50 Shocking Things People Learned About The Lavish Life At Rich People’s Events

I was at a political fundraising dinner around 20 years ago. There were many affluent rich people there but only one billionaire. At one point I naively asked him why he didn’t run for office. He laughed and looked me directly in they eyes and said, “ son, why would I be a politician when I can own one?” F****d me up then. Nothing has changed.

I don't think it qualifies as a "rich people event" but my wife works for bank, and unless you are management at a bank, you don't make s**t. At her company holiday party a few years ago, the president of the bank comes out on stage and starts shooting dollar bills out of an air cannon. The site of a reasonable wealthy head of a bank shooting dollars at his underpaid (~$17/hour) employees, that they then have to scramble on the floor in their eveningwear to pick up turned my stomach. I don't know how a supposedly smart and successful person could be so tone deaf. It was gross.

When I was in school I got paid $20 to work silent auctions for fundraising events in NYC. Most of them were for private schools in Manhattan. I swiped a credit card for a woman who bid $25,000 for her 5 year old to be principal for a day.

I was a server at a really nice restaurant and ended up working a dinner in our private room for the president of a major movie production studio's birthday. One of the guests at the dinner was apparently a major producer and insanely rich.

I heard them discussing how he had decided to collect EVERY BOTTLE of a very nice wine maker's specific vintage (to put into context this bottle would probably go for about $2000 per in a restaurant, not sure what retail would be) and had a full time employee tracking down private collections and restaurant wine cellars that might have bottles. At that point he had over 4000 bottles of the one wine, organized by serial number in a custom-made cellar.

He told a story about how Martin Scorsese had badmouthed a franchise he funded and when he later called looking for funding for The Irishman he told him to "go f**k himself".

At one point in the dinner his assistant (one of three assistants sitting at the end of the long dinner table) informed him that the first truffles of the season had been delivered to some chef in Tokyo. So producer guy goes "Great! Anyone want to go to Tokyo this weekend for a truffle tasting?" A couple of people said yes so he instructed the assistant to "make sure one of the jets is available" for the trip.

They stayed 3 hours after we closed. Bought every bottle of the same brand of wine (different vintage) we had in our cellar "for the road", let me taste a 1989 Chateau Haut-Brion and tipped $3600 for the lateness of their departure.

Wild night.

Edit: It wasn't Kevin Feige for those trying to guess. He wasn't American.

I was in the Peace Corps in Zambia. We used to hang out at the casino in Lusaka cause they gave you free food, drinks, and cigarettes while you played. We would play like $2 hands of blackjack just to get fed.

But I went to the roulette table and some guy put down $10,000 in USD all over the table. Lost his spin, and just shrugged his shoulders and walked away.

Coming from the village where we sh*t in holes and pumped our own water, I was floored by the amount of wealth that existed right around from us.

My friend had a friend who is one of those "crazy rich asian" type of dude. Watch the movie and you will know what i mean.

One day, this rich dude was driving his Ferrari in the toll road, my friend was in another car following him for a car meetup event. This dude crashed his Ferrari to another car, and then stopped in the side of the road. He went out, called someone and waited while smoking with my friend. He acted like normal nothing happened, my friend said.

In 10 minutes, suddenly there was a yellow Lamborghini came up. The Lambo driver went out, took the Ferrari key from the rich dude hands, and then sit inside the crashed Ferrari.

The rich dude drove the Lambo and continue the journey. Apparently the new driver will take the fall for every single crash related problem.

Oh yeah, Police was there the whole time, and they did not bother to talk or approaching the rich dude before the lambo driver came up.

Learned about the yacht life. I once had super wealthy bosses and they they were talking about their friend who owned several buildings. And who had a big yacht.

So the yacht was always ready to go. Which meant that it had a full complement of personnel, paid full time, down to chefs and servers. It was basically a hotel at sea.

The thing is, the guy rarely used it. So you had a boatload of bored people who had nothing much to do. If the guy goes to Europe, he would rather fly there -- and have the yacht head there ahead, *just in case* he felt like using it. Which wasn't all the time.

Not at an event, but at my then 9yr old sons friends house. They were VERY wealthy, and it was the Dads birthday dinner. They were having fillet steak, seafood etc.

Their two sons were disgusted that hey were having fillet steak-AGAIN. And one threw his away, and the other huffed off to his room and demanded his Dad (whose birthday it was) take him to get a pizza.

Dad actually DID! And my macaroni eating kid sat there scoffing his steak and witnessing the majesty of life.

"So anyway, I had to buy the maid a 1M dollar house so she could live closer to me to do my cleaning everyday. And now she's not my maid anymore"

Gee I wonder why...

How I wish I was joking 😑.

"There's not a huge difference in lifestyle between 10 and 30 million."

I literally had nothing to relate to. He's one of my best friends and the kindest guy you'd meet. He drives an older truck from the early 2000s and likes t-shirts and shorts.

My buddy took me on a cruise with our local Ferrari club. The house we went to was owned by a member who had 8 Ferrari's in his garage, at this house, he also had a real Michael Schumacher F1 car and a Ford GT. While we were there he unveiled his new car a custom built Daytona SP3 that was all completely custom. The base price of the car is around $2.2 million so with the customizations it was closer to $3 million the way he had it.

The crazy part was the story he told about it, this was supposed to be an early build number car but it was delayed. He had to ask Ferrari about why his $3 million dollar car was taking so long while he was putting in another order for a completely custom Ferrari that is probably worth even more than that.

Spending more money on 2 cars than I'll probably make in my whole life was a pretty wild story to hear while in a garage with cars that collectively are worth more than my family has made all together for a couple of generations really puts the wealth gap into perspective.

They had a ‘poor people’ themed costume party. I wish I was joking!

I worked a private event as a waiter, it was a rehearsal dinner. The father of the bride was telling everyone he chartered a private jet for his daughter and son in law to fly to Bali for their 6 week honeymoon, which he has also paid for. The jet was to stay there for their use for the duration of the trip in case they wanted to visit other places if they got bored. The rehearsal dinner for 20 people was about 20k. Working that event was probably the most I ever made in one night at that job, certainly the easiest.

I was hired to be a photographer at a wedding. They had rented the venue at a very expensive vineyard. There was a mansion there and as part of the deal the bridal party got to stay at the mansion. The owner is almost never actually there. He lives in a big White House, if you know what I mean.

I show up early the morning of the wedding and I’m greeted by the butler. Who’s more or less exactly like what you’d think, but younger and not English. Throughout the day I was all over the mansion taking pictures. During a lull I was chatting up the butler.

The weird thing was that he said it’s shift work, that there are basically three of them (maybe another guy for filling in, I’m not sure) and it’s 8 hour shifts. So I was asking, since wedding stuff is kinda seasonal and it gets cold here, like if I showed up at 2am in January one of you would be here, all alone in the mansion, just knocking around on the odd chance the big guy shows up? And he was like yeah, someone’s always here.

That just kinda blew my mind. Can you imagine just being the dude who sits alone in someone else’s mansion polishing the silver waiting to see if they show up? 85% chance I’d let my guard down and they’d catch me running around in my boxers dry h*****g the statues while blasting AC/DC or something.

When we were poor our daughter went to a private preschool that was great for her disability and they accepted us at hardly any tuition in exchange for speaking at fundraising events for them on our daughters benefit from being at the school.

At their big fancy yearly ball dinner we were speakers and they sat us at a donor table. We were literally stealing dinner rolls to make our Carl buddig sandwich meat better. At the auction portion one of the ladies explained that last year she bid on and won the African safari but she didn’t have anyone to go with her so she donated it back to this years event. As that vacation came up for bid she goes “wait my niece loves animals and travel, I’ll take her” and she went and bought it for he second year in a row.

Having to chase someone down because they paid a power bill for a family in need at a charity event, It was $2200 they wrote the check for $22000 said they just heard wrong.

Eating sushi off super hot naked girls.

I was tending bar at a party at a 50 million dollar mansion in East Hampton. If I named the owner/host you’d all know who it was. There were movie stars and musicians there. There was a lot of crazy s**t there. What made the sushi thing so weird is nobody really paid any attention to the woman. It actually creeped me out and reinforced how different really rich people are.

Through some odd connections I found myself at a private dinner that included the then-current Treasurer of a US state (this was decades ago).

His wife was young and gorgeous and everyone (not me) was drinking steadily. As the night wore on the State Treasurer demonstrated his ability to touch the tip of his nose with his tongue and my connection (the one who got me invited) said, "that's why he always has a beautiful blond in his arm!"

Raucous laughter all around. Later I said something to my connection about the Treasurer's wife and they laughed, rolled their eyes and said, *THAT'S* not his wife, that's his girlfriend - well, one of 'em.

After further discussion it was revealed that every woman there was either a side piece or casual/open thing and most of the men (all VIPs/rich) had wives at home.

Meanwhile I was from a small, coastal (Gulf of Mexico) fishing village and this was the kind of thing I only saw watching *Dallas*. Tame by current "standards", but back then it was scandalous.

Hot tip for anyone that likes art, the best place to see art in places like New York? Auction houses. They change their art every month, most of it will go into private collections and never be seen again, and they are free to visit.

I've stood in a room at Sotheby's in NYC by myself with 5 or 6 Monets....probably $70-80 million worth.

But the two crazy things I've seen is you won't even find rich collectors there. They send their assistants.

And one time I was at Sotheby's and they were auctioning off a bunch of Tiffany Vases. Some assistant was checking them out, flipping them over, bare hands, just almost tossing them around like soho cups. I was shocked.

I worked at the montage resort in laguna Beach,ca. A centi-millionaire threw a birthday party for himself. He hired John legend and Don Henley to put on a show for him. Henley cost 750k for a couple songs and John Legend was 250k.