Financial advisors for the Uber rich. I remember hearing an interview of one on..radio lab or this American life or.. Something...I can't remember it was years ago, but anyway she described what it was like. They don't use passports, they would call her to find bracelets they lost in taxis, it didn't sound like they were working at all. I don't remember if she went into their work schedule, but financial advisors are treated like baby sitters, or at least she was.
I thought that might be a good place to start, I'm sure some of them have written books about it, or done more interviews.
Welcome to a day in the life of a billionaire. You'll need to get up nice and early for a personalised yoga routine devised by your trainer, and then it's straight out of the house to work. You've got breakfast scheduled with a CEO, and you're going to spend an hour objectifying women with him before heading into the office. Quick hello, report from your executive team, and now it's time for a power brunch with the man who sources child slaves for you to have sex with. Private jet flight to the next city over for lunch, you have a corrupt mayor to bribe so the minimum wage won't go up. Then it's time to fly back and spend an hour in your office looking important. You ended up sleeping with your secretary instead of getting anything done, but hey, we can't all be faithful to our wives. Now that it's 2pm, you've got to go play golf with your "professional contacts". You refer to your caddy with a racial slur. At 4pm, you go back to the office for the last time today, where your son is waiting for you. It's very hard educating a young man on how to inherit a fortune 500 company that runs itself. You spend most of the next hour telling him about golf. At 5pm, finally get in your limousine to go home. You've been working all day, and you're beat. You praise yourself for your work ethic, and wonder if the single day you work next week is going to be as hard.
You write all of that in the middle of the night to distract yourself from the guilt which robs you of your sleep, before your heavy medication kicks in. You give it to your social media staff in the morning to post throughout the day.
I mean, literally the first person listed is Elon Musk. If you think he's a hard worker who only got there through grinding then I have a bridge to sell you.
You're going to take a single counter example and throw out everything else? I also mentioned there are different types, and some are like Christy Walton, who haven't worked at all. But neither of those examples means that there aren't a bunch of workaholics on the list.
Look, at least most of us agree that the wealth inequality is grotesque, but I'm not sure why you have a hard time with the concept that a lot of people get rich by focusing on making money and working very hard at it. I have a hard time with the concept of a CEO making orders of magnitude more than the average worker's salary, but that doesn't mean they don't work a lot.
Ah yes, a single counter example, also the person who leads the list. And I disagree, having people do presentations and going "ah yes, very good" isn't a fucking job. These people don't work.
I feel people still don't understand how much a billion is. One Million dollars would still be life changing for most people here, but consider that 1 million seconds ago was 11 days ago, 1 Billion seconds ago was 31 years ago.
To put it in another perspective, a very bad investment would yield you 0.1% monthly. This means that if a billionaire was to invest money the worst way possible, he would have to spend over 1 Million dollars per month to ever decrease his fortune.
If you had an infinite money machine, that as long as you don't spend more than a million per month it just keeps on growing, would you ever work? Yeah, thought so, billionaires are the same, they might have hobbies, and those hobbies might be something others consider work, but they're not working.
I personally believe that if a person ever gets 1 Billion dollars he should receive a letter congratulating them for winning capitalism, and informing them that any cent above 1 Billion will be taxed at 99.9999% (including investments).
That's still a 50% down payment on that house, your mortgage payments will be a lot less than your rent. So you'll have a place of your own and more money every month, plus be investing in your capital instead of pissing money away. If that's not life changing for you then nothing is.
There's a 4.5x household income limit for mortgages in the UK. So if your combined income is Ā£60k (for a family where both parties have average UK income), the most money you can borrow is Ā£270k. And then you look at something that's not immediately falling apart and you see this https://www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/details/67606066/ you instantly know that you can't afford anything even with Ā£1m in your pocket.
But also as a general rule places don't let you spend over 30% of your income in rent, 60K that you mentioned for a couple is Ā£4186 per month, so the maximum rent of that hypothetical person is Ā£1256. Which wouldn't also allow you to rent a house like the one you showed, so it's pointless. The house where a couple that earns 60k lives can absolutely be bought for close to 1 million (if not less). Whoever is living in a 4 bedroom house like the one you pointed out earns a lot more than 60k and so they can finance the rest.
Definitely not 9-5, M-F. Most billionaires inherited substantial wealth to begin with. But executives, in general, donāt have āhoursā in the same way as rank and file workers. Itās more about knowledge and meetings ā well, hopefully knowledge ā so you might have an 11am meeting, a 2pm call, and then a 7pm dinner with a potential investor or whatever. You donāt really āworkā in between those obligations unless itās a small company (where you probably arenāt a billionaire anyway). At most, you need to make a board report or PowerPoint for a presentation or something like that.
Billionaires who just own things and arenāt in the C-suite donāt work much at all. Even if youāre on some boards, itās not much in terms of actual obligations. Thereās definitely tasks to do but itās also definitely not a job. So, a bit like being a landlord.