There are wealthy people, and very wealthy people, and people who have so much money they don’t know what to do with it. Literally, they don’t know. I don’t mean business — these people are often good at business and investing. But, that just makes more money. I mean spending it, just on fun stuff.
Like people in every age, I am a little appalled at what wealthy people spend their money on. It’s OK with me if they have a little fun for their money, but they seem to have so little fun for so much money.
It was this very wealthy class that made possible the art of the Renaissance, or the music of Mozart. Often, this was royalty — and their support of artists was not only a personal interest, but also a kind of national ambition. The Vanderbilt family, which was the wealthiest family of the late 19th century (due to their control of the railroad business), felt a real obligation to use that wealth for something like National Artistic Ambition. The Vanderbilts built Grand Central and the original Penn Station in New York, among their many ambitious undertakings. The Breakers in Newport, RI was a rather absurd project for a summer beach house that only got used 10 weeks a year. But, it stands today as an extraordinary and wonderful accomplishment, somewhat ridiculous as personal lifestyle adornment but actually in line with royalty in Europe at the time. (Today, you can rent nearby Rosecliff and Marble House for your weddings and events.) Andrew Mellon, one of the wealthiest men of the 1920s, built the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC, with his own money, even as Franklin Roosevelt was trying to take it from him.
If the very wealthy of the late 19th century were inspired by the example of European royalty, those of today seem to be inspired by the upper-middle class. Some people might have their own workout room — a typical middle-class ambition. With a bigger budget, we get workout rooms today that are equivalent to a full size Equinox gym, for a single family. This has no lasting value, and I don’t think it is even very useful as a workout room.
Machines are a common enthusiasm. I actually sort of like the hypercar class, automobiles in the $1m+ range. You get some extraordinary things. But, these don’t really seem that different than a Corvette Z07 to me, at 10% the price. And you can still only drive 65mph. The nice thing about a Corvette is, you can park it outside Walmart, and dip inside to buy some sunscreen, without worrying about it. This is not a joke. Plus, it is much more reliable, and much easier to fix when something goes wrong. I know that reliability and ease of maintenance are actually negatives, in the big-dollar class. People like things that are very impractical, and thus only people with enough money to waste on nonsense own them. But, I would also suggest that you are just trying to get more out of automobiles, than automobiles can really deliver. You can get everything you want for under $200,000. Beyond that, you are in the zone of diminishing returns. Which is a nice way of saying: you are wasting your time. Get a Mercedes AMG GT if you want European.
Is there anything better, at any price? Different, yes. More expensive, yes. But better? This is the point at which you should just direct your attention somewhere else. Even this $120,000+ class is arguably not so much better than the Toyota Supra/Corvette Z51/Porsche Cayman variety.
When you step beyond this mass-market-supercar class (Corvette/AMG GT), the funny thing is that you can’t actually drive the cars. They basically become collectors’ items. And, every mile you put on them makes them that much less collectible.
Go ahead and wear nice clothing. Unfortunately, many wealthy people don’t really like nice clothing. They wear stuff that is rather dismal. Literally t-shirts. I think we are in a period of increasing formality and ambition in clothing. The pendulum is swinging back the other way. Or, maybe I am just hallucinating. But, just as with automobiles, I think you hit a point of diminishing returns — that things actually get worse, not better; or, not much better — at a pretty low price point. I get custom made-to-order suits, from European craftsmen, using top Italian and British fabrics, for less than $1000. I do not think you can get much better at any price. It is just a suit, made from fabric, usually fabric from the same companies. People who have actually spent $5000+ for actual bespoke Savile Row suits say the same thing. A woman can get a decent dress for $200, and a very nice dress for less than $1000. I don’t think you are necessarily getting more for more money. Anyway, things are so informal these days, that for a woman to just wear a dress at all, tends to be for special occasions.
Wealthy people don’t wear used clothing, but for us non-wealthy people, you can get silly stuff for not much money. Here is a coat in real German sable:
It is pre-owned, of course. But, someone bought it on eBay for $260. We (my wife and I) used to buy a lot of fur coats in the past. I think at one point we owned more than twenty, most of which cost us less than $100 each. I used to have a spectacular men’s coat in coyote fur. It cost me less than $150. But, my wife was a little uncomfortable wearing fur in public, not only because there are some no-fur activists, but because she would get a lot of attention, especially from other women.
The point here is, a wealthy woman can dress like a superstar for less than $10,000. Certainly less than $100,000, which is barely a rounding error for the superwealthy. I don’t think spending more gets you more. For example, look at the model above. Nice girl. Wearing a heck of a nice coat. Can we dress up this girl, any more than she is already dressed up? Can we make her look better? Not really — at least, not without getting into clothing for events that are actually quite rare. A woman just doesn’t have that many opportunities to wear fine jewelry these days. You don’t wear that stuff for normal life, even superwealthy normal life. I don’t think that shopping, in itself, and filling closets, is a worthwhile use of time. Have a few nice things, and wear them. We all know that, if you want to look good, the most important thing is to have a fantastic body. Go spend $179 a year at BODi. That’s all you need.
In this scene from My Fair Lady, Audrey Hepburn attends a party of European royalty.
But, gatherings of the superwealthy today look more like this:
Maybe nothing can stop the ultra-wealthy from building huge yachts, and spending perhaps north of $50m or $100m for them. But, ships age and are typically retired in about 20 years. Nothing is left. I think spending time on a big boat is a ton of fun. But, you can rent a superyacht for not too much money (relatively). This 301-foot superyacht rents for $1,500,000 per week, including a full crew. That might seem like a lot, but it is a piffle compared to the cost and hassle of actually owning a boat like this. Instead of spending $100m on a yacht (not even counting the costs of a full-time crew and maintenance), you could spend the interest on $100m, or about $5m per year, and get three weeks of pleasure cruising per year, plus 49 weeks of not having to worry about it. If you are bargain hunting in the superyacht rental space, here is one that is almost as big at 295 feet, but half the price. Six weeks a year, instead of three. And after you have your fun, you still have your $100m, instead of a hulk of metal headed for the scrapyard. (The costs of maintaining a superyacht are estimated at 20% of purchase price, per year.)
OK, I understand that you just can’t win the posing competition with a rental yacht. In that case, realizing that it might be better to just not play that game at all, be a guest on other people’s yachts. Every yacht owner needs ten or twenty guests to have a good time. They don’t just motor around alone. Ride your superwealthy friend’s yacht.
“But,” the superwealthy complain, “you don’t understand. I have $100m to spend. You just saved me $95m, but now what do I do?”
“You’re supposed to tell me How To Spend It, not How To Not Spend It.”
There are a lot of things today that people with money should be spending their money on, but aren’t. There are great opportunities.
One of the biggest opportunities, it seems to me, is realist painting. Modernist painting, as you may have noticed, kinda sucks. Don’t spend money on that crap. If you happen to own some modernist stuff, such as an Andy Warhol print, sell that thing to some other dingbat who actually likes that stuff. It’s a silkscreen — basically, a t-shirt. I know that such art can serve a useful purpose as a money-laundering device, but can’t we find some better way of laundering our money?
Some of the best work of the best of today’s living painters can be had for $5000-$30000 per painting. For $500,000, you can fill a whole house with the best that today’s painters have to offer. Plus, it might be worth a lot more than that, someday.
I like the various scientific and other writings of Miles Mathis. But, I actually think he is a pretty good painter too, just as he says that he is. Maybe not among the best of all time, but among the best we have today.
I admit that, even as an enthusiast of realist painting from before 1910, it took a little while for me to understand this work. It looked to me like a typical Instagram feed of pretty girls. Nice, but, so what. Now, I understand it better. Mathis insists that his paintings look a lot better in real life than on a screen, and I believe him. But, even on a screen, the painting at the bottom, in teeny size, has a sense of life and beauty. We feel like we can sense the energy or personality of the woman — maybe, even more than from a photograph. And, this was accomplished with paint on canvas. Have you ever seen paint? It’s gloopy stuff that comes in a tube. By itself, a long way from “energy and personality.” Amazing.
The painting at the bottom does not have a lot of careful detail, as you often see in a Rembrandt or a Titian. This, Mathis says, is because he couldn’t afford much time with his models. Two or three sittings. For the great portraits of the past, artists would sometimes have fifty or a hundred sittings. What could today’s better artists accomplish, with a little more time and resources? Pay some money and find out.
By the way, here’s Andy:
The joke’s on you, sucker.
If I had $500,000 to spend, I would get on a plane and visit Miles Mathis in California, and buy a few things. Then, I would ask him to recommend four other living and active painters. Eventually, in time, you could open a museum of some sort — maybe buy a historic house somewhere for the purpose — which also might have some nice tax advantages. You could spend many years along these lines, supporting the work of living artists with five- and six-figure sums, for less than the cost of a two week rental on a superyacht. You could take $100m, put it in a nonprofit endowment (big tax savings), and then have $5m a year to spend on such things, just on endowment income. It would give some of your children something to do.
Is anyone doing this today? I haven’t heard about Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos opening any museums. Maybe they bid up the price of Andy Warhol’s stupid t-shirt art, which does exactly nothing for creating new art of quality. Maybe they gave a ton of money to a museum. But what museum has good contemporary art of quality today? I can’t name one. The money just fizzles away.
In the past, people paid money to Mozart, Beethoven or Maurice Ravel to create beautiful music. Unfortunately, even if you wanted to do this, we do not have any obvious Mozarts or Beethovens to give it to. Nevertheless, I think there is great potential for serious art music today, that is not like the ugly garbage of the mid-20th century. Mostly, these are film composers today. If you listen to some of the more ambitious film soundtracks, they have the essence of what could be very good standalone music. Personally, I don’t think the music of Hans Zimmer would be so good as standalone music, although Zimmer does have his enthusiastic fans who go to concerts of his film music. Another contender is Alexandre Desplat, who won two Academy Awards for Best Original Score. I also like Carlos Franzetti, who has done a number of very nice albums for Chesky. His orchestral compositions were good, but I particularly enjoyed his arrangements for Jon Faddis and jazz orchestra on Remembrances (1998).
So, let’s get some of these guys to write some music — not for film, but for standalone orchestra, or a ballet, or an opera. Serious art music, but of course not too “serious” (ugly) in the 20th century style. Fun and beautiful, like Mozart, Puccini, Verdi, Bizet or Tchaikovsky, but with an entirely contemporary sensibility. Basically, just like you hear in the best film music today.
How much does it cost to get these guys to do something like that? Film music pays well, so maybe you would have to pay a similar rate. Let’s say it’s $400,000. Or, maybe they would be so enthusiastic about having a chance to make real art music, that they would do it for a lot less. Probably you could get an existing orchestra or ballet company to give it a try, in a noncommittal way, just to see if they like the piece, and make it part of their performance schedule. I think that ballet dancers get tired of doing the same twenty ballets over and over. But I also think they get tired of doing 20th century or contemporary stuff that stinks, compared to the 20 great ballets. It is not too hard to commission an orchestra to record something. You could just record a ballet — the music for a ballet — and then it would be available. Any ballet company could spend $16, get the music, and see if they like it and want to gin up some dancing to go along. Carlos Franzetti did a lot of work with the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, and I don’t think it cost too much.
Film work is, to some degree, hack work for money. There is a tight schedule. It has to be done in post-production, between the time that the film is complete but before release. There is a lot of pressure to write in a manner that is easy for an orchestra to perform, without much rehearsal. Do you have any idea how much it costs per hour for orchestra rehearsal? Unfortunately, even the greatest talents, if they spend too much time doing hack work for money, find that they are not able to move beyond this. This music doesn’t have the fine filigree of Debussy or Joseph Canteloube. Still, you have to start somewhere. And, the pressure on film composers to be tuneful and popular — like the classic operas or ballets — does a lot to counter the tendency toward 20th century ugliness. But, these composers also have a lot of skills incorporating some of the ugly 20th-century-style elements, as you might hear in some sci-fi or horror movies, such as the Aliens soundtracks. There is so much potential here.
Literature today is basically just Leftist brainwashing. Major publishers are not even shy about saying that they will only accept novels with multicultural, LGBTQ+ etc. themes. Don’t read that crap.
But, somewhere, there may be some good writers, who are not just contract manufacturers of New World Order degeneracy. Writers who will never appear in the New York Times Book Review. You could find them. Basically, this means establishing a publisher of fine literature. Or, since it is so easy to publish now using Kindle Direct Publishing or Ingram Spark or whatever, maybe we don’t even need publishers. We need someone to find those novels. You would have to hire someone, with your sensibilities, who goes and finds something worth reading. This would be a nice $200,000 project.
Moving up the scale, let’s take $100 million or so, and open a new movie studio. The Sound of Freedom (2023) made $250 million in gross revenue against a $14.5 million budget. Even the idiot masses have figured out that Hollywood these days is just a Leftist brainwashing factory — especially now that Hollywood itself is admitting publicly exactly that. People are eager to see something that reflects their ideals, and will pay money to see it. Still, you need the $14.5 million upfront. Plus, it would be pretty fun, I think, to be a movie studio owner. More fun than spending the same $100m on a superyacht that is scrap metal in twenty years. Instead, in twenty years, you could IPO your movie studio for billions.
For $10m you could start a College, and it could be just the way you like it. Thales College was started by businessman Robert Luddy, and I don’t think he spent more than that on it. This is not $10m per year, it is a one-time $10m investment, and also tax-deductible. Luddy also started Thales Academy, a K-12 school. Its first graduating class had three students. Today, it has over 3600 students in twelve campuses. You can buy college campuses today, that might cost $100m in construction costs alone to build, for about $5 million. Maybe you should do something about that.
Of course architecture is great fun. You can have great architecture for not so much money. For example, here’s a recent courthouse done in a Classical style.
This 63,000 square foot courthouse cost $42.6 million. That’s $681 per square foot — for government work. Private-sector work might come in cheaper than that. It will probably last for three hundred years, if you take care of it. Here’s the new courthouse is Tuscaloosa, AL:
The 127,000 sf building cost $47.8m, or $376 per square foot. For government work.
That is not very expensive.
One of the most extravagant buildings ever made was the Palais Garnier in Paris, home of the Paris Opera.
This cost 7.5 million francs to open in 1874. (Also government work.) A franc then had 290mg of gold; so 7.5 million francs was about 70,000 oz. of gold. At $2000/oz., that’s $140 million in today’s money — about the same as a superyacht that is scrap metal in twenty years. But, the Palais Garnier is still going strong and making people happy 150 years later. Of course, you don’t have to put up the $140 million yourself. You could spend $1 million to hire some fundraisers to raise the $140 million from other people like you. That might be a pretty incredible use of $1 million.
You might raise some money to rebuild Penn Station, the Vanderbilt masterpiece that was tragically torn down in 1963 … because Modernism.
This is not CGI, it is a real train station, that millions of people used.
Including all the tunnels and rail lines, this was a colossal project, of $114 million in 1910 dollars. In gold terms, that is about $11.4 billion today.
Of course all the train lines are still there, so just the building alone would be a lot less than that. But, still probably more than a billion.
So, you spend $1 million to hire some fundraisers to raise the $1 billion from others, or maybe just pressure the government to spend the $1 billion. The station today is owned by Amtrak. And, Amtrak is owned by the Federal Government. The Federal Government may be soon headed by Donald Trump, who, in 2016, created a mandate that new Federal buildings would be done in the classical style. The existing building is 60 years old, old enough for an ugly building to be replaced.
So, basically you spend $1 million to persuade Amtrak/Trump to rebuild Penn Station.
See what I mean about having fun with your money? There are so many better ways to spend it.
