Some time ago, a now-deleted Reddit user asked everyone on the platform "What do the rich buy that the poor don't even know is available for purchase?" And apparently, the shopping list of the elite is exactly what we're interested in; the post has received a whopping 16.5K comments.
However, while pet cloning and celebrity rentals sound appealing, let's not forget that over the last 50 years, the poverty rate in the U.S. has barely budged: in 1970, about 12% of the U.S. population was considered poor. In 2019, around 11% was. It's crazy to think that some splash hundreds of thousands of dollars on these luxuries while others don't have even the essentials.
Time.
All that you do commuting, grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning your house, waiting on hold, paying bills all those chunks of your life that are eaten up by minutiae - rich people buy out of all that routine garbage.Time is all you really get in your life. Rich people buy it back.
Luxury ice cubes.
Gläce Luxury Ice Co produces perfectly square ice blocks for “minimum dilution and maximum cooling”.
Hand-carved and completely clear, these cubes are sold in bags of 50 and each bag costs $325.
A person to go to jail for you in your stead.
This is a known phenomenon in Latin America but I imagine it happens in other places as well.
Landing 747s in small airports.
I grew up around Lexington, KY. The region is huge on horses, particularly Thoroughbred horses. The entire city is surrounded by horse farms, and these farms breed some of the best racing horses in the world. The rich and famous will often come here to buy Thoroughbreds to add to their breeding stock.
One such person is a shiek from Dubai (i think?) who owns his own private 747. Now the local airport isn't rated for 747s, and it's not legal to land one there unless it's a emergency. The shiek doesn't care though and lands his 747 there anyways. The airport fines him every time he does this, which he is totally fine with paying. I've been told that many of the upgrades to the airport over the years where almost entirely funded with money from those fines.
You can buy houses "ready to move in only with a suitcase". These house are more than fully equipped. Everything is already there like the whole furniture, glasses, knifes, forks, spoons, tissues and toilette paper, towels, toys and games for the children etc.
You can rent celebrities for your private events. Not just musicians, but bona fide actors & actresses.
Super rich guy in Bel Air used to host his kid's birthday party in late October, so they went all out for a Halloween themed party.
Everyone at the kid's school was invited, plus their own friends.
Each year they'd hire some fantastic athlete to appear at the event; 1 year it was Tony Hawk, another year it was some Olympic gold medal gymnastic winners.
The one that threw me was when they hired Demi Moore, Anthony Kedis & Benecio de Toro to be "guests" at the party, to hang out and pretend they were friends with the kid.
Mind you this was a KID'S Halloween party, set outside in a huge, massive garden, spread out over tennis courts & lawns, with games, buffets, dessert tables, taco stands, omelette stands, bbq, pizza, burgers, etc... no booze, no one allowed inside. All the event staff were dressed in halloween costumes, it was VERY cool.
Entire floors of hotels or multiple floors. Entire restaurants. Chefs from literally any restaurant in the world to cook for them, wherever they are.
I saw all of those things done by a Prince Of Saudi Arabia: We estimated it cost him $50,000 just for the one private meal in our restaurant, given that he:
1. Had the top four floors of our hotel booked (for the hundreds of staff to take care of him, his wife and his two kids; plus likely some concubines, if I'm being honest). As someone in this part of the world, being rich= the number of people who work for you.
2. He paid $30k just to close our restaurant for one meal.
3. Flew his favorite chef from New York to Orlando to cook for him, on his private jet; and then back again. Of course, it was likely the OTHER private jet he had just for his staff, not for himself or his family.
4. Make food our entire staff, all the kitchen staff, all the federal, state and local security and him, his wife and his two kids.
I have posted the entire story somewhere else in the past, but I couldn't find it easily.
I had a buddy who taught ski lessons to another Saudi Prince's little kid and had some nearly unbelievable and yet similar details during his interactions with them. That kid had an entire team around him or probably ten staff, plus vehicles, snowmobiles, a helicopter, and so on.
I later met a guy who worked on an ultra-luxury 300-foot yacht and served Bill Gates and his wife, among other super-rich people. Their primary job was to operate without interacting with them, or at least as little as possible.
This shows you, in some sense, that having people around you doing stuff you need to be done but doing it invisibly is another perk of being rich.
A while back some guy on here was talking about his experience working as a sort of personnel manager for a billionaire and how things are just wildly different for them.
The specific example he used was how things work when these people want to go on a trip, and give any notice at all to their employees.
What happens is that an advanced team gets sent ahead by a few days to scope out the rented/bought location and report back exact dimensions for closet space, drawer space, etc. People back at the home go through the clothing, jewelry, etc, and draw up a priority list which is sent to the advanced team. The advanced team then spends the next two days purchasing the list of items.
Entire wardrobes, jewelry sets, makeup kits, bathing supplies, etc. Anything they cannot get (not enough time, or is one-of-a-kind like the family heirloom watch the rich dude wears every now and then) is relayed to the house-team. The family's schedule is arranged such that the moment the family leaves the house on the day of travel, a whole team of people rushes through and packs up all the remaining items (only after the family leaves, you wouldn't want to deny them access to their items for even a few seconds) which are then sent ahead to the airport while the family has a lunch or something somewhere.
Upon landing, their luggage takes one route (direct) and the family takes a similarly indirect route (unless otherwise directed) such that by the time they get to the location all of their items are not just unpacked but in their proper organized locations and ready for use without any of the advanced team ever being visible to the family.
What happens when the family leaves the location? The same situation in reverse, but quite frequently all of the repurchased items are just disposed of in some method. It's just easier, if not cheaper, to rebuy them each time the family goes somewhere if they aren't travelling to too many different locations in quick succession.
Ever seen "The Big Short" why do you think Goldman Sachs took a week to correctly price Dr. Michael Burry's housing-short position? Because they were securing that position for themselves and their clients.
Those financial instruments are so complicated and the regulation on them so byzantine that it wouldn't surprise me if Goldman actually didn't do anything illegal, like they're allowed, at their discretion, to misprice an asset for a certain period of time. Probably under the guise of the assets being complicated to price, but really it's just a buffer for them to get an edge that regular people couldn't believe.
Imagine going to a horse race an being able to bet on the horses near the end of the race. Rich people get that.
