How rich are the rich? If only you knew.
“If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets.”
This article is a bunch of numbers and data and it doesn’t really paint a very vivid picture of the problem.
So here’s an example that I assure you is 100% real.
My dad works on boats. Not in any capacity that makes a lot of money (he basically inspects their fire systems), but he gets to set foot on the luxury yachts of the most mindblowingly wealthy people on earth. People who have so much money they have to invent new and absurd ways to even spend it. People who barely work for a living because they have so much goddamn money they spend most of their lives in perpetual vacation having other people manage anything of importance while their “bootstraps” are nowhere to be found.
And I don’t mean 30-60 foot fishing boats, I mean the REAL luxury yachts, for which 150 feet counts as a smaller size. It’s fairly common for them to be around 180ish feet, more rarely as much as 200. Boats personally owned by individual people that have helicopter landing pads (plural) and more. These are floating super mansions that these people own for fun.
Most of them are huge, incompetent assholes who wouldn’t last a day in the rest of the world without people sucking up to them because of their money.
But this is about what one guy, one STUPIDLY RICH jackass, has come up with as a way to spend a tiny fraction of his money.
Persian rugs are like, the stereotype of a priceless artifact that is impossible to replace. Anywhere you see one on display there is enormous care taken not to damage them or to allow people to touch them. Some of them are well over a thousand years old, and while it’s possible for modern textiles to produce similar designs, the real ones are fragile, in limited supply, impossible to replace, and very expensive.
Every couple of years this guy buys one, has it cut into the correct shape, and gets it installed as carpeting – to be walked on – in one room on his yacht. After it wears out it gets stripped off the floor and thrown away, and he buys a new one.
Priceless, irreplaceable artifacts that cost millions of dollars each are disposable, temporary carpeting for these people. And this is not the richest person my dad has ever worked for. Nor is his the biggest or most expensive boat.
One of them has a yacht with a huge, multimillion-dollar setup on the back for his personal luxury submarine.
The ultra-wealthy are too goddamn rich. WAY beyond even what people who think they know what rich looks like would ever imagine.