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

I used to work for an eye doctor, and he sent me to a charity event in town. There was a silent auction, the kind where you write your bids down, and someone would come behind you and bid a little more. The doctor asked me to bid on this ski package and gave me a blank check and a maximum price. As dinner finished and the auction began, I knew that I was in the wrong room. I decided that instead of hanging around the ski package, I would just write down the maximum and hit up the open bar. It wasn't my money. As I was backing away from the table, the guy behind me was a local developer. Big real-estate, big money. He looked at what I wrote down, looked at me, and said, "There is no way you have that kind of money, and I bet that you don't even ski." He then turned around, wrote $10K as a bid and looked at me, and said, "You ruined my fun. I think I will ruin everyone else's fun." He walked around the room and bid $5k to $10K on all of the luxury items. The charity broke a fundraising record, but people were pissed. I could care less. When I told the doctor the story, he thought it was funny.

Special service. It was a ritzy wedding and someone there was a congressman. So we had secret service throughout the wedding pretending like they were guests while also not engaging with anyone to be distracted. They were like real life NPCs.

Worked for a guy who said he shouldn’t have to pay taxes because he doesn’t use the welfare programs it pays for… I get where he comes from but taxes pay for so much more, than just welfare… same guy also said that he lies on his taxes because if he gets audited then he’ll just pay what he owes, but if he doesn’t then it’s free money….

I once celebrated New Year's eve at the big house of a rich family.

He was the boyfriend of my girl's college roommate, met the guy before and he was really friendly.

When outside for a smoke with his best friend he told me the guy was gifted a small castle with 12 permanent staff for his 21st bday.

I attended a rich person dinner in Bel Air. My girlfriend and I hardly knew anyone there but slowly got the sense everyone there was "wealthy." The house where the dinner was held was listed for $80MM on my Zillow app. At the actual dinner, I began to make small talk with the guy seated next to me. We started talking about traveling, and he said his friend recently "raced with the Porsches in Germany." I looked at him, and said "oh, you mean he raced Porsches in Germany, that's great."

He looked at me confused and said "no, he raced with the Porsche *family*" and rattled off a couple names of the Porsche heirs that apparently they were friendly with.

Years and years ago, assisted a photographer at a fundraising event at the country club for a very, very, VERY private gated community in the NC mountains. The turn INTO the entire community was all but disguised as a junky old “mountain hollar” driveway. No signage, missed it the first two times. Absolutely GRILLED at the guard house before they let me through and then about 30 years into driving up: holy s**t, the Garden of Eden. It was WILD how well hidden everything was.

The event was at the country club and there were some very famous names in attendance. It was my job to stand beside the photographer and write down the names of those in attendance as they lined up for their photo op with the famous names. During the dinner, was upstairs inserting photos and polishing already-immaculate solid sterling picture frames that had to have weighed a couple of pounds each. And then passing them off to a handful of staff with thousand-yard stares, to be arranged on tables by the doors upon exit (after the event ended).

Then standing downstairs beside that table, checking names off a list as the donors/attendees left (and were supposed to pick up their parting gift). Except it never really got that far, because….

The SHEER VOLUME of people who saw their photos in those frames just *tried to f*****g steal them.* Nevermind that they were clearly intended as a donor GIFT— that part didn’t even matter. I was hired help, I had nothing to do with anything except the expectation that I’d hand them off and check a name off a list, **assuming** that the event organizers had shared that information with the attendees/donors. I guess they didn’t? People were literally swiping them and shoving them into their jackets, pockets, down pants and/or purses and hauling a*s for the door while I stood there desperately trying to explain “It’s a gift! If you don’t mind, what’s your name so I may check it off that you received yours?”

That went down like a lead balloon. Apparently being told that something was intended as a gift **after you already f*****g stole it** was considered rude. Maybe you should have asked before you tried to shove it down your pants???

I’ve witnessed wealth, I don’t possess it but I’ve been in the company of more than plenty and sometimes to the point of excess. But this was on a level of its own: these people collectively possessed more f**k-you money than some small countries, but behaved no better than a flash-mob on an Apple Store in San Francisco. I’ve just never seen anything like it, before or since.

My dad cooked a small dinner at a very privately wealthy families house, in which D**k Cheney was a guest and they flew in Elton John to play piano for the night.

That same family put on a birthday party for their 4 year old granddaughter, who wanted “a carnival” for her birthday, so they invited all of the country clubs staffs families to “make the place look alive”. Free carnival rides and food all day and night. In their backyard.

Roomate/sports teammate in college got married. They flew me in to be a groomsmen. I knew he had money but not “whatever the f**k I want money”. Dad came up to me bragging about hiring a 30 person black choir to sing with him at the dinner after wedding. He really did and f*****g danced and sang his a*s off. Then he caught me in the walk in portable semi truck size fridge. I found the Dom Perignon and had never had any but always heard about it. He hands me three cases one at a time and said get out there and start a Dom fight. So I did.

Then he introduced me to the two state senators and the owner of the Chicago Bears.

I drunkenly got to talking with the wedding planner and asked how much. 1.5 million. I was the quirky white trash friend who stopped people from bothering him or fought while he left the bar cause of some a*****e losing money on him in college.

I woke up hung over in their f*****g palatial mansion to a maid putting breakfast on my bed and asking if I “Mr. Southernjeb” needing anything further.

Orders of magnitude greater wealth than anything I could have imagined.

Go gators.

“There should be a line at the DMV for people like us, then another line for everyone else…”

For context, he’s a super rich lawyer that thinks laws and mores don’t apply to him and others of his status.

Not me but my friend worked catering at this fancy charity auction and said people were casually bidding $50k on a weekend trip like it was pocket change.

The wildest part was when someone bid $20k on a bottle of wine just to immediately gift it to someone else at the table.

Meanwhile my friend was making minimum wage serving them and stressing about rent that month"...".

I went to school with a lot of crazy rich kids, the richest of whom were normally Russian. A few stick out to me:

It was a boarding school so we had all our stuff there all term. At the end of term one kid piled his stuff on the side of the road, and got into an all-white Rolls Royce as it pulled up. As it left a second all-white Rolls Royce pulled up and collected all his things.

One of the nicest kids you'll ever meet decided he wasn't going to go into student accommodation at uni, so he decided to buy a house. I asked him out of interest how much money he had access to. His dad had given him £3.2 million in 'spending money' to last him 5 years.

We also had a designated helicopter landing pitch for anyone who flew in.

At a very rich people wedding. The grooms father talking about what a sound financial investment it was for this other rich girl to marry his son. To top it all off the groom was 200% gay.

Good friend of mine catered Zuckerberg’s birthday party a while back, and the dude had an entire “McDonalds”—with all the food, packaging, and such—flown in to his f*****g backyard. None of the cooks were McDonalds employees, but *fine-dining* line chefs making Big Macs and other s**t while the rest of them made all the “real” food for the sober adults….

Went to a wedding in San Francisco 30 years ago. My wife was good friends with the groom. Lots of nice people that I'd never met. Casual conversation with anonymous attendee, he asks me what I do professionally. I tell him that I'm a public employee Union advocate. He tells me I'm the problem with the world and turns his back to me. Similar thing happened to me when a mutual friend introduced me to Reince Preibus. In both instances, "tell me you're a class warrior on the wrong side of the battle without telling me". The rich don't care about being polite or getting along. They drive the steamrollers.

I worked in catering while in law school. Worked a super rich family's daughter's wedding where the dessert course was a whole show. A giant ice sculpture of a dove was carted out. Probably 10 ft high. In the middle there was a giant gold ball. Once it got set they pushed two racks of glasses up next to the sculpture on opposing sides. Then, two guys with chrom bore drills drilled into the sides of the sculpture and desert wine came pouring out of the internal globe into the waiting glasses. According to the wedding planner the sculpture was 15k. The wine in the sculpture was close to 50k.

An investor of my company bought a new Bentley SUV because his Cadillac's battery died.

At my former employer we had a client book one of the largest aircraft in the fleet to fly her son to private school in Europe and she accompanied him. She then stopped at a smaller city in Italy for her to visit a restaurant she liked and then returned to the west coast of the US. The bill for this was well over 100k…to drop her kid off at school for the year.

I went to a famous person's birthday party in Beverly Hills. I won't say who it was, just in case. But when my girlfriend and I got there, we were escorted up his driveway in a golf cart. Security brought us into his front room where there was a gold piano and then they escorted us to the backyard. First thing I saw was a woman in lingerie in one of those big inflatable spheres floating in the pool. But that was just the side pool. We kept going to the main backyard where there were trapeze artists, more lingerie girls in the bigger pool, a cigar wrapping station, Topher Grace sitting by himself (didn't seem like he knew anyone there), and a big jazz band playing.

It was the most Los Angeles thing I've ever done and honestly didn't enjoy my time there. We left early because of how self important everyone seemed.

I work at a high end country club. It was raining so we closed the tennis/pickleball/basketball courts. A group of teens came in and asked if they could play basketball. When I told them the court was wet and slippery and they weren’t allowed to play one kid said, there are towels in the locker room, grab some and go dry it off!” It was pouring rain when he said this.

I was once at an all you can eat lobster dinner put on by a company as a reward for high performing employees and a drunk millionaire started yelling at his bosses who were worth hundreds times more than him, because the wine selection was sub par.

I was once told to get my pilot license after complaining about being in a long distance relationship.