Comment by rpcope1
1 month ago
Having been closely acquainted with a woman worth north of a billion dollars, and having met a number of people that are worth probably at least hundreds of millions, I can tell you the kitchen experience for the wealthy (maybe barring like top 10-100 billionaires) is really frankly kind of pedestrian. Are the kitchens nicer? Yeah sort of, I have fixed a bunch of stuff on a couple of certified real money mansions, and a lot of it is gimmicky stuff, some of it is good heavy expensive stuff, but honestly nothing that's doing some sort of extra magic a whole lot better than all of the plain old Whirlpool kit in my own home. Do they have help? Yeah for cleaning, and sometimes from what I've seen the one or two people helping around the house will help cook, but they're not dependent on it and it's more a "hey we're cooking for family, I need to delegate", as well as the sort of person I've met with that kind of money tends to skew much older anyways.
Maybe some nerds in silly valley like to larp as 1800s rich people with actual large numbers of staff, I don't know, but the regular old very wealthy (the sort you don't know who they are, and I think they prefer it that way) live what you would probably consider mostly very pedestrian lives. More trips? Yes. Multiple homes in nice places? Yes. A couple of nice cars and a (reasonably sized) boat? Usually. Chartered flights? Absolutely. An army of staff and never doing even basic shit themselves? Nope and no on the doing basically nothing unless they're really geriatric (and then can you blame them anyways).
It sounds like you're describing idle-rich people. Which makes sense.
Yeah, if you're "rich" as in "retired", your life is usually pretty mundane. Most such people don't even live in any kind of mansion these days†, but rather just in very nice homes that are perfectly-sized and perfectly-cozy for them and what they like to do — with some verrrry long driveways, if they're in the right part of the country for that.
† (Mansions as a concept evolved from palaces; both exist mostly to provide enough rooms to host guests when some other rich person decides to pilgrimage themselves and everyone they know over to your place to stay for three months — in turn because that was really the only good way to visit someone with full amenities, back before air travel. Nobody needs to do that these days. Any modern mansion exists either as a status symbol, or because the owner likes hosting parties [or imagines they might one day host a party, but never actually does]. Mansions are especially useful, in the modern day, for people who throw fundraiser galas, like politicians.)
> Maybe some nerds in silly valley like to larp as 1800s rich people with actual large numbers of staff, I don't know,
I don't think it's SV people doing this. (The SV entrepreneurial "grindset" is a form of protestant work-ethic mindset; most tech millionaires find it hard to allow themselves to have staff. They might have a lot of people on retainer — lawyers, personal trainers, private-practice doctors, etc — but they would find the idea of paying the full salary for the exclusive use of even a maid to be a bit strange, instead preferring to just "hire a service" for that. Right up until they have a security scare, that is... but I digress.)
Rather, the personal-staff (private chef, limo driver, landscaper, several maids, etc) setup is, these days, something for the busy rich — think "runs ten businesses because they don't know how to stop", or "has an infinite queue of people needing them to make a decision about something" [politician, chaebol owner], or "thrives on fame, and so can't stand to turn down packing their schedule with ever-bigger gigs" [celebrity actors]. You find it in LA and in DC, not in SF.
These groups "have people" because they literally wouldn't be able to fit self-care into their schedule without "people."