I'm a driving instructor and one group rented the track to drive their supercars for the day. At the end of the day they all partnered up and got into the cars to leave. After they were gone we realized that they had forgotten their Lamborghini Aventador at the track.
Family friends were having marital issues. Their marriage counselor figured out a lot of their problems were over cooking meals. The counselor reminded them that they are rich and can just cater all their meals, and it would be cheaper than getting a divorce. They listened to the counselor and now are happily married again.
Client was a mega millionaire in the 60s so even richer when I met him. He'd ride the bus to the office to have free coffee. Every day.
A woman who owned a small private jet business told me one time someone paid them to fly their dog (by itself) to NY for about $45,000 for some training. No other passengers.
Old high school teacher of mine is an extremely successful private tutor and does a lot of work in the wealthy neighborhoods in the area.
He told us once he was tutoring a kid and helped him get prepared and pass his college level physics class and at the end of their last session the kid told him to wait there and went into his dad’s office and came out with his payment and an extra $1,000. My teacher tried to deny it, saying it was too much but the kid said his dad asked him to give a tip.
I live near a company that builds yachts. One day there was an odd looking yacht. A crew member explained to me that was a 'shadow-yacht'.
You see, when you get hyper rich and have multiple yachts. You wouldn't want to ruin the astetic of your nice yachts with jetski's and helicopters. Nor would you want your crew to sleep on the nice yacht. So you buy a shadow yacht to store your toys and to house your crew. This shadow yacht follows your fleet of nice yachts around.
When rich people want to buy a Jaguar in the UK they get assigned a special sales person who is incredibly knowledgeable, they meet in a special fancy office, and special arrangements can be made. This was my friend Chris job, he had access to things that a normal Jaguar sales person wouldn't have. Like he could ring up the manager of the factory for special requests level of access.
Well a Saudi Price wanted to buy this new Jaguar that had been released, so they met up and spent a full day specing the Jaguar out. I believe the final price was something like 125k for the vehicle.
Then came the decision for color, at the time the factory had 16 different color choices for this model. The Prince asked if he could sleep on it as it was getting late and almost time for dinner/prayer my friend Chris says of course and they set a time to meet the new morning.
The next morning the Saudi price is like "I figured out an acceptable solution to my color dilemma" to which Chris goes "And what would that be?" the Saudi Prince goes "i'll order one of each color"
And my friend Chris is like O well of course. They quote delivery time, Saudi prince was fine and asked for his options and was presented with ocean travel options to which the Prince said "what about air cargo?" Chris thinking maybe they'd do 1 or 2 by air cargo and the rest by boat, the Prince was like "No I want all 16 vehicles loaded on a plane, and flown to Saudi Arabia"
So thats the story on how 16 of the same Jaguar with different colors ended up being flown to Saudi Arabia all in the total cost was around 2.5 million.
Please note the prices should be £ not $
I became personal friends with my boss and his wife; super nice people. The wife turned out to be an heiress and would buy me whatever I mentioned, like in passing during a conversation. I learned gifts were how she was raised to show love.
I’ve trained myself to only talk about things I already own, unless I find something useful she might like and suggest it for her.
Ohhh,
My grandpa was a piano tuner. He couldn't drive due to epilepsy so family would take him to jobs.
One day dad took him to a job and got talking to the owner. He said the guy lived in the biggest nicest mansion he had ever seen. Everything in the house was crazy expensive. But the owner and his wife were very down to earth and normal. If not a bit rough around the edges.
Finally his curiosity got the better off him and dad asked how they made thier money.
The guy said he used to drive a truck and got tired of needing to carry around bottles of ketchup.
That's how my dad met the creator of the ketchup packet.
Some extremely wealthy people I have been around have a more acute sense of their own time and mortality, leading to impatience. Like they understand how awesome their lives are and therefore how short they feel. I knew a guy whose vintage yacht broke down before summer so he bought another one strictly for that upcoming Summer. His reasoning was he likely had 20 full health summers left in his life and didn’t want to spend one of them without a boat considering he had the means to. Honestly can’t argue with that logic.
My great uncle was VERY well off.
He did not have a guest house. It was a guest mansion. Separate from his mansion. In case his kids dropped by. This does not include the olympic sized indoor pool. That was a separate building.
He bought a cannon. He used it to shoot the mountain behind his house. He shot brand new special bowling balls out of it. They cost 100 bucks per ball.
Was invited to a Christmas Dinner while i lived in Seoul by an extremely wealthy Korean family. Very nice family but I think in hindsight they wanted to show their friends that they had foreign friends like me. Wife had everything catered and the home professionally decorated - it felt like we were in a department store. Multiple Christmas trees, a working train set, staff handing out appetizers on plates etc. It looked like she studied Christmas movies from the USA and copied everything.
Dinner is served on a comically long table with 2 huge oven roasted Turkeys and all of the trimmings - they looked perfect. I was later told that Koreans don't like turkey & were just for decoration - they would be thrown out later. We ate Korean food. The family said I could take a turkey home and that the caterer would drop it off with anything else I wanted.
I worked at a resort & marina that dealt with high end boats; from mega yachts to brand new cigarette boats.
Always assume the quiet dude with the stained shirt is the owner of the performance boat. Never expect tips from mega yachts.
The most narcissistic guests were always surgeons. The angriest guests were lawyers. (No offense to attorneys, I am one). The richest were in construction & commercial real estate.
The best tippers were guys entertaining their side pieces on their boats when you know their actual wives.
Keith Urban tipped me $7 on a $4 shake and left the keys to his Bentley at the store but he came back and got them.
I did IT work for a tiny little private company like the owner, his brother, and me. guy called because his new pc wouldn't turn on and it's like 3pm he was 100% willing to pay for me to drive 5 hours one way to get it working today because he wanted to play games today. Ok so 5 hour road trip one way and the address is this huge fucking mansion 100% thought I was in the wrong place. Use the intercom at the gate and nope this is the place, guy and his wife are really cool and the dude had built his own gaming rig... it was absolutely over the top, I had never even laid eyes on hardware that expensive before... he never turned the power switch on his PSU on... he payed the base rate of $1400 for me to come out there to flip a switch I also installed his graphic drivers but that was technically free, and then gave me $5000 cash as a tip all because he was excited to play league of legends on his new pc.
Have been working for the super rich for sometime.
Craziest thing I've seen - brand new 90 metre multimillion pound (GBP) yacht was built in Netherlands. Maiden voyage to Antibes in France. Owner came onboard and left after a few hours. Next week we get sent to Genoa Italy, where all the bathrooms onboard were ripped out and upgraded.
That doesn't sound like a big deal but I'm talking about brand new marble sinks, showers, floors and lobbies all crowbarred out chucked in skips. Tonnes of brand new polished marble binned.
New marble colours and patterns arrived in the weeks following.
I used to ‘work’ for an Arab billionaire’s son, a Daddy’s money guy, terrible garbage human being.
Once saw him spend $16 000 on a wallet, was a fancy one with little gold spikes on it and stuff. He had shoes with gold on them.
I remember one year for his birthday he received like 30+ cakes, big fancy cakes and he told us to leave them on the floor in the hallway outside his room.
We walked by those cakes every day for two weeks waiting for instruction, after the two weeks we were told to throw them away.
I used to work for a company that modified aircraft for really rich people. I’m talking 747s, not gulfstreams.
This company had made several aircraft for this one customer, who I was told had purchased a new one solely because his spiritual advisor had told him that one of his current planes was bad luck. He still let his wife use it for her personal travel.
To me, one of the most exquisite features of these planes wasn’t the gold plated everything, or rare wood veneers, it was the silk carpet. That stuff cost over $1,000 per square foot and feels like walking on a bed of angel feathers harvested in the most inhumane way possible. Granted, these guys don’t deck out the whole plane, just their personal areas (the aft third is usually reserved for staff and such and is more like a fancy economy class), but yeah… silk carpet.
I work at a university offshoot, where a billionaire has donated a few buildings. He'll drive through every now and then to take a look at them. He'll stop and chat with us lowly workers, and occasionally give us tickets to the games in the arena he donated to the university.
A friend did some work on Sylvester Stallone's home. Apparently there's a ton of statues and art of himself, some of which are naked and very well endowed
My dad delivered a pizza to Rob Dyrdek. He tipped him 100 bucks and apparently farted and thought it would be silent, but it wasn't.
Some kids have whole plans and strategies they practice to prevent being kidnapped or harmed by crazy stalkers.One kid I worked with was the kid of a big hollywood player. And people would stalk the kid in an attempt to get to the parent. So this nutjob wielding a screenplay broke in and cornered the kid. Here I am thinking I am going to have to throw myself physically between them but the kid dove into a nearby dog kennel and locked themselves in. He couldn't get out but the nutjob couldn't get in either. So the nutjob just threw the screenplay at him into the kennel! Meanwhile I had called the cops. I was so impressed by the kid's quick thinking and asked how he got the idea. But he said that he always keeps an eye out for a way to escape. And when he sees someone he doesn't know approach, he gets ready to run.
I felt awful that this kid had to live like that. If I hadn't seen it happen myself I would have thought it was just paranoia.
I used to petsit. I remember a rich person asking me to petsit their cat. There was a lot of TVs, in almost every room. The weirdest was the bathroom. Sorry, cat bathroom. There was a TV playing cat cartoons, an overly fancy litter box and paintings of cats.
My wife's aunt and uncle were busy the entire day of their 25th anniversary and returned home at about 21:00. Decided that the kids needed a bit of fun and booked a private jet to Moscow( they live in paris) and spent a week there.
Money- gotta love it.
Was a boyfriend of a girl from an obscenely rich family. The sister used to have the nanny (who was sleeping with the husband, but that's another story) fly to Paris in their G550 to buy the newest Hermès bag so she could show it off a few days before it went on sale in the US.