a little island named Al Futaisi. In 2011, Hamad had his surname carved into the sand of the island in letters so large they could be seen from space (Forbes measured them at “two miles across and half a mile wide”). And then, for reasons unknown, in 2013, he had them filled in again. Rich and bored, I guess.
4. Creating their own special healthcare system. Healthcare, and the appalling lack of it, is always a national conversation in a country where the adherents of one party actually applaud the idea of letting people without insurance die. And surely none of us are surprised to learn that, even as the rate of the uninsured has fallen somewhat in the U.S., richer Americans still get the best healthcare and live longer lives. This point is driven home by articles like a 2012 New York Times piece that described luxury hospital services provided those who could pay for rooms that cost up to thousands of dollars a day. These louche offerings include “the ultimate in pampering,” from lobster tails to “concierges [who] act like butlers.” Then there’s actual concierge medical care, which entails paying as much as $30,000 a year for access to a doctor who makes house calls anytime you need. And for the very wealthy, there’s the option of having their own onsite emergency room, complete with all the technology found in an actual hospital. (A Bloomberg piece cites a company that “installs its so-called ReadyRooms in homes, yachts and planes, and can equip them with X-ray machines, CT scanners, ultrasounds and blood-analysis.”) These run about about $1 million, and can probably be built between our home movie theater and private bowling alley.
5. Buying art at absurd prices and destroying the art market for everyone else. The rich have always had a soft spot for art, going back to the Medicis. But in today’s art market, patronage has taken on a new form that might be considered a variety of vulturism. This is an era in which art appreciation is incidental to art collecting; what many of the world’s top art purchasers see when they gaze at a new work is the potential for endless return on investment. No one’s arguing that the work of the most well-known artists hasn’t always been out of financial reach to anyone but the upper classes. But today, for many rich collectors, art has become a signifier of wealth, a commodity to be flipped to make yet more money.
Salon is proud to feature content from AlterNet, an award-winning news magazine and online community that creates original journalism and amplifies the best of hundreds of other independent media sources.