30 Times Rich People Made It Clear To Everyone Else Just How Out Of Touch They Are Without Even Trying

It seems like every day there’s a new story about the ridiculous ways rich people are spending their money. Jeff Bezos paid $5.5 billion to go to space for about four minutes. Taylor Swift owns two private jets, one of which has flown at least 170 times during 2022 already. Lady Gaga spent $50,000 on an Electro-Magnetic Field Reader, which is intended to detect ghosts. Celebrities and others in the 1% may be “people just like us”, but they definitely live in a different world from the billions of people around the world who have much less money than them. 

Whether it’s inevitable to become out of touch when you reach a certain level of wealth or not, it’s definitely very easy to. If you live in a massive home in a gated community protected by a security guard, you can easily never encounter people who aren’t in your same economic class, aside from those who work for you. Someone else could be doing your grocery shopping, and you might be traveling in private jets or at least in the first-class section of commercial planes. When you’re in a bubble, it might not be so obvious that you’re inside of it.    

Now, I’m not defending rich people for saying out of touch things or lacking self-awareness. It is certainly their responsibility to recognize their privilege and try to use their resources for good. But what a privilege it would be to think nobody needs a job until they are out of college or to assume that anyone can hop on a plane to Hawaii whenever they need to unwind. Money may not be able to buy you happiness, but apparently, it can buy you ignorance. And ignorance is bliss right?

The thing about wealth, though, is that it’s not all about just working hard and excelling in school. It comes down to many factors, such as luck, family background, resources, connections and how much generational wealth you inherit. If it was so easy to accumulate money, don’t you think more people would be doing it? The reality is that it can be extremely hard to even get the opportunity to acquire riches. Most people know this because most people aren’t rich. In fact, 65% of Americans believe that the main reason a person becomes wealthy is because they have had more advantages in life, and 71% of Americans believe that poor people are in their current situation because they have faced more adversity. So people who get to vacation in other countries, fly in private jets and have personal chefs preparing their meals are extremely unrelatable to most of the world. The least they can do is acknowledge that.  

To gain some insight on the topic of the extremely wealthy, we reached out to Linda McQuaig, co-author of The Trouble with Billionaires. First, we asked Linda if she could explain for us why wealth inequality is a problem. "It’s an extremely serious problem, which is quickly and constantly getting worse," she told Bored Panda. "Basically, a small group of billionaires has come to dominate the world to a degree unimaginable even a decade ago. In addition to capturing the lion’s share of resources for themselves – as wealthy elites always have – today’s elite has attained the life-and-death power to determine whether we’ll all be able to survive the ecological crises that threaten our very existence."

"Quite simply -- today’s super-rich play an enormous role in generating carbon emissions, through their indulgent personal lives and also through the corporations they own," Linda explained. "On top of this, they are the key players blocking government action that would allow us to battle climate change."

We also asked Linda why it's so common for wealthy people to become out of touch and not realize their privilege, but she raised another point, "I suspect most wealthy people do realize their privilege and don’t really care if we are offended by it."

Finally, we asked Linda if she has any advice for people who still aspire to be wealthy, despite actively disliking rich people. "My advice would be: Get a life – that is, a life that doesn’t do harm to others and to the planet."

Wealthy people tend to be out of touch about a lot of things: how much groceries cost, how often the average person can take a vacation, how challenging it is for many parents to afford childcare, and how much of their paycheck the average person has left to put into savings at the end of the month. One thing in particular that many affluent people don’t understand is how high their salaries actually are. Arwa Mahdawi explored this issue in an article for The Guardian, where she noted that, when asked how much money they thought the average American made per year, one quarter of the students in a class at the University of Pennsylvania assumed that it must be six-figures. One student even guessed as high as $800,000 a year. The actual answer? $53,838.

Mahdawi goes on to note that it’s not surprising these students were so out of touch when it comes to the average salaries Americans earn, though. The average student at the University of Pennsylvania comes from a family earning about $195,000 per year, and a staggering 19% of their students come from families in the 1%. On the other hand, only 3.3% of Penn students come from families in the bottom 20% of wealth in the US. Rich people run in the same circles as one another their entire lives, from the time they begin attending private schools as children to when they inherit their parents’ businesses later on in life. It may be annoying that they often have no concept of how the other half lives, but it is not shocking.