![]() What, then, is the sweet spot for being rich but still capable of coolness? Thankfully, the Sunday Times rich list came out this week, so I went through it for ages trying to find a single name I recognised that wasn’t just some anonymous guy called Alex who inherited a lot of property from his dad who was a lord, and I think I’ve figured it out. You’re telling me not one of them can even plot to blow up the moon? They wouldn’t even have to blow it up, just start assembling the big laser. Even celebrity billionaires aren’t that cool: Kylie Jenner is arguably the least interesting Kardashian-adjacent sibling, and I’m not looking to rattle “ Stan Twitter” too much, but it’s fair to say Rihanna’s been way less fun since she made all that Fenty money. Does Zuck really need an $84bn net worth to wear T-shirts and be too into grilling meat? I would just like one billionaire to pivot into something flamboyant and Bond villainesque. But while dullness isn’t a sin, it does seem to highlight how little there is to actually do once you acquire a nation-state level of wealth. Similarly, I cannot imagine anything worse than squirming in the corner with a warm beer while Mark Zuckerberg stares through me and tells me how the metaverse is actually good now, honestly. Bill Gates – the byword for “richest guy on Earth” when I was growing up – has done a lot of impressive work in water sanitation, which is great, but you wouldn’t want to have to talk to him about it at a party, would you? ![]() ![]() There are two other options with billionaire status, of course: be dull, or unbecome one. The only thing left to do after that is buy Twitter or make your boat a bit silly.Įven if you disagree with the sheer concept of billionaires, you have to admit: the current crop should be doing a bit more to inspire awe, be more formidable, or be more jealousy-inducingly insane with it. This is why so many billionaires end up dabbling with the folly of space, isn’t it? At a certain point, your wealth truly eclipses what you can do, and there’s only so many times you can go to the Maldives with some supermodels before getting bored. And this is arguably the coolest thing he’s ever done. Which is the sort of thing a 14-year-old boy would draw in the back of a maths textbook, but made real. I’ll book my flight.”)Īnd then there’s Jeff Bezos who, it was revealed this week, has had an intricately carved figurehead of his girlfriend Lauren Sánchez installed on the front of his $500m superyacht. And what is there to do? Oh, you’ve just got Ronaldo out there scoring triple hat-tricks to an audience of no one? Yeah, wow. (“Oh, so it’s a big long line, is it? And you’re going to build it by 2030, is it? Right, OK. The entire city of Neom, a vanity project of Mohammed bin Salman’s, is fundamentally cringe. Elon Musk’s past couple of years, of course, have just been faintly embarrassing all round. I have to assume every billionaire is bored, then, because so many of them seem to end up spinning their wheels within their great glass palaces, watching their net worth jump and jag on a big five-screen set-up, and then – as sure as night follows day – starting to act in a way that can only be described as “cringe”.
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