“The Levels Of Excess And Indulgence I See Are Insane”: 50 Things That People Working For The Rich Have Seen

My son is a contractor. They just finished an outdoor “party barn” for a wealthy hedge fund manager. One room for $120,000. They followed the architects plans to the smallest detail. It turned out beautiful. When the guy’s wife saw it she said she hated it and ordered it torn down immediately and replaced. That kind of waste and attitude sickens me. To top it off, they’re out of state and may spend two -three weeks a year there.

My mom worked for a very wealthy man. He and his wife had 2 boys and she decided she wanted a girl. So she adopts a girl, probably about 4 years old. She wasn't old enough for school yet. So it's a done deal and she finally has her girl. They spend their days going shopping for clothes and fun stuff for the girl. A few months later, the wife decides she doesn't want a girl anymore and RETURNS HER, like a dog from a pound. She told the girl to keep the clothes if she wanted them.

I fly private jets for a living. The levels of excess and indulgence I see are insane.

- $50k worth of dishes that never get used.
- A vacation to Norway last year cost around $450k.
- The plane I fly right now is around 40 million.
- Flying the family dogs on the jet an hour to their preferred groomer.
- A day trip to Maui just for a same day passport.
- $34,000/month for our satellite based wifi.
- The


EDIT: hah, I’m at work and closed the app before I finished the comment. I didn’t think it posted. I’m still alive and definitely not a sniper posting on my victims phone. Definitely not 😅.

My friend's wife flies to Aspen when she has a headache. Not for a headache treatment, just to ‘breathe better air.’ Meanwhile, I treat my migraines by turning off the lights and putting a wet facecloth over my forehead.

About 20 years ago, I was the personal assistant / nanny for a billionaire family in SoCal. At first, they were such lovely people but slowly all of their dysfunction overtook the happy veneer. The husband spent almost all of his time away and barely checked in with his family. The wife was the epitome of the bored, neglected rich second wife who ignored her only child in private but pretended to be mother of the year in public. She would take one yoga class a day and attend one high society function and then spend the rest of the day bemoaning how difficult and stressful her life was.

The child was neglected, unloved, and acted out constantly. He reminded me of one of the kids from Russian orphanages that weren’t held as babies and grew up not being able to form attachments to other human beings. He basically lived alone in this mansion with only myself, the cook and housemaid, and his mother who barely even spoke to him and who I never saw hug him much less play with him.

I essentially drove him to school, and to all the activities he didn’t want to do but kept him out of her way, helped him do his homework and tucked him in at night. He hated me no matter how I tried to bond with him, which I could understand because all he needed was his parents love and attention, and didn’t want me as a replacement.

I ended up getting fired after the holidays because I was tasked with planning their Christmas vacation, and after a month of intense planning: booking a private villa, organizing their private jet, the house-staff at the location, ordering all the necessary food and getting all the activities planned, the wife decided two days out that she no longer wanted to go to that location, but to a private island instead. When I informed her of the lack of availability at the new destination and cost of lost deposits etc, but did provide her a list of options to choose from, she blamed me for ruining their holidays because I should have anticipated and planned a back up at the exact location she wanted that she had never previously mentioned.

I was so happy to have been fired from that mausoleum of rich malaise and despair. and honestly, I’ve sadly enjoyed reading the news over the years of the husband moving on to his fourth and now fifth much younger wives, get caught up in legal drama for corruption, and she off into obscurity once she was divorced from her place in high society.

Unfortunately I’ve seen the kid’s social media and he’s turned out to be another uber rich soulless [jerk], and will probably just play out his father’s life beat by beat in an attempt to forever try to earn his attention, love and respect.

I've got friends who work on superyachts. They've told me a few stories, but one that sticks out is the guy who worked on a yacht with a fancy fish tank. The yacht also had a "snow room" where they had a snowmaking machine, and people could go in at any time and just...play in the snow, I guess. But this fishtank ran the entire height of the staircase in the yacht. You could go up and down the stairs and there'd be fish all the way. It sounded pretty amazing. The problem was that one of the fish they had in there was a shark. So, every week the shark would eat all the other fish, and they'd end the week by spending 50k buying more fish to put in with the shark.

I had a close friend who's aunt and uncle owned one of the major hotel chains on the West Coast. They have so much money its become a figurative "dragon on a pile of gold" situation.

My friend (who was living modestly, as we were both in our 20s) told me that that part of her family had recently bought their neighbor's mansion to the tune of something like 15 million dollars, and knocked it down because they wanted a bigger yard.

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On the flip side, I know someone who worked with Harrison Ford and said he is the most boring, average person you can imagine. Don't ask him about acting (he'll shut down on you) but ask him about carpentry or aviation and he turns into a little kid. Also: while filming Indiana Jones 4, Ford had a weekly party in his hotel suite - cast and crew, everyone invited - and always picked up the (often enormous) tab if he went out to dinner with groups.

My girlfriend was a mobile dog groomer in San Francisco. She groomed dogs at several homes on "Billionaire's Row". With most of her clients, she interfaces with the owner of the dog (normal, right?). At one house on Billionaire's Row, she didn't interface with the owner or even the butler - but with the "dog butler". The dog butler didn't groom or walk the dogs - he would just coordinate the schedules of the dog walkers and the dog groomer. He reported to the butler.

My aunt is a retired high-end realtor. She got roped into helping this service arrange housing for wealthy F1 fans.

These “Saudi prince” types are from another planet. 1 mansion for a week isn’t enough. They need 6-8 mansions next door to each other for a month to accommodate their private medical staff, legal teams, chefs, airplane mechanics, etc. They fly in on multiple private jets and rent entire airports for the weekend. Once guy even paid to have a helicopter pad constructed on a property he rented, and then paid to be removed when he was done.

All of this for a WEEKEND GETAWAY.

Taught at a private school on a yacht club. Once I asked a parent what they were doing this weekend. They said going to the Keys to check out a property they forgot they owned 💀.

My niece had a scholarship to an excellent university she would never have been able to afford. Therefore there were many people attending that came from money. She was lucky enough to room with really nice people. The girls she was with would just give her clothing and bags like Prada and Gucci, like stuff that cost thousands of dollars. My niece would say, I can't take this. The girls would say stuff, like, don't worry, I have another one that's almost just like it. Or, my aunt gave it to me and I just don't like the color or something like that. They were super nice but the fact that they thought nothing of giving away items that cost thousands of dollars. My niece would tell me, "They gave me a bag that's worth more than my car!".

Worked for a summer cleaning boats at a yacht club so I could get free sailing lessons. One very rich pharmaceutical family had a person hired specifically to bake cookies and brownies. Nothing else. Warm cookies and brownies for certain times of day. They had entirely separate culinary / pastry staff for other food preparation. She was a public school teacher who loved to bake so it was a great summer job for her but still…blew my mind to conceive of enough wealth to hire staff for such specificities.

I did some work for a bank in Dubai. They had a department for the elite which consisted of people sitting around waiting for a phone call along the lines of "I need $500k in New York". The person in the office would them sort the paperwork and the cash, jump on the next flight to where ever the money was wanted and hand deliver it.

Worked a $3 million wedding. My in-laws own the premier florist in town. The flower budget was $250K. They blew that out of the water. I think it ended up being in excess of $480K.

The wedding was on the bride's father's land. An entire section of land (600+ acres) with three houses, two churches, barn* and a private polo field (the horse stalls were nicer than my first apartment).

(*by barn I mean a Amish-built barn the guy found in New York State, had it dismantled and reassembled on his land and turned into an apartment. I had to move a painting from the mantle for decorating. They told me AFTER it was worth $1.5 million.)

The tent for the wedding could have held 2 of Barnum & Baily's 3 rings. Everything was over the top.

But, talking to the father, he was an exceptionally nice man and you would never knew he was rich.

Private air charter. Once saw a woman fly herself and her dog up to Aspen, Colorado because she liked the groomer there. The dog groomer ended up being out sick when the woman arrived. She then flew home empty handed, and flew back a few days later once the dog groomer was available.

All said and done, she spent about $75,000 on a private jet to fly her and her dog out to Aspen and back twice so she could get the person she wanted to bathe her dog.

Once watched a woman fly from FL to CA to spend the day shopping in Beverly Hills because she was annoyed at her husband. She shopped all day and flew back the next morning. She dropped about $100,000 on the last minute flight, plus whatever she bought that day. She bragged that she used his credit card for everything. She had armloads full of clothes and purses. The next day we found a price tag for one of her purses in the airplane and it was over $10,000.

A Saudi princess and her entourage were coming to stay in Paris for a month at the Plaza Athenee Hotel and they paid the hotel to renovate and reconfigure one entire floor of rooms to make it into a single large apartment with its own kitchen and private entry. The princess would pay for the cost of refurbishing it back to the original state after the trip.

I’ve got megarich clients.

Most of them are first generation money, grew up on farms or working on oil rigs. You’d never know they were wealthy.

There’s no shabbiness or suffering, but no ostentatious displays either. They have a nice car, but not nicer than lots of other people who aren’t rich. The difference is that theirs isn’t financed. They have vacation homes, but purchased with cash and not financed to the eyeballs.

Maybe it’s like the saying “money talks, but wealth whispers”.

I knew a billionaire pretty well and worked in close proximity to him for years. He was a nice guy - very smart, shy, and eclectic. Happened to luck into back to back excellent business decisions after growing up with a really great childhood. Not all luck, but a lot of it was right time, right place.

After a while, people mistook his luck and quietness for genius business acumen, and started to semi-worship him. After a few years of this, he started to believe the hype, and started surrounding himself with sycophants and yes men who assured him they were his friends. Anyone that challenged him would be exiled from his circle. It was really hard to watch.

He ended up going down a path of trying to “hack his own body”. Got heavy into [illegal substances] and ended up passing. Really tragic.

I used to manage the personal properties of a super rich farmer/developer.

One morning he was trying to explain to me about a garden he saw in San Antonio that he wanted to emulate. He got frustrated trying to describe it, so he got on his phone….An hour later me and the gardener were with him on a flight in his private jet. From Idaho!

We were picked up by a private car service, taken to the garden, spent a half hour walking around, and went back and got on the jet. Didn’t even stop for lunch.

The fuel for that flight was two months of me and the gardener’s salary!

I spent years working for multi-billionaires in their private homes. A few memories that come to mind:

1. Purchasing 30 lbs. of top quality filet mignon and asking the butcher to grind it up so the chef could make hamburgers for the principal's annual Super Bowl party. I thought the butcher was going to cry.

2. Sneaking into a child's bedroom in the wee hours of the morning and setting up 500 inflated helium balloons so that the child would wake up to a balloon extravaganza on the morning of their birthday.

3. Sending a housekeeper and gardener 90 minutes up the coast to Malibu to collect diarrhea that the principal's dog had deposited on the private beach used for its morning walk. The stool was collected in 2 separate baggies so that the samples could be sent to 2 separate veterinarians for evaluation. (Because you simply can't trust the opinion of just one vet.) There was nothing wrong with the dog other than the Mr. had fed it cheese.

4. Spending over $500K USD on empty hotel rooms over the course of three months. I had to reserve the rooms and have them stocked and ready to go just in case the principal decided he wanted to use them. He rarely did.

5. Bribing a group of university researchers so that they would reschedule their research trip on an icebreaker ship in the Svalbard archipelago because the principal wanted the ship for those dates so he could take photos of polar bears and whales. After three days the Mr. and Mrs. both got "bored" of Norway and returned home early.