That's a classic put-down (and a lie).

English aristocracy really knows how to cut someone to size when they feel like.

This is so dandy

>I don't know anyone who hobnobs with celebrities nor wants to.

My wife has an uncle that uses his access to wealth and some connections to meet and develop friendships with sports players. It's not even that expensive but you do have to have the personality to be somewhat charming and have the ability to exploit connections. Once you have an in, you can extend that to others. If I had his money, I'd move out to the middle of the woods and never talk to anyone. I just depends on what you like to do.

what does LNW mean?

how did they create their networth, self made or inheritance

I was invited for coffee at a friend's friend.

He seemed a pretty regular guy, very friendly: kids playing in the pool. Nothing out of the ordinary except as many house employees as adult guests (and house employees where calling guests by their name).

I happened to know the artist Jeff Koons: not a big fan of the "inflated balloon dogs" but I do like his ballerinas. Well... Turns out the dude had one house destroyed then rebuilt to accommodate a 3 meters high Jeff Koons sculpture of two ballerinas.

I don't know exactly but I take it that's a $15m sculpture. I'd say most people don't know who Jeff Koons is and most people have no idea that some people shall just level an entire house just to have an architect redesign a new house, at the same place, so that a sculpture can now be admired from the living room, kitchen and garden.

He's got several paintings from Basquiat too. He's actually in the top 200 of the world's top art collectors (I found that out by googling his name after having been to his place).

And he's got his art pieces sprinkled around the world, in his many properties.

> The $10-30M people don't seem much different from me.

Definitely not very different. One little fantasy I saw not one but two people in that range do is buy several times the exact same car. Identical. Same config. Then they use one as a daily, and put the the others at different vacation places they have: so they land, take a cab, then get to enjoy the same car. Weird but I've seen two people do it, so I take it's a thing? One had identical Range Rover, the other identical Lexus.

Not real petrolheads: rich car petrolheads are actually going to own fancy stuff like old Ferrari 250 (even if "just" a GTE), old GT40, old Porsche, etc. which every body expects rich people to have if they're into cars at all.

But yup: buying x times the exact same car when times comes to change cars is kinda just weird.

the NW of 700M guy increased to 750M in 1 min - does he sell eggs?

Please remember that this is from 10 years ago. For wealth comparison, you need to take into account the valuation of assets in this period. What the author says about 700M, is probably roughly equivalent to today's 5 billions.

We are all Miele at home and for the next renewal, I will go to Bosch/Siemens. Too many small failures here and there (less than 8 year old). I was sincerely surprised because 20 years ago, Miele was the gold standard (at least in Germany). So, I agree with you.

I'm curious about this though, does a rich man actually wear the same pair of boots for 10 years?

That being said, I've noticed that a lot of clothes that I bought 10 years ago or so are of pretty high quality compared to today, (and no, they are not rich man's clothes). Some of them I actually have been wearing for more than 10 years now.

This is one economic function of loans: borrow money to buy the more expensive boots, pay extra in interest, but save money in the long run. Assuming it is in fact cheaper to buy the more expensive item.

Loved the book! :)

But on the other hand, consider running shoes - most modern ones, even the expensive ones, will wear out in a few hundred kms and are usually non-repairable.

Probably $200 for a good pair of boots

> People no longer need 50-100 years furniture, because nobody wants to inherit old stuff anymore.

I'm going to challenge this assertion: did anyone, ever? Looking around in my parents' house (retirement age), there's no furniture from their parents (post-WW2). I don't remember whether my grandparents had any furniture of their parents in use either.

I do recall going to the charity shops and finding older wooden furniture; while I recognize it as better quality as what you can get today, at the same time it's no longer useful today. TV cabinets (with doors) for CRT TVs and video tapes, writing tables, those kinds of things are obsolete. Tables are timeless though.

But also, over time a lot of that old furniture was either destroyed or bought up and exported. What you find in the charity stores near me today is mostly 90's and onwards.

> Maybe a Miele dishwasher last twice as long at double the price. But it will become old after 10 years even so.

It... won't support the new dishes that come out in the 2030s?

Like, other than energy efficiency (and this is basically already into diminishing returns for appliances like dishwashers), what must-have progress are you expecting?

It's not just how long it lasts.

When we redid our kitchen our fitter had to argue with our whitegoods supplier for us.

The guy in the shop couldn't understand why I wanted a built in Miele fridge-freezer over what ever generic he wanted to off load. His argument was that nobody would be able to see the logo so it didn't matter and we should just take the cheaper item.

My argument was that the Miele was much more energy efficient and would be running 24/7.

Given that enegry costs have risen substantially since then I think I made the correct choice and that the difference in purchase price has more than been offset.

High end furniture from brands that last 50-100 years (i.e. Hancock and Moore, Century, a lot of other brands made in the Hickory NC area) hold their value. Go to the estate sales near you and watch as the prices for pieces from those companies (also real mid century modern furniture) holds at least 1/2 it's value 10+ years later.

High end furniture is the kind, like goodyear welted boots, where you keep it forever and reupholster it every 10 years.

Of course nobody wants your garbage furniture that only lasts 15 years. And since I plan to live 50-100 years, I'd like furniture that can last as long.

As a person who's installed quartz countertops for a living, I'd shy away from IKEA kitchens. I agree with your point, but I'd take exception to the general quality of their cabinets in Canada at least.

Well that falls under the "unless someone tells you" part.

It depends on your background. I grew up in Russia in the 90s, back then it was considered cool to put plastic panels on the walls of your apartment. Fresh and modern look, easy to wash, clearly superior to wallpaper. It was called "euro-renovation" as opposed to soviet-style or "grandma" apartments.

More generally, it can be hard to distinguish between "luxury" products that are primarily more exclusive with very little functional benefit (or in some cases more fragile!), versus products that are Actually Good.

The display luxury category: anything by LVMH, Birkin bags, limited edition sneakers, Ferrari, etc

The "better product for more money" category: Miele, wood furniture, Lexus etc

All professional dishwashers I have encountered (there may be others, obviously) require thorough rinsing (either high-pressure handheld wand or a wipe with a brush/cloth) so they are essentially "clean" before going in the dishwasher.

The dishwasher sanitizes the dishes via very hot water and thorough coverage, but does not really clean anything. It has high temperatures and high throughput - 5 minute cycles. Basically a completely different use case and probably unsuitable for a home.

Two things:

One, there are things you can do with veneer that you cannot be done in solid wood. You can resaw a board to get a book matched panel in solid wood, but you generally cannot get a four-way match because of either pattern shift, not enough thickness to start with, or basically creating veneer the hard way. This generalizes to radial matches with more pieces. That's the most basic example. There are many other things you can do with veneer that are impossible to execute in solid wood. See here[0] for more examples.

Two: professional equipment is not usually built to the customary dimensions of a private residence. A commercial range is a hell of a lot deeper than standard counter depth (about 24" in the US, probably 60cm or thereabouts in Europe because it's based off of how far you can comfortably reach). I looked into this after getting spoiled cooking on a commercial range once. It's not the cost of the range that kills you; it's the cost of the kitchen renovation to accommodate it.

There are vendors that build closer to professional quality appliances sized to residential standards. We lucked into a used Capital range a year ago for a number of dollars we could afford. It's built a lot better than a strictly residential unit and has a weight to match.

[0] https://ctfinefurniture.com/ I am unaffiliated other than owning his excellent book, which I regularly consult when I'm doing veneer work.

Those are designed to have a service contract for continuous maintenance. Not the best idea for a home.

> Buy professional equipment.

Just what I thought and wanted to add.

I guess if an appliance is used each day for several hours, that will last a lifetime in my home for use once or twice a week.

Downside: Professional kitchen equipment is also optimized for being easy to clean. Could be a problem if you don't like pure stainless steel very much... ;-D

Industrial dishwashers use different detergents and operate at a much higher temperatures. Most dishes don't like either. Not to mention if you're in the US you probably want three phase power.

>The dishwasher is fully enclosed...the typical DW is open at the back with all the guts just barely contained in an open structure.

That seems.. fine? Why spend a bunch of money/effort on dressing up something that'd get seen for a few hours max?

>It has pucks full of detergent, a load now a days costs about $1.80...more than I'd like, but the simple avoidance of pouring soap and having a sixpack delivered when you need it is a crazy luxury.

Is pouring out detergent powder really that much of an advantage? At best you're saving a few seconds because you don't have to portion out the soap. Using loose detergent also means you can sprinkle a bit outside of the dispenser, which improves the per-rinse cycle. That means you're getting a worse wash by using tablets, because there's only detergent for the main cycle.

Do I understand from this that they lock you into... proprietary soap?

I think we have the same one.

Anecdata. I've had Miele washer, dryer and cooktop. No parts changed, no maintenance done on them since 1992. Works absolutely fine.

So what would you buy instead?

Yes, but the quietness outweighs all other considerations.

What happened to that then? ;) We bought a Miele dishwasher to replace a Neff which broke down after 10 yrs (probably 16 yrs worth of "official" usage) due to a silly design fault that caused it to leak. Thought a fairly basic model Miele worth a shot, as because it a stupid built-in, there's extra costs getting it installed, so longer it lasts the better. So far, it seems to clean to fairly similar standard to the Neff. Key thing is how long it'll last. Not made in Germany anymore , says made in Czech. Might be fine. But think they've cut some costs. We also own, assumingly, a "Tesco Value" microwave which cost £22 in 2006. Fairly ugly. Has just 2 controls - power level and time. Absolutely hammered, used every day for 19 years, still works fine. I kind of worry whether after this time it will emit more microwaves out into the open so I stand back even more when using it ;)

The only thing people look up on Miele stuff is to last 20 years minimum. That and maybe the cutlery tray on dishwashers, but the patent expired some time ago. Everything else barely matters if the thing is workable one way or another.

>However, this may very well be survivorship bias - of course anything built 100 years ago still around today is good, because anything that wasn't as good is long gone. Like my ikea furniture will be as soon as I try to move it.

It's a 100% surviorship bias. The knockoff "ikea" style flatpack dresser that I assembled (incorrectly) when I was 12 lasted 20 years, and only finally went away because I was moving in with my girlfriend and we could afford slightly more "real" and coordinated furniture. It would have continued to work for longer.

The stuff that lasts 100 years is primarily just whatever is bought by people who treat their stuff well. That has vastly more impact than any product design excluding the modern planned obsolescence and negligence with electronics.

Basically any Toyota can make it to 250k miles, but the Million Mile Lexus is still impressive to people because it tells you about the history of the car more than the manufacturer. If you want to know what cars will make it to 1 million miles, you don't look at reliability stats, you look at what was bought by middle aged wealthy men who were good friends with very careful mechanics.

I'm not looking into 100 years old stuff, that's mostly solid wood anyway.

I'm referring to my consistent experience of buying both laminated chipwood and veneer wood things, then seeing the former disintegrate within 5 years and the latter last 10 years with no visible damage.

It's all good now, I just wish it didn't take me 10 years to gain this knowledge. On another hand if I got it much earlier it wouldn't benefit me either because I could only afford cheap stuff anyway.

We still know how to make the things that last. Modern engineering can do better than the 100 year old things. However we also know how to make things much worse. They couldn't make chipwood 100 years ago.

This is fascinating to me and I'm sure many people who read your comment. What did you learn from the reddit comment that you didn't know before reading it ten years ago? Why has it stuck with you?

We're not talking of centuries here. Laminated chipwood looks like shit in a matter of years. I can replace my phone every year but for a kitchen table or a bathroom door it's ridiculous, way too much hassle.

The best interiors feel lived in but not stuffy. A few old pieces of furniture can help achieve that. Part of the skill of interior design is making these pieces work together in new ways.

You don’t want your home to feel like an ikea catalog surely!?

Not a universal view. I don't have a modern apartment (I've lived in them and don't enjoy the æsthetic of a straight, unornamented beige and glass box full of postmodern slab furniture). I have a stone cottage from the 1600s. If anything, my 19th-century solid wood furniture is too modern!

People have different tastes. There’s nothing weird about that at all.

Hum, that's fair points but don't contradicts OP's arguments:

1. OP finds it "much more pleasant to use" which I believe includes the aesthetic side. "your modern appartement" is your take, but is it? and how old modern? There's an universe of different styles that have been implemented in the past, in a multi dimensional sense: it may be influenced by the state of the art of that time (available tools, wood...), the vogue (not necessarily correlated with state of the art) and the context (unique fancy piece for someone wealthy that paid for, unique simple piece for your family, small series by a semi industrial workshop).

2. True, however your old chipwood furniture may not be newish enough for the next householder so A. he/you needs to ditch it B. buy a new one. With a quality furniture you often can re-sell it at almost the same price you bought it, there's no devaluation but only a seller commission if you don't want to bother.

3. I have in front of me a drawer that was build by the gran-gran-gran-pa (yes!) of my wife and... drawers are drawers. Same for stools, bed or tables. I understand your point as there's usages that are lost like furniture-like-clock but some others weird stuff still come back every time because they actually are clever [0]

4. I'm not sure what you're talking about: integrated kitchen (and so) are made to fill a certain room, not the wooden furniture I'm familiar with that you can literally place where you want. New place and not enough space ? Sell it (the the new owner or someone else) and buy another one that fits better. You hardly sell a cheapwood furniture. Moreover, moving to new places have other drawbacks to deal with that you take into account when making the decision. I'm not arguing you sloudn't move, but it's a process that isn't always trivial. For exemple many US residents won't be able to bring their tank-car aboard for legal and/or practical reasons. Or their digged swimming pool. Or whatever if they move to inner Tokyo.

TV => The image quality is wined by the news devices image, however ss you mention "expensive things" I'd like to point out a B&W tv is probably way cheaper and robust that and the 4K OLED one. But there's room for choices in-between, and I a agree the argumentation works better with furniture than electronics.

CAT scratch => That's the beauty of the made-to-last furniture: Wood ? sand it, a bit of varnish and you're done. Fabric ? tear off the piece and nail a new one. They're not museum pieces but day-to-day home helpers.

[0] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confident_(siège)

move to a warm country and that problem is solved.

> But your comment on Meile, nice kitchen cabinets, sounds like you're looking only for what the next tier above you is enjoying.

No, not really. These are examples of things I know from N+1 level. I'm curious to hear about N+2, N+3 and so on. Some of the points shared in this thread fit nicely, like "buying identical cars in locations you visit often". Or something like "don't by 488, find a used 458 instead -- it's more fun for lower price" would be appreciated.

The original post instead just rambles like this: "I know rich people, let me tell you how rich they are. You wouldn't believe it. Like, really really rich. Like they have their own island, you know".

I don't see how that's useful.

I've had the same Miele HEPA vacuum cleaner for 35 years. I've replaced various pieces on it over the years. The bags are still available. It refuses to become obsolete.

I got one because it was the only reasonable model I could find with a water softener built in. It lasted a good while (~8 years) and performed well i.e. no hard water stains on dishes. After 8 years it developed a grinding noise in the recirculation pump which pointed to broken gears and a replacement which would cost in the ballpark of a new machine so I replaced it.

The design itself has some "German overfeatured" idiosyncrasies to me. Like, when the wash is done, a little stick extends out of the top of the machine pushing the door open to vent. But then, when you tug on the door to open it, you can hear a little geared motor spin and retract that stick. Just more stuff to design, add to BOM, and to break.

I’ve had to repair my Miele dishwasher several times. (Faulty heater relay, common problem with the model.) also coincidentally the spring in the door broke yesterday. Otherwise it does clean the dishes very well and it’s quiet and attractive looking.

I bought it because they have a good rep. But I’ve owned this dishwasher for 15 years and it’s still going.

My Fisher and Paykel fridge I’ve had for 20+ years and it’s never needed any maintenance whatsoever. To me that’s pretty amazing.

Generally at least some models at least used to be very reliable. Like I just discussed with my parents that their clothes washer is over 20 years old. And been in regular use without any issues or significant maintenance. That sort of lifespan isn't really expected from even premium models from most brands.

So they do have perceived quality of being more expensive but more long lasting goods.

depends on the ikea product.

I had ikea stuff that:

- bubbled when liquid spilled on it

- scratched easily

- had screws loosen over time. basically all of them

(this was non-kitchen stuff, I just haven't bought a kitchen from them)

> Miele is a pretty well known standard french brand no?

Miele are German in fact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miele

Well so would I, too bad I'm not wealthy.

The only vaccum cleaner you want is a central vac (Miele doesn't make these).

Central Vac's are easily 4X as powerful for often the same price as the over priced Miele stuff.

But that's the thing, if you'd no longer need to think in money-constrained terms, then instead you'd just want to make something happen in the world. It doesn't need to have a financial return, because your finances would be solved already.

Suppose you have more than enough money for you and your family to live out their lives without needing to worry about that. Now that's solved, you can move on to what you actually want to happen in your life, such as helping your kids become pro athletes.

Sure, through sponsorships and adverts. But like all such things, it's an extremely limited number of people who have the right combination of talent, training, perseverance, looks/charisma and probably luck to get that amount.

Usain Bolt estimated net worth is $90million. Maybe as many as ten others have passed $4m? A few listed here https://athleticsweekly.com/aw-promotion/top-10-richest-trac...

I'm sure taking the bronze or silver in the Olympics is a great talking point for a future as a lawyer or financial analyst, so the backup plan is in place.

absolutely, but let's just say the distribution is a bit skewed to making nothing from pro running ventures. It has an extremely bad effort to potential reward ratio.

By putting in the same level of extreme effort into any classicaly well paying profession you would highly likely become very rich and successful.

Maybe, but this is one of those ‘if you need to ask, you can’t afford it’ type scenarios.

Pretty sure Usain Bolt has.

Yeah but I really wanted to know what rich people buy that I don't know about. The top answer - while vaguely interesting - didn't actually tell me anything I didn't already know.

I think the conclusion is probably that they don't buy anything we don't know about.

I think the question was pretty clearly worded:

> Title: What do insanely wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about?

> Text: I was just spending a second thinking of what insanely wealthy people buy, that the not insanely wealthy people aren't familiar with (as in they don't even know it's for sale)?

The comment just plain and straight doesn't answer the question being asked.

It's kinda amazing how much more it is upvoted than comments with relevant answers. Maybe because emotions from dreaming of what it's like being rich (that's what it actually goes about) are so strong, the interpretation of the question is getting bent towards experiencing them.

Sometimes the question is really asking what is asking ...

Also, "extremely rich" is like "extremely successful in life" to a lot of people. But for the latter, emotional connections are also important.

So it does for many ordinary people.

Money can't buy happiness but nether could the absence of money. It's not really a good argument against money.

Time is indeed a very major thing, but it’s more accessible than most realise - I am only marginally wealthy, high 7/low 8 figures, and that’s ample for me to not need to work for a living and live very comfortably. Frankly, once you have even $1M in free liquid capital, you are in the endgame, as money makes money far more efficiently than labour. I spend perhaps 20 hours a year farting around with our finances, place some bets, and that’s it. I decided to go full on idle-rich when I was still practically a pauper, and have grown my worth significantly since.

Perhaps my sample pool is skewed, but the billionaires and centimillionaires I know live pretty modest lives in general - yes, they fly first class, stay in the best hotels, and all that jazz, but they’re unpretentious, and you wouldn’t know them from the upper middle class family sat at the next table. In fact, one I know regularly gets weird looks because he’ll be in some elite country club in his coffee-stained slacks and threadbare jumper - but there’s the rub - he doesn’t care. The guy who looks rich is probably up to his eyeballs in debt. The guy who looks like the janitor probably owns the place.

I think the single biggest thing wealth buys is not giving a shit what other people think. You don’t have to play status games when you know you’re the big dog in the room, even if nobody else knows it. I mean, I take perverse joy in showing up at places looking like I just crawled out of a gutter, because I know it doesn’t matter - my money is good.

Being able to say no to things, take your time, be present. That's a whole different kind of freedom

> The very rich have circles of people they rely on to take care of problems.

At the higher levels, there's a "family office" which takes care of such things. All bills go there, and anything that needs to be done, they take care of. The first big one was the Rockefellers', which was in Rockefeller Center in New York. (That turned into a business. Now it offers Being Rich as a Service.)

> A very rich person has a full-time housekeeper.

So does any middle class family living in a developing country with high economic inequality.

>The very rich have circles of people they rely on to take care of problems. Like having "a lawyer" who they go to for and have known for years. There seems to be much more of a sense of personal relationships / loyalty. Almost like the old feudal oaths.

That has more to do with owning business interests than wealth. The guy who owns a small chain of a mundane business, has stake in another business via investment, etc, etc, his social circle looks roughly the same.

> Other than that, the main difference is the very wealthy having a mentality of getting people to "take care of problems" to a much larger extent. For example, routine tasks like cleaning. An upper MC person might have a weekly cleaner at best.

Pfft... amateurs. I've solved the same problem by just living in filth.

I would pay to avoid flying : private or public…

The post is probably written by a non-rich who does not know but suspect that there is something? may be there is that we do not know now? ;)

In my experience roaming many different groups, the ones who do not signal status typically are the most powerful/influental. Their membership is safe; they don’t need to signal status, or rather, signaling it draws too much attention (annoyances by those seeking to gain status by affiliation). I remember reading a study about this some years back to find my own findings confirmed.

The people I know with a net worth over 10m do not display it. Why would they want to. It only has downsides and no upside. Same applies to other forms of status/rank/belonging.

(Not contradicting your points, merely adding to them.)

If you want to experiment with that, try to NOT match other people’s style AND radiate a deep sense of security/belonging/entitlement. Do not hide your (other) insecurities; those with status don’t have to hide their authenticity. This may sound like a contradiction at first, but you can develop an universal sense of belonging that remains authentic. You will be surprised which people will suddenly find you to talk with you, once you stop seeking their attention.

Not to be trite, but signaling status is only complicated due to animals/humans making it complex. These are games and they are zero sum games.

We should strive to remove ourselves from these games as much as possible and not to lean into them as LVMH would like.

Rejecting such superficial signaling only enhances one's life, IMO.

Same thing with 401k enrollments at businesses. Management gets way more of a benefit from them than the wage slaves, but needs to maintain a minimum amount of people enrolled.

The very wealthy had mobile phones years before they were commonly available/affordable. The only things they can't have are things that are technically/physically impossible. A Gilded Age railroad titan could not have had a mobile phone. But the wealthy had them in the 1940s.

The other piece is that there's no incentive to keep prices out of reach.

There might be reasons for high prices, like costly manufacture, but no one is going to refuse to expand their market by 10000x if they are able to bring costs down.

Without people to buy from, money is worthless.

Miele makes really good stuff. I have their stackable W1/T1 washer/dryer. It's unbelievably good at washing or drying pretty much anything. They also supposedly last forever, even today. I'll let y'all know how true that is in 20 years LOL

My apartment has Miele appliances. It came with the apartment and I'm honestly not impressed at all besides the fact that they still work after 18 years (when they were installed).

The oven is mediocre at best, my Annova Precision Oven is much much better, much better control of temperature, heats up much faster, has more features, infinitely cheaper.

The range hood needs to be repaired because it makes a lot of noise. Repair of Miele appliances are super expensive.

The only appliance I'm impressed with is the wine cave but that's a white labeled Liebherr

And I would sell tickets (at a loss, ). Because whats something cool if nobody witnesses it.

‘The Manor on Stagecoach’

https://g.co/kgs/tgHhdkD

You aren’t alone

when the 3D printing stack gets a little further, we'll all get "a utopian, post-scarcity space society of humanoid aliens and advanced superintelligent artificial intelligences living in artificial habitats spread across the Milky Way galaxy."

These are mostly positional items.

The four seasons isn't materially better than the hilton next door. The rooms are basically the same, the fixtures at the four seasons are fancier, the bedding is prettier, some random furniture may be sourced from a different supplier. The four seasons will be in a location which has somewhat better views.

The four seasons has prettier and more attentive staff, and there are less "less well off" at the four seasons. And you get to brag that you went to the "four seasons" but it really isn't that much better.

It's almost all status.

Can't say I've stayed at the Four Seasons, but we stayed in the St Regis in SF last year. We got upgraded to the Metropolitan Suite and that was quite the experience. Note that I paid exactly zero as I'm a long time Bonvoy Gold Member and was burning points on one of their regular rooms for a vacation, then they elected to upgrade us. I think it was due calling ahead asking for an accommodation for my autistic son (which they were amazing regarding).

I have nothing bad to say and everything good about how they handled our stay. Whether it was worth the price is (as this whole topic is about) relative to your means. I would say that it was more than we would have paid, but now that we've experienced it it's on my radar as a reasonable value. Their signature "Butler" service was beyond amazing; traveling with my son is difficult at the best of times and they handled everything.

They essentially allowed me to have an actual vacation vice allowing me to handle a series of challenges and let the rest of my family have a vacation (which is the normal way things go).

The problem with a maximum wage is deciding what that maximum is. Outsides returns are what incentivize people to start companies. A earning cap will cap that incentive accordingly.

It’s easy to determine what income would be if everyone made the same amount - average income, which is $72,000 per worker.

That includes everyone who filed a tax return from the kid working at McDonald’s to Warren Buffet.

Not sure what you’d call a comfortable life but a single mom making $72,000 per year would be struggling in many major cities.

Some of us believe in liberty of property and maximum wages is not compatible with that.

People hate the thought because it's repeatedly failed to work historically, with even explicitly Marxist states deciding that it's best to allow some billionaires.

In Bill Gates's post about changing his charitable giving goal to give most of it away in the next 20 years, he references Chuck Feeney as someone he admired.

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Feeney

  Until he was 75, he traveled only in coach, and carried reading materials in a plastic bag." He did not own a car or a house and wore a $10 Casio F-91W watch

He gave away most of his fortune and required recipients not to reveal the source of the donation.

Bill Gates gets a lot of hate for good reason. His business practices killed off a lot of good products. BeOS, anyone?

This is a disingenuous post.

Philanthropy is often used a strategy to lobby politicians and drive policy that benefits other investments while avoiding most taxes.

Nobody voted people like Bill Gates to have such a massive influence over media and institutions via "donations".

If you knew anything about NGOs and politics you wouldn't simply go for "They're asking for or donating money so they're obviously awesome, their intentions are great and it's a net positive".

Calling skepticism reflective is like saying that if you think your company doesn't have your best interest at heart like it says you're being paranoid.

> Bill Gates has saved millions of lives through his philanthropy, and the internet is full of malicious rumors about him.

But that's not related to his philanthropy mostly. There's evil business stuff he actually did and there are some conspiracy freaks. Those would exist anyway. But I've never seen a significant number of people with criticisms because of the programs he enables.

Gates giving away his money is good, but it would be better for the billionaire class not to exist. Money is power is a zero sum game.

You can't talk about top rates without also talking about where they kick in. Italy's top rate of 43% kicks in for everything over 50k euros. The 50k feels a bit low to me, and maybe 100k euros would be better. 90% of everything over 5M may work, but then you run into another problem where people that rich are not bringing home a salary. So you lower where it kicks in and then just impact the working professionals, which also isn't who you really want to target. And if you do want to target those working $500k+/year, removing the cap (176,100 this year) on SS payments is probably a better path.

So now we're back to the ultra-rich where you need to first think about taxing dividends as income without hurting retirees, and second think about some wealth tax. It could be small like .2% on everything over 5M or something, but it would actually put some tax burden on the people you're trying to put it on.

How about we do the exact opposite?

Create expensive products which materially improve the lives of those with wealth? Align the incentives of the rich so that they don't spend on these zero sum status goods. Also incentivize the rich to get richer so that they can buy these products that make their lives better in a non-shallow way.

Work with incentives instead of against incentives.

we didn't arbitrarily select people to make rich, they are externalities of our wants and needs, and a sign that those things are being ~ satisfied.

The problem was that technological advances made this a very tough market. Nokia used to have a separate marque called Vertu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertu) to serve this market. But rapid technological progress meant that next year's $300 phone is batter in most functional aspects as last year's $5000 luxury model, so even the very wealthy would probably prefer this year's iPhone 17 Air to last year's diamond-encrusted iPhone 16.

The market might get revived when the tech improvement flattens flattens. like they did for cars.

There's gold plated / jewel encrusted versions of phones or graphics cards [0] but that's just making things look garish for the people that want to look rich. But as far as I know there's no 'bespoke' phone manufacturer on the same level as Swiss watches or hand-built cars. No real reason either; with a watch, any performance has peaked years ago so the only thing that remains is design. Phones are mostly functional, although I suppose you could do something cool with the back side.

[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/graphics-cards/one-day-the-...

I don’t think StarLink was built to improve lives. See: how it’s being used as a control and power mechanism.

After health and edu, your points do not apply. Filthy rich do not have jobs, hard times etc And at least in Europe we have (mostly) low cost health and edu and we do not (mostly) get jealous about the rich

That's literally the case already: each tech oligarch has their own toy AI company.

yup, it's very hard to bootstrap without knowing where the next step even is in a dark room.

> All the things you lists are things I personally associate with familial education.

I absolutely agree. Or some good mentor. If your entire family runs paycheck to mouth, the likelihood of somebody able to guide you towards a low fee brokerage that provides you with the financial advice to differentiate between different investment instruments is vanishingly small. Even people who make it into white-collar jobs with 401ks are likely to only vaguely understand that it's something more than a weird savings account they can't touch.

Investment takes a certain kind of stomach and can be a very expensive training exercise. Lots of people don't do it well, even highly sophisticated and educated investors.

I remember we spent a couple weeks on stocks and bonds in a class in middle school, but basically zero time on personal finance, how loans work, how to read legal paperwork, run a ledger, etc. Those have almost always been a "learn on the job" thing since I've been alive.

I grew up upper middle-class and graduated from the ivy league. I will not list out how antithetical my own experience is to yours, but I promise you your financial education was highly abnormal.

I'd wager walking down Main Street USA and asking people in their 30s and 40s what stocks they own and what an ETF is would be get you a lot of blank stares.

When I did the equivalent "lets learn about stocks" at school, we opened the newspaper, found a stock, "invested" fake money in a ledger the teacher kept, and then cashed out at the end of three weeks after doing some rough calculations.

The equivalent for a real world person would have been to

1) know what a brokerage was

2) find one

3) drive there and fill out some paperwork to make the account

4) deposit a paper check or cash at the location

5) get a phone # with a specific broker at the brokerage

6) subscribe to a local paper with the stock section

7) watch one of several thousand stocks, and write down by hand the movement of the stocks to see if you could set a strategy

8) maybe buy subscriptions for some investment magazines, a few hundred dollars per year

9) decide the time is right, call your broker, leave a message with his secretary to get back to you

10) wait for that to happen, then place your order. your broker would then charge you a percentage (up to 3% of your trade!) as their fee

11) Angry men in a pit in NYC would yell at each other for hours to make the trade. The trade would be communicated on scraps of paper with hastily written numbers, then shouted over a phone on the trading floor

12) wait for your broker to send you physical mail with your certificates or a record of ownership showing that the trade closed several days after you placed it with him

13) go through a similar process to sell your stock certificates, but then have to self track capital gains for your taxes

Can you name a single reason why you think a poor person living paycheck-to-meal would even know about or wish to participate in this?

Things got better with the internet, which didn't exist for most people until I was an adult (I know because I helped start an ISP), it still cost $30 trade electronically and settlement still didn't happen for days. So somebody making hundreds of dollars a month would have to lose $30, just to make a bet of whatever they were able to scrimp together over months, in the hope it would turn into more than $30 so they could sell it and make money above the trading fee.

Again, why would a poor person, who may not even have a bank account, be a participant in this?

So, to help with your incredulity, why would somebody, who is from a poor family, with not a single person around them trading stocks, most without full-time employment, take a brief class when they were 10, retain those precious handful of classroom hours, until they get lucky enough to have disposable income decades later and suddenly decide "I'm going to trade ETFs" <insert rich yacht buying cat meme picture>

Most people don't work in companies with a 401k, or even with any benefits at all. Why would they be familiar with managing one? Next time you eat out, trade some tips with your waiter on how they diversify their retirement investments. Ask them which ETFs they like, and if any have especially low fees, or do they pursue a market segment strategy. What's their opinion on I-bonds? Maybe they have a prediction if Cathie Wood is a cook or not?

Umbrella insurance is very cheap, and if you have any money at all, you should have it.

The quintessentially American perpetual fear of lawsuits is sickening to the unwitting bystander.

The given range was the assumed incorrect price, which made them not contract for the service.

>Huh, for me the nice part of being rich would be to not have to choose between so much goods.

A friend of mine has a friend that's a fancy lawyer and I went camping with them once and the lawyer had the best of the best of camping stuff. Like he just went to REI and was like "give me the best of whatever I need to camp this weekend." It's possible that he weighed the pros and cons of some of it, but I sorta doubt it. The tent fabric felt like silk and was the lightest weight of anything I've ever seen and I camp a lot of with a wide range of people that can afford nicer stuff. The tent didn't even have any branding on it. My friend was telling me about this bike the guy had, and it's basically carbon fiber everything probably $10k at least. He had wrecked his old bike and gave it to my buddy that would have just needed to get a few parts and have it assembled at a bike shop and it was basically too expensive for my buddy to justify it.

The specific catalogs seemed to cater to the specific interests these people would have enjoyed nerding-out to. For stuff they weren't interested in it looks like they paid people to just buy the highest-end if everything else (appliances, electronics, HVAC, etc).

The J Peterman catalog is still around around (at least, online) and approaches satire in its selection of goods (mostly clothing) that assiduously conveys "casual, interesting, old-money wealth". The Elaine Benes character on "Seinfeld" worked there, and had to deal with the kooky habits of the Mr Peterman character.

There was one that totally had that look. Ugh. I should have made notes of the names. It was a very Sharper Image-looking catalog, filled with wildly eclectic products. It was replete with statements about everything being top-of-the-line, satisfaction guaranteed, and lifetime warranties.

This one comes to mind. It was quite expensive and Uma Thurman's father was involved when I used to get the catalogs 20 years ago. They have private and custom tours available. www.nomadicexpeditions.com

Some others. www.nomadicexpeditions.com www.geoex.com - Digging the 22 day train trip through the Silk Road for $50k

How about around the work via private jet? https://www.smithsonianjourneys.org/tours/around-world-priva...

Ugh. We threw away a ton of stuff. I'll see what I can find. (A change-of-address had lapsed. We let the recipient's family know and they're keeping it updated now, so the torrent has, sadly, stopped.)