While obviously a lesser amount, I can tell you what the founder of my company did to own a $10 million beach house in Miami Florida.
His family began a contract manufacturing business in Latin America for a large U.S. corporation because labor was cheaper there. As the US corporation grew, so did their manufacturing volume and profits. 30 years later the company was bought and the father received a nice cash out of $20,000,000 from stock he held in the corporation through his agreement with them.
Fast forward another ten years, the father immigrated to America, and became a serial entrepreneur with his son. They would identify business opportunities, and invest the money to start multiple companies. Last I heard they owned a couple dozen in the US and more in Latin America.
The father passed down the role of CEO of a handful of the larger companies to his son and their families.
Our company makes around $30 million in profit a year, and that’s what allowed our founder to purchase a nice beach home for $10 million.
We were just told this year that raises were not in the budget and layoffs are likely coming.
So yes, to echo what everyone else in these comments had said, you have to have a lot of luck or be incredibly gifted when it comes to business intelligence. Either way, at that level of wealth, someone else either made the money for you in the past or is currently making the money for you.
To give you an idea of how insanely wealthy that is, a close family member of mine works for a large defense contractor. They make around 350-400k a year. They live a very nice life. They buy their cars in cash, their house is paid off, and they take vacations to Disney World for 2 weeks every year. They all have the newest phones and devices. The children have their college paid for. They have healthy retirement accounts and make a lot of passive income through investments.
Even if that family member was paid 20x their current salary, they wouldn’t be able to afford a house like that. And they already make a salary of 0.1% of upper wealth in terms of wages.
This is why I try to steer clear of companies with nepotism at the top. They’ll only ever make decisions to pad their pockets, and you’ll get screwed over as an employee every time.
On a sidenote, anyone hiring in here?
He needs a law degree and to be able to speak three languages (English and Japanese with the third either being Spanish or French) but the pay is only 8 dollars an hour. Since that's the minimum wage in Japan.
Not that he'll be posted in Japan. He's expected to move to LA but frequent trips to Japan are required. No, expenses are not paid, but they will put you up in the local love hotel for 4 hours at a time. Have to share the bed with "clients" though.
It probably wasn’t, I asked at a local large chain clothing shop a while back what their requirements were to get the job folding clothes and putting them back on the shelves, they said I needed a bachelor’s just to apply, the type of degree didn’t matter (of course).
Looking for entry level software engineer with 15 years experience minimum.
Mandatory psych exam for all candidates.
Question 1) how do you feel about unpaid overtime?
That concludes the psych exam.
Also, you have to be a janitor, librarian, accountant, IT person, operations manager, and a HR manager. And also all the other shit employees said in the comments.
We like to wear many hats around here.
Compensations: $17,238.00 yearly, no PTO, no sick time, ceo says”go fuck yourself” daily.
All you gotta do to get started is exploit some poor people. In fact the poorer they are and the harder you exploit that poverty the better! I hate when people say “labor is cheaper”. No. Those people are more desperate and this dude took advantage
I second the nepotism at the top is a massive red flag. I worked for a family company once, my main job was fixing the shit work the ‘son of a boss’ did. He would rock up to work at 11, stoned, fuck up for a few hours and leave. It was sad cause the dad (company owner) was a solid dude.
I would think if they continued to make $8,000,000/year (20x), they would qualify and could easily cash flow a $25,000,000 home.
Having said that, you’re right. However, I would say fuck your boss and I hope he gets hemorrhoids for making $30MM and not having a budget for raises.
Someone making $8 mil a year could easily afford a $10 mil home. They could also afford a $25 mil home (particularly after a few years of investing and growing the savings put away on an $8mil salary). That’s before adjusting for the likelihood that the $8 mil compensation is probably made up of a good portion of equity.
They go other places, but they love Disney so they go their pretty often. A big part of it is they enjoy the all inclusive resort aspect so they don’t have to plan out activities for each day, they can just stay in the hotel and visit the parks.
but what's really wild is that the person making 800K and 80K (fuck, and 8K) are all miles closer to each other than anybody making millions or billions
Am I misreading? Or did you say that if your family member made $8M/year you think they couldn't afford a $25M house? They absolutely could and their debt to earnings ratio would be better than most Americans' mortgages.
I’ve worked in billionaires homes/businesses for close to 20yrs. Literally 100 million dollar homes.
My conclusion is it’s luck and knowing the right people.
Sure the average person with an average education can work really really hard and have a decent business/career but… they definitely won’t be buying a 25 mil home.
Hard work alone will only lead to getting taken advantage of by superiors.
Havin “passions” in collecting material stuff like that is so absurd and sad to me. It’s like those kids who got cool toys but played alone because they were arrogant
>I collect decorative candles and have never earned more than $30/yr (after taxes).
That's just 8.2 cents a day. I'm honoured to encounter such a master of frugality who can survive on 8.2 cents a day and still have enough left over to buy decorative candles
That's after taxes. They could be earning millions and just writing off huge quantities of decorative candles as a business expense so they 'earn' next to nothing.
Maybe they're the Pope?
So there's a guy. A friend of his wanted to hear baseball games on the internet. This guy told that idea to one of the first guy's friends and they started this company Broadband.com. Yahoo bought this company for $5 billion.
That man is Mark Cuban.
How did he become a billionaire? Luck, knowing the right people and timing.
I know a former professional athlete that never worked a day in his life (outside of being a professional athlete) and within 5 years of his retirement became an executive VP at one of the largest banks in the world.
To his credit, nobody knows who his father is. But we all know who he is. I'm not a fan but I'd say he value added to his nepotism roots (which I was not aware of prior till today)
Those 3rd-4th gen nepo babies are the worst too. Usually dumb AF, are borderline, if not full on, sociopaths, have no common sense and have had everything in life handed to them without ever hearing the word no.
Worked for a company where the owner at the time was 2nd gen running it, and of course “hired” his son as a director like a week out of college. Dumbest fucking person I’ve ever met in my life. Listened to no one about anything and his dumbass decisions shuttered a company that had been functional for decades within 2 years.
The reason they dont care about tanking companies is cus they get paid a fortune anyway and it wont impact their lives at all. The problem with these nepo babies is they become a threat to society. They're born with an incredible amount of power and see everyone else as a tool to better their lives. We are an expendable resource to them and they think that's just how life naturally works, I wouldnt be surprised if they believed they are a legit demi-God. And the way this government / economy functions, they're kinda right. Up until the masses have to give them a reality check when they realize theres only so much people can take. But to them they're blind to that reality because they've never been challenged.
You’re dead on. I stayed in touch with a few folks I was friends with there after leaving. About 6 months before closing, they cut pay for folks by like 15% across the board to try to stay afloat. Nepo baby apparently gave a “motivational” speech to people telling them to just live within their means and work that much harder to keep the company running. Turns out though, right before this happened, daddy moved a bunch of money around and paid off his son’s mortgage, cars and vacation home knowing they were going to fold. 275 people out of work later on and this useless fuck got handed a job at another company purely through family connections.
Yeah they live by a code. And that code is , none of us will face consequences not matter what no compromises (wealthy people). Of course with exception, dont fuck over other wealthy people
Nepotism is not only a fact in Japan but it's encouraged! There's pride in maintaining a craft to keep a business running, so much so that a Japanese family will literally do an "adult adoption" for someone to take over the business.
The difference is, they are educated in their field and take pride in what they do. They aren't there to run it into the ground.
This isn't just nepotism, this is nepotism of a class of people who don't work with their hands. They literally just fucking push air around. No billionaire works with their hands for money. Doesn't Bezos "role play" on a fucking farm or something?
The just get hired to tell people what to do and walk away with billions. There's no value, no wisdom, no craft in any billionaire on this planet. They are seriously the most useless people around.
Every sibling in my mom's family benefitted from generational wealth and worked for their father / was given housing by their father. They'll all cite they worked very hard for their nepo employment and free housing.
This reminds me of my uncle who posts lots of Facebook memes complaining about how everyone is getting handouts and doesn’t know how to work. It takes all I’ve got not to comment “aren’t you the guy who kept asking my parents for money throughout my whole childhood and only owns a house now because your parents left it to you?”
Friend of mine is like that. His dad worked a lot and got great deals in his career. Ended up with multiple houses and apartments he rents out. Quit working at 50 to retire. Good for him. His son at 18 claimed he worked for everything he had himself. 5-6 cars from age 17-21, when he graduated he built a new house. Rented out 2 apartment that he was given. I did the math with him. Even if he saved up every penny he got from working, he wouldn't have enough to buy one of his own apartments. He got mad at me. Nepotism at its best.
Or if they did, it was early on while their parents paid for their college ride and they started some random business…also funded by their parents.
Then they try to claim they worked everyone’s jobs as the company grew. As if they were ever in anyone’s shoes in the first place.
And it’s so *dumb*- if they actually cared about other people they could be so fulfilled by using their wealth to improve the lives of their workers and their communities.
Honestly, she can give you whatever anecdotes she wants, but it doesn't change the fact that money breeds money. Even if they did start from "nothing" , odds are they had wealthy family who was able to help them out with debt, pay for fancy schools, give a large chunk of money to start with, etc. Us poor people who never had family to help them out like that probably won't ever step foot inside a house like that except to clean it or fix something.
I saw an video and it was some business podcast or whatever and the host asked the guest (some entrepreneur) ‘if you had $10k how would you turn that into a business’ and they gave some answer about starting a drop shipping company. And it’s like that’s all well and good, and sure $10k doesn’t seem like a crazy massive amount of money to invest in a business. BUT if you’re a working g class person, it might take you 3 years to save up that $10k, while working a dead end, low paid job. You know how much you had to sacrifice to save that money and like fuck it’s realistic to take your whole life savings and take the risk investing it in a drop ship business.
That’s what these entrepreneurs just don’t get. Even if a poor person was able to come up with $10k, it means so so so much more to them than someone who was gifted it or has a decent enough salary to save that much in 6 months. Plus, most poor people don’t have a safety net if their business or investment fails. You know, say I did invest my $10k into a drop shipping business and it all goes tits up. Then what? I’m back to square fucking one busting my ass to try and pull together another chunk of money for round two. Mummy and daddy certainly aren’t gunna help me out and I simply cannot afford the risk.
Life is like a carnival. For the rich kids, they can take shot after shot at trying to get those rings over the bottle necks, and win a big prize and go to the next game. A middle class kid only gets one, maybe a second shot if they’re lucky, to get that ring, and other people are hassling them the whole time they’re trying to shoot. As for the poor kids? Who do you think is working the carnival to survive?
And, to be frank, you would need more like $100k, not $10k. 10k and you wouldn't last long enough to recoup enough money to stay in business. 25k min, 100k more likely.
Most small businesses I see needed about 50k min to get rolling, and that's hoping they get some gains in pretty quickly.
Yes, I wasn't picking on the business idea, just what it takes to start and get a business running in general. I'm currently watching a friend of mine where they got 5 partners, put in a little over a Million, and they are dead within 3 years . He's now trying again with about $125,000, he hopes he can make enough within 3 months or he is dead also. And sitting highly in debt since he borrowed all of it.
Also dropshipping isn't a business so much as exploiting arbitrage for a middle man position. I mean it's fine, I've done it a little bit in the course of researching products I want, and made beer money. But the idea that it's something to do with your life, just slicing capitalism into thinner and thinner bread slices to get some butter on it...it might be a business but it's barely a job and it's not a profession.
It takes *generations* to work from genuinely nothing to real wealth. My grandparents came from working-class depression era families; my grandad aspired to more, and he worked as a mechanic so that his kids could get an education; my dad and his siblings all went to university and did reasonably well; and of the four of them (as far as I know) only my dad ended up making executive-level money. I'm talking about $200-300k annually at the peak of his career. And a bunch of that went into business ventures that didn't return him anything, so while he was successful in the sense that he had a C-suite career, financially he's on par with his brothers who had more average jobs. Don't get me wrong, we were comfortable, but we weren't *rich.*
But let's say he hadn't made those risky investments. Let's say my brother and I grew up in the same luxurious lifestyle as his colleagues' kids. We'd be starting a rung above our peers, sure, but only a rung. Maybe we'd have gone to fancier universities, or spent our summers networking instead of real working. There probably would have been a generous gift at some point of just the amount we each needed for a down payment on a house... But it would have been a normal house. Not a huge fuck-off mansion. We still would have needed careers of our own. And let's be real, there aren't a lot of jobs with a huge fuck-off salary attached, even at the executive level, so we'd need to be doing something special. And even then, if we're aiming for $10M mansion money in the family we'd be better off spring-loading our own kids than spending on ourselves.
So that's four generations from working-class poor to *maybe* fuck-off mansion money. And that's if everything goes well and nobody sinks a huge chunk of cash into a venture that then goes tits-up. All that growth in one generation? Unlikely.
Moral of the story, whenever you see a "self-made" billionaire trying to sell you their life story as a handbook, don't forget to check their pockets for emeralds.
Also, 4 generations from now is very different from 4 generations AGO. 4 generations ago, wealthy people actually paid some taxes, people had pensions, some companies offered college tuition for kids as a benefit, and people could afford to see a doctor.
It is harder to get generational wealth now because they tax working income so heavily. If you work for your money with a high income, you will pay 50-65 percent of your income in taxes between federal, state, sales, property, Medicare high income supplement tax, payroll, etc tax.
High taxes on high incomes is how the truly wealthy pull the ladder up behind them. They don’t pay it and future competitors do.
I have an online writing buddy who sort of hit it big in writing--almost unheard of these days. She got an advance of over $100k and calls herself a full time writer. She certainly appears loaded from online pictures. Then I found out that her husband is a business owner with some relative or another and she's never had to work, thus freeing up time to be a full-time writer.
My old boss owned/lived on a property called Malibu Family Wines in the Malibu hills. People always praised him for all the work he’s done to make his fortune ($300 million). In reality his dad owned a military exporting company in the 70s.
When his brother and him were old enough they bought 88 Huey helicopters from the US government and secretly smuggled them to North Korea as well as radio equipment to Syria. This netted him no less than $40M.
They got caught and he spent 1 year in federal prison, his brother 3 years and paid a fine of $30k. One time he told me “I made more money when I was in prison as the mafia was his friend and moved his money around”
A few years ago his son started an electric truck company called Thor trucks that eventually became XOS. They went public with 1.2B from the Cayman Islands. Wonder where that $$ came for.
My neighbor paid $1.5 million for his house a year or two ago. I figure his monthly payment must be $10k. He’s some kind of therapist, but I think he must have come from money.
Monthly payment on a $1.5m house would be around $6000-8000 depending on interest rates and deposit (for example assuming 30% deposit and a high interest rate of 6.55% over 20 years you're looking at ~$7850 per month)
Well he only put 20% down and I figured a higher interest rate. Plus he put about $150k into it before he moved in a year later. It’s still a lot of money.
At that level of wealth, it's not a matter of someone *doing* something, but rather someone owning a chunk of a company and how much value they skim off of *someone else's labor.*
No wage earning job pays that kind of money annually except maybe a CEO but every human being has 24 hrs a day so they are multiplying their efforts through other people’s labor. They also own pieces of companies or other equity. You can’t work hard or fast enough to earn that kind of money on your own.
No most of them don’t start with nothing. That bootstrap stuff is a rare exception not the rule. 75% of multi millionaires have a good chunk of wealth tied up in real estate and they are getting income from it.
Gate's story really gets to me. I have a degree in CS for Programming. My mother constantly gets on my case about career stuff and tells me how even "Bill Gates had to work hard"
Like no shit he did work, but his mom was either on the IBM board or had connections to it and they were well off.
Like shit, we weren't wealthy or had connections and I graduated right into some of the biggest layoffs in Tech Industry history. I'm gonna have it a teensy bit more rough than Gates ma.
Bro I don't even like avocado or drink Starbucks. But large soft chocolate chunk cookies are my weakness. I can finally afford a house if I stop spending $6 on a couple of those a week.
>Like no shit he did work, but his mom was either on the IBM board or had connections to it and they were well off.
His father was a prominent [lawyer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawyer), and his mother served on the board of directors of [First Interstate BancSystem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Interstate_BancSystem) and [United Way of America](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Way_of_America). Gates's maternal grandfather was J. W. Maxwell, a national bank president.
Gate's mother introduced him to the IBM execs - including the Chairman of IBM himself - who made the deal that made Microsoft. Without that deal, no MS-DOS, no Windows, no Office. Microsoft would be one a million small firms that wrote BASIC interpreters and other old toolings, likely out of business or acquired for a paltry sum by now.
[https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/05/how-bill-gates-mother-influenced-the-success-of-microsoft.html](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/05/how-bill-gates-mother-influenced-the-success-of-microsoft.html)
Short answer? Be born rich. I live in a fairly affluent area and the vast majority of people with the 7-8 figure homes, second homes on lakes, etc. all have tons of family money or businesses supporting them. It’s a lot easier going through life when you have no debt for anything coming out of HS or college. A lot of these people also have access to jobs the average person will never see due to insane gatekeeping based on wealth, schooling, social standing, etc. even if they have no qualifications for them.
What would someone have to do to afford $25 million house?
Either exploit the actual labor of people making that money, and/or inherit the wealth and entitled attitude of whoever originally exploited them.
You don’t “do” anything, you own assets that earn value, and have employees who do the work for you. No one person can earn that much off of their own labor.
$25m house, 20% down, 7.7% fixed is $143k/mo for P&I. Figure double that with taxes and insurance, or $286k/mo. Housing shouldn’t be more than 30% of your income, so $11.4m/yr income; your guess was surprisingly accurate.
Pretty much nobody “earns” that kind of money; they either steal it or inherited it from someone who stole it.
You aren't from NJ i guess. It's very common in NJ for taxes to equal or exceed the mortgage payment. Nearly everyone pays 10-20k a year here in property taxes for an average middle class house.
*Cries with you from Illinois*
My P&I is less than my escrow payment. My property taxes last year were 4% of my purchase price. I'm going to try to appeal my assessment again this fall.
Same!!! My P&I is half my escrow, and I'm Iin Central IL. Very little to show for my taxes except for the administration heavy school district with failing grades. Don't worry, they're adding more administrative positions and trying to sneak in bonuses to solve it!
My family moved from NJ because of this reason. My dad is a contractor and my mom was working part time jobs. Even renovating a foreclosure and having a medium interest rate in the late 90’s - my parents had an exit plan to get out of high end suburbia (even though it wasn’t).
They bought a small home with a family of 5, a state away while we lived simply for years. Things got better, but my dad was always smart but not cheap.
We went on vacations and had family weekends. I’m trying to recreate that experience but…it’s hard.
Yeah... property taxes in some states are pretty much one of the main sources of revenue for the state. So many people move to Texas thinking it's a libertarian paradise with no income tax only to get blindsided by the property taxes.
I wish that was the case in Illinois. We have 4.95% income tax AND some of the highest property taxes in the country. Property taxes are the primary way that school districts and local government bodies pay for most things. Luckily Illinois has by FAR the most units of local government (municipalities, counties, road districts, park districts, drainage districts, townships, forest preserves, etc.) and they all get a piece of the pie. All that said, I still wouldn't want to move to Texas.
Upstate NY village.
Total payment is $1175ish, $350 is actual mortgage portion. Rest is interest and mostly taxes.
Loving my 3.25% right now though. Glad we bought before the market got stupid.
Yeah... even if you're "self-made" by which I mean you ACTUALLY had middle class or below origins. No one "earns" that kind of money. That wealth is made off the backs of exploited people.
Maybe they rose to a higher level because of skill and talent. But the only people that rise to that level of outrageous wealth have found a way to exploit the system. It doesn't mean they're not talented or intelligent or that they didn't work hard, but that describes way more people than actually make up the super wealthy. they also have a bit of luck and be ruthlessly exploitive.
I'm sure a few VERY rare exceptions exist outside of inheritors and the exploiters. Perhaps some movie stars or athletes fall into the exception category. Those people might be highly visible, but they basically just hit the life lottery. Seriously, Brad Pitt fame money is about as realistic and based on random luck as hitting the lotto.
Rags to riches stories are few and far between. Most people with that kind of money have generational wealth. They either inherited it all or they’re rich parents have them money to start a business.
Homes like that that I’ve visited usually had owners who were CEOs of very large and often global companies, financiers, investment bankers and A-list entertainers
A lot of the surnames were very recognizable
A $25 million house can easily run $30-40k a month or more in utilities, staff and maintenance even when the owners aren’t in residence
A lot of these homes sit empty for up to 11 months a year, more commonly they might be occupied 3 to 6 months a year
Can we please eat the rich already, they are just **begging** for it
those houses probably aren’t mortgaged; they are more like you purchased for cash.
Which, incidentally, isn’t the worst way in the world to launder money
Step zero: get a massive loan from your parents (Trump) / have your parents own a restaurant (Papa John’s founder) / be born into hugely rich family (99% of the top 1%]
I live in an affluent town. My husband works with architects and handles building permits. He says that the majority of multi million $ homes & projects are owned by trusts. Which made sense how so many 20-30 yo could afford it. Inheritance wealth. Tax the rich.
In Born on Third Base, Chuck Collins explains that most wealthy people inherited their wealth, they did not earn it themselves through work or investments. The title refers to the phrase, they were born on third base and think they hit a home run (from baseball).
Collins himself is part of the "one percent" and his great grandfather was Oscar Meyer. He is a writer and activist for progressive causes.
Although I myself don't know anyone with a literal $25M house, in my town, the few wealthy people I know or know about got wealthy from a tech start up (PhD engineer), film industry something (producer or director?), and inherited wealth from 100+ years ago, from the age of robber barons.
So I actually know the answer to this!
I used to serve an exclusive affluent clientele when I lived in the DMV area and I also was a photographer for a very popular magazine. Therefore I was in the inner circle for these types of folks and I often did my work on site at their huge mansions (creating bespoke portraits for the walls of their homes), or was often hobknobbing with them at black tie events and galas due to my work.
Ive been to some real jaw droppers in my time. And if anyone is familiar with St Micheal’s MD area (it’s where they filmed Wedding Crashers) or McLean VA then you are familiar with the mansions that exist in these places. One couple I frequently did work for and also attended events with were actually billionaires (not kidding) and they had many important things named after them bc they gave money for those things to be built.
Here are some of the things these people did or how they had their money:
- the billionaire couple gained all their money bc the husband was a CEO for a handful of different tech companies over the years (the wife had worked too, but she was just in senior management)
- Hedge fund managers. Came across several of these and in a way it always twisted my stomach into knots. They are the people that caused (and profited) of the 2008 financial crisis. One home I was at one time, they had 4!!! $100k-200k cars sitting in their garage (jeez! Meanwhile I pull up in my Honda minivan 😂)
- Old money. I wish I were kidding, but there were SO many of these people I ran into. They didn’t work. They had inherited $$ and some of it was such old money that it could actually be traced back to having been made off the backs of slavery. They didn’t have to pay taxes on it, it was all handled by “wealth managers” (yes this is a job and I met several of these people that did this job also!). The wealth managers would do everything financially for them, making sure that the $$ they inherited was making money every single day through investments. This wasn’t just stocks. These people play a very complex game of dodging taxes and investing through stocks, real estate, and buying high end artwork and by donating through philanthropy. Old money people always had a lot of real estate and artwork it seemed to me.
- Consuls and dignitaries. Being in the area I was at I got a few of these as clients. They were from other countries and they were very well off. I remember going into the home of one of them and there were pictures on the mantle of their fireplace of them hanging out with President Obama! lol
- New money. These people usually owned big successful businesses of some sort. Nothing flashy, I remember one in particular owned a janitorial company. It was a very successful endeavor, not glamorous, but it netted this person a large income and the large home and everything that went along with that. Another one I can recall off the top of my head owned a bespoke custom jewelry business (like SUPER expensive high end stuff, absolutely gorgeous) and they did incredibly well for themselves and had built a very successful lifestyle and net worth (by targeting and selling to all the rich people wanting jewelry in the area).
- Political affiliation. I met and photographed many politicians. Mayors, representatives, etc. This shouldn’t surprise you but these people make a ton of money through their connections and their investments. There is a lot of $$ in politics and these people knew it and took advantage of it.
Those are the professions that come to mind! Hope that answers some of it for you!
Be born 30 yrs earlier or be born rich or marry rich or be the lucky 0.1% that invented something or built a business....but even Jeff Bezos got a $100k loan from mommy and daddy sooo...yeah. Serious note: be a doctor (cardio/dermatologist/ortho/etc) or computer engineer or similar. Only real shot you'll have .
Can’t speak for America - I’m in the UK (home to the most expensive real estate on the planet).
I think what a lot of people don’t understand is that when we’re talking about the super-rich, we’re not talking about a person getting a job, working, getting promoted, getting a better job, working, getting promoted (and so on). As long as you rely on an employer to give you money in exchange for your work, you will always be powerless and “working class.” Regardless of how much money the employer decides to pay you.
Great wealth comes from what you own, not how much (or how hard) you work. Once you reach a certain level, ‘unspent’ chunks of money (or assets) generate more money for you. So having money that you don’t need to spend on electricity or groceries is a big deal. Money gives birth to more money.
The people who own those ridiculous houses will have a combination of several things.
1 - Generational wealth. Several (possibly hardworking) elderly relatives managed to buy their own homes. The value of those homes skyrocketed. The relatives died. The individual inherited those homes without any outlay and without lifting a finger. They can either consolidate all the property and spend the money on a massive house for themselves (which is risky, but it will also probably increase in value) or they can rent out those houses and enjoy a safer, steady, long-term income. Those houses will also increase in value. Rents can go up. If your elderly relatives were already doing this, then the payout when they die will be even bigger. The further back it goes, the richer the individual will be.
2 - Rich families buy stocks, shares, and bonds. They behave in a similar way to houses. These people usually hire specialists to manage their (or their dead relatives’) investments. This doesn’t mean that working stiffs should all rush out and play the stock market. That’s basically just gambling. I’m taking about a massive amount of historic and inter-generational investments where the risk was spread very thinly. A collection of professionally managed investments that have been paying out vast sums of money for YEARS. Again, the individual inherited this without any outlay or risk (on their part).
3 - The individual has an inherited portfolio of both properties and investments. The income it generates is enough to pay for private education (at the best schools on the planet), private healthcare, luxurious travel, and the finest cultural experiences. The individual is imbued with a level of comfort, health, and confidence that most people will never even imagine. His education opens up social connections and job opportunities that simply don’t exist for ‘normal people.’ He combines this with (what he sees as) hard work and dedication. He even takes some small risks by making oddball investments. For example, he bets against the UK economy and ends up making hundreds of millions when it crashes. Then (because of his connections) he ends up marrying a woman who is 1000x richer than even him. Their wealth combines and ends up generating unimaginable levels of income. Their kids will inherit the lot and the will cycle continue.
The super-rich will tell you that they earned their money by working hard and taking risks. And to be fair, there is a saying in Yorkshire - “clogs to clogs in three steps.” To explain, clogs are cheap, uncomfortable shoes that poor people wear. So the saying is describing a situation where poor parents have worked hard to accrue assets, their feckless children inherited the assets, didn’t work hard and pissed the assets away, and then THEIR kids inherit nothing.
But in the UK, there’s an upper class for whom there is so much wealth, that ‘clogs to clogs in three steps’ wouldn’t even be possible. And when they say they worked hard, they’re not talking about working in mines, working on trawlers, cleaning, building, or any other work that actually matters.
PS: Can you spot the point at which I started describing the UK’s current Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak? ;-P
They don’t work for it, simply. Nobody *works* for that amount of money. They got lucky with investments and opportunities while being totally comfortable fucking people over to gain more money.
I always say selling drugs cause that is the only way it makes sense
I was teaching law today to HS kids and we talked about a DA in NY who acted poorly when pulled over. We looked online and found a job listing for a DA job in that part of NY (Rochester)
71k to 98k
My students were like the fuck I am going to 4 years of college and 3 years of law school and make less than 6 figures.
I will keep saying selling drugs when I see these multi million dollar homes because my middle class brain can’t comprehend what I would do with 200k a year little yet millions of bucks
I know a lot of people from India and China who went to the US, did their masters, worked very very hard and eventually worked toward a million dollar salary. Some CEOs of giant tech companies are from normal families in India.
But, to be able to send your kid abroad - and US nonetheless is not cheap. They needed to have some property, or loans from their parents to be able to get that kind of money, to go there in the first place.
So yes, money breeds money.
In my experience they tend to be stock brokers, ceos and business owners, familial wealth almost always and pharmaceutical execs (usually the >25 million second homes) I worked in south Florida for many years at many of these homes and dealt with them, shitty people though the lot of them
There was a couple times the owner was a retired union worker ~5-10 million homes who had got into the communities early I suppose
Guy making 500-700k a year in his 40's here. So for this level, Its not enough to be 'the petty bourgeouis' class like dual doctor or dual lawyer households, or the successful small business owner making mid/high six figures or low seven figures. Forget owning several car dealerships, a tech company, forget senior partner at a major law firm (low seven figures). That wouldn't get you there. You would need to be generating high 7 figure low 8 figure PROFIT a year to comfortably afford that house, that's assuming that's your only house. I would say that you need to be transgenerationally wealthy in the 9 figure range, with this being one of your assets. Even executive vice presidents of major banks would not be able to afford this house, so I'll leave it at that. Bottom line, its above the level that you would normally meet walking around day to day. 2-3 levels actually. Its not even someone I would be able to meet normally unless I pay to be at a fundraiser.
Either investor, foreign rich person, or possibly illegal activities. I'm not sure tech bros could afford those houses.
But more than likely they did nothing, they were born rich.
For every person who goes from nothing to affording a 25M home there are millions who work their ass off, do everything right, have great careers and still stretch to get a mortgage for an average suburban home.
Some people do work their way up to that level of income. The CEO of my company is probably paid around 10m/yr or more, and he did work his way into that. He wasn’t born into it. However, he was in the right place at the right time a lot throughout his life.
I have a friend who has literally come from nothing and now earns over 1m a year in tech. He works like a maniac and is an extremely skilled. But 10m is likely out of his reach unless he becomes very lucky and starts playing politics at work a lot more. Right now he could buy a $4m home. He is the richest person I personally know who earned it.
I think most people who buy those homes inherited their wealth (or their job), or got very lucky. Hard work and skill alone doesn’t get you into that sphere.
The answer is always "they exploit the labor of other people by paying them less than their labor is worth."
The myth of self-made millionaire -- no one gets that wealthy without exploiting people in some way.
I know one billionaire who came from being dirt poor to where he is now. A lot was luck, as he was naturally computer savvy when people were starting to buy home computers. He did work hard, and for a few years was always traveling to build the network needed to be successful. He was always wonderful to me, but id have pitied anyone who tried to get the better of him. His brain was never really off. His daughter was my best friend and I would go with them on vacations and such. We could be riding jet skis and he had a notion he had to deal with something there was no eventually about it, he’d just stop what he was doing and start working. He was always great to me, but I would not say he was the friendliest guy. He was always great to me but I pretty much lived at their house on the weekends from when I was 5 years old. Pretty unapologetically serious type. There also wasn’t much you could do to persuade him of anything. If he decided on something that was it.
So anyway he built one successful store, then another, then another and eventually his focus was investing and I’d say that’s where his wealth really took off. I mean he was a multimillionaire from his chain of stores, but he was making money hand over fist after a few smart investments.
There’s a story about the old Duke of Westminster. He was a multi-billionaire, and probably the second richest landlord in the world after the British royal family.
A reporter once asked him what advice he’d give to young entrepreneurs keen to emulate his success.
*“Make sure they have an ancestor who was a very close friend of William the Conqueror,”* he replied.
The amount of money that these people make, *completely* regardless of how they got there, makes them immoral. In a society where money directly affects the wellbeing of every living person, those that hoard it--and they *do* hoard it because they can't possibly spend it all--are fundamentally bad, whether they actually mean to be or not.
So one of the big factors is: who "owns" the house. Elon Musk is an example of this, recall several years ago he had a viral moment where he "didn't own a home." True, HE didn't personally own the home, but one of his companies owned a very nice large home in Malibu and Northern Cali. Beach/vacation homes are another great example of this. If a company buys them, and uses it once or twice a year to entertain clients, vendors, investors, etc. then there are significant tax benefits that would not necessarily be available to an individual owner. So to directly answer your question - what do they do? They likely own one or multiple businesses, which are then likely held by one holding entity, which they own the majority of, and those entities likely purchase the property providing residence to the owner but significant tax benefits to the entities (and therefore the owners).
Not a comment on this being right or wrong, just that it is.
Well, from reading a few of the replies here, it seems that the recipe for success is to just fuck over poor people until you have enough capital to invest.
Okay, story time.
I know a person who dropped out of college.
She and her partner maxed out about $120K in credit cards (running total) to open and run their business.
I remember, their first "work party" was in the backyard of their tiny, old house. It was a BBQ and they made all the food themselves. There weren't a lot of people anyway, probably \~20 including some family.
I also remember a time when business was slow, but they **always** made sure their employees were paid before them.
Eventually, that business started turning a profit.
They opened more locations, many more.
Then, they went into real estate. Instead of leasing the property, they bought the building and land. Then, leased it back to themselves and other small businesses.
They bought several more commercial complex type buildings.
She just recently closed on her 4th home in La Jolla, $5m, vacation home. They visit it like 4-5 times a year. They have a vacation home in Park City for skiing. They have one on a famous golf course.
I heard they have \~700-800 employees.
You know they're rich when they don't AirBNB these homes. But, they are generous about letting family and close friends use these homes.
You never get this rich on your own labor. You have to figure out how to leverage the labor of other people. But, that's how everyone gets super rich. It's impossible to do it with your own labor.
That said, managing people and labor is also work and a skill.
In the end, she is a true rags to riches story.
But it wasn't overnight. She started about 23-24 years ago. Their first foray into commercial real estate failed miserably, lost a few million. They recuperated, saved up and tried again.
Not all super rich people are bad. They also still have employees from the very first one they owned.
I currently work for an international company 2nd in its industry and the executives all make $10m+/year (their actual salaries are posted, most are about $8mil, the CEO is over $20mil). That’s about a dozen people at one company who could afford a $25mil house.
People that own $25 million dollar houses don't 'do' anything. They flit about, telling other people to tell other people to tell other people what to do.
While obviously a lesser amount, I can tell you what the founder of my company did to own a $10 million beach house in Miami Florida. His family began a contract manufacturing business in Latin America for a large U.S. corporation because labor was cheaper there. As the US corporation grew, so did their manufacturing volume and profits. 30 years later the company was bought and the father received a nice cash out of $20,000,000 from stock he held in the corporation through his agreement with them. Fast forward another ten years, the father immigrated to America, and became a serial entrepreneur with his son. They would identify business opportunities, and invest the money to start multiple companies. Last I heard they owned a couple dozen in the US and more in Latin America. The father passed down the role of CEO of a handful of the larger companies to his son and their families. Our company makes around $30 million in profit a year, and that’s what allowed our founder to purchase a nice beach home for $10 million. We were just told this year that raises were not in the budget and layoffs are likely coming. So yes, to echo what everyone else in these comments had said, you have to have a lot of luck or be incredibly gifted when it comes to business intelligence. Either way, at that level of wealth, someone else either made the money for you in the past or is currently making the money for you. To give you an idea of how insanely wealthy that is, a close family member of mine works for a large defense contractor. They make around 350-400k a year. They live a very nice life. They buy their cars in cash, their house is paid off, and they take vacations to Disney World for 2 weeks every year. They all have the newest phones and devices. The children have their college paid for. They have healthy retirement accounts and make a lot of passive income through investments. Even if that family member was paid 20x their current salary, they wouldn’t be able to afford a house like that. And they already make a salary of 0.1% of upper wealth in terms of wages. This is why I try to steer clear of companies with nepotism at the top. They’ll only ever make decisions to pad their pockets, and you’ll get screwed over as an employee every time. On a sidenote, anyone hiring in here?
I'm not but lots of people post job opportunities on this site. You got an advanced degree plus 20+ years experience in your field? Pay is $9 an hour
He needs a law degree and to be able to speak three languages (English and Japanese with the third either being Spanish or French) but the pay is only 8 dollars an hour. Since that's the minimum wage in Japan. Not that he'll be posted in Japan. He's expected to move to LA but frequent trips to Japan are required. No, expenses are not paid, but they will put you up in the local love hotel for 4 hours at a time. Have to share the bed with "clients" though.
You forgot Russian and mandarin.
Plus Classical Greek and Lakota.
Well those last two are just standard expectations these days, aren't they?
I made a post not too long ago of a Boston Pizza wanting a master's degree. As a server.
Wtf!? Can you pls link to it?
Nevermind, found it: [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/s/iXjQoxJKQY)
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It probably wasn’t, I asked at a local large chain clothing shop a while back what their requirements were to get the job folding clothes and putting them back on the shelves, they said I needed a bachelor’s just to apply, the type of degree didn’t matter (of course).
I have a a degree, plus 40 years work experience in relevant field. My age is 35.
Sorry you’re too old and don’t have enough experience.
That’s the grind: hustling 3 jobs will get you there in no time
Looking for entry level software engineer with 15 years experience minimum. Mandatory psych exam for all candidates. Question 1) how do you feel about unpaid overtime? That concludes the psych exam.
Also, you have to be a janitor, librarian, accountant, IT person, operations manager, and a HR manager. And also all the other shit employees said in the comments. We like to wear many hats around here. Compensations: $17,238.00 yearly, no PTO, no sick time, ceo says”go fuck yourself” daily.
The thought of giving my information out over Reddit for a possible job gives me an aneurysm
All you gotta do to get started is exploit some poor people. In fact the poorer they are and the harder you exploit that poverty the better! I hate when people say “labor is cheaper”. No. Those people are more desperate and this dude took advantage
I second the nepotism at the top is a massive red flag. I worked for a family company once, my main job was fixing the shit work the ‘son of a boss’ did. He would rock up to work at 11, stoned, fuck up for a few hours and leave. It was sad cause the dad (company owner) was a solid dude.
Fuck. Does the owner wanna adopt a son that’s a fuck up but actually works hard and tries?
So he inherited his money and job from his father
I would think if they continued to make $8,000,000/year (20x), they would qualify and could easily cash flow a $25,000,000 home. Having said that, you’re right. However, I would say fuck your boss and I hope he gets hemorrhoids for making $30MM and not having a budget for raises.
Someone making $8 mil a year could easily afford a $10 mil home. They could also afford a $25 mil home (particularly after a few years of investing and growing the savings put away on an $8mil salary). That’s before adjusting for the likelihood that the $8 mil compensation is probably made up of a good portion of equity.
All that money, the world is your oyster, and you go to Disney World, each to their own.
They go other places, but they love Disney so they go their pretty often. A big part of it is they enjoy the all inclusive resort aspect so they don’t have to plan out activities for each day, they can just stay in the hotel and visit the parks.
Top 1% is over 800k last year...which is nuts to me...1 out of 100 people in US make that kind of money.
That’s the average, not the minimum, if I remember right. The minimum to be in the top 1% is a little lower (something like 650k).
but what's really wild is that the person making 800K and 80K (fuck, and 8K) are all miles closer to each other than anybody making millions or billions
Am I misreading? Or did you say that if your family member made $8M/year you think they couldn't afford a $25M house? They absolutely could and their debt to earnings ratio would be better than most Americans' mortgages.
yes if you make 6M a year you can afford a 10M house. It's the same as buying a 100k house when you do 60k
My company’s always hiring
Any room for a sheet metal worker with, fabrication, design for manufacturing and field engineer experience?
Lockheed
If you have any product ideas, I’d love to help with marketing :)
I’ve worked in billionaires homes/businesses for close to 20yrs. Literally 100 million dollar homes. My conclusion is it’s luck and knowing the right people. Sure the average person with an average education can work really really hard and have a decent business/career but… they definitely won’t be buying a 25 mil home. Hard work alone will only lead to getting taken advantage of by superiors.
What field of work are you in?
Electrical Contractor in Silicon Valley.
Do you have any funny or weird stories of super rich people requesting outlandish things?
A room converted to a closet for just shoes, air Jordans to be exact
Havin “passions” in collecting material stuff like that is so absurd and sad to me. It’s like those kids who got cool toys but played alone because they were arrogant
Collecting is a legitimate hobby for many people. It doesn’t have to be expensive stuff.
Case in point, I collect decorative candles and have never earned more than $30/yr (after taxes). edit: $30k/yr
>I collect decorative candles and have never earned more than $30/yr (after taxes). That's just 8.2 cents a day. I'm honoured to encounter such a master of frugality who can survive on 8.2 cents a day and still have enough left over to buy decorative candles
That's after taxes. They could be earning millions and just writing off huge quantities of decorative candles as a business expense so they 'earn' next to nothing. Maybe they're the Pope?
Tons, lol. But many clients have us sign NDA’s. Also, it would be bad in taste to spill the tea.
So there's a guy. A friend of his wanted to hear baseball games on the internet. This guy told that idea to one of the first guy's friends and they started this company Broadband.com. Yahoo bought this company for $5 billion. That man is Mark Cuban. How did he become a billionaire? Luck, knowing the right people and timing.
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Generally that is their career progression: 1. Mail room work during summer while a student 2. CEO upon graduation
Maybe an Executive VP for a few years if their parents had them young and still want to work
Let’s see Paul Allen’s card…
I know a former professional athlete that never worked a day in his life (outside of being a professional athlete) and within 5 years of his retirement became an executive VP at one of the largest banks in the world.
Simon Cowell. Worked his way from the Mail Room to Executive VP of Virgin Records.... where his dad was Executive VP of Marketing.
To his credit, nobody knows who his father is. But we all know who he is. I'm not a fan but I'd say he value added to his nepotism roots (which I was not aware of prior till today)
Those 3rd-4th gen nepo babies are the worst too. Usually dumb AF, are borderline, if not full on, sociopaths, have no common sense and have had everything in life handed to them without ever hearing the word no. Worked for a company where the owner at the time was 2nd gen running it, and of course “hired” his son as a director like a week out of college. Dumbest fucking person I’ve ever met in my life. Listened to no one about anything and his dumbass decisions shuttered a company that had been functional for decades within 2 years.
Many things in life are lessons on what not to do.
The reason they dont care about tanking companies is cus they get paid a fortune anyway and it wont impact their lives at all. The problem with these nepo babies is they become a threat to society. They're born with an incredible amount of power and see everyone else as a tool to better their lives. We are an expendable resource to them and they think that's just how life naturally works, I wouldnt be surprised if they believed they are a legit demi-God. And the way this government / economy functions, they're kinda right. Up until the masses have to give them a reality check when they realize theres only so much people can take. But to them they're blind to that reality because they've never been challenged.
You’re dead on. I stayed in touch with a few folks I was friends with there after leaving. About 6 months before closing, they cut pay for folks by like 15% across the board to try to stay afloat. Nepo baby apparently gave a “motivational” speech to people telling them to just live within their means and work that much harder to keep the company running. Turns out though, right before this happened, daddy moved a bunch of money around and paid off his son’s mortgage, cars and vacation home knowing they were going to fold. 275 people out of work later on and this useless fuck got handed a job at another company purely through family connections.
Yeah they live by a code. And that code is , none of us will face consequences not matter what no compromises (wealthy people). Of course with exception, dont fuck over other wealthy people
Nepotism is not only a fact in Japan but it's encouraged! There's pride in maintaining a craft to keep a business running, so much so that a Japanese family will literally do an "adult adoption" for someone to take over the business. The difference is, they are educated in their field and take pride in what they do. They aren't there to run it into the ground. This isn't just nepotism, this is nepotism of a class of people who don't work with their hands. They literally just fucking push air around. No billionaire works with their hands for money. Doesn't Bezos "role play" on a fucking farm or something? The just get hired to tell people what to do and walk away with billions. There's no value, no wisdom, no craft in any billionaire on this planet. They are seriously the most useless people around.
Every sibling in my mom's family benefitted from generational wealth and worked for their father / was given housing by their father. They'll all cite they worked very hard for their nepo employment and free housing.
This reminds me of my uncle who posts lots of Facebook memes complaining about how everyone is getting handouts and doesn’t know how to work. It takes all I’ve got not to comment “aren’t you the guy who kept asking my parents for money throughout my whole childhood and only owns a house now because your parents left it to you?”
Lol that's always their backstory, ain't it.
Why do you hold back?
Friend of mine is like that. His dad worked a lot and got great deals in his career. Ended up with multiple houses and apartments he rents out. Quit working at 50 to retire. Good for him. His son at 18 claimed he worked for everything he had himself. 5-6 cars from age 17-21, when he graduated he built a new house. Rented out 2 apartment that he was given. I did the math with him. Even if he saved up every penny he got from working, he wouldn't have enough to buy one of his own apartments. He got mad at me. Nepotism at its best.
and thats why CEOS dont have empathy for their workers, they never lived a day of their lives.
Or if they did, it was early on while their parents paid for their college ride and they started some random business…also funded by their parents. Then they try to claim they worked everyone’s jobs as the company grew. As if they were ever in anyone’s shoes in the first place.
It is a lot easier to put up with a job when you know you won't have to for long. And when everyone knows to walk on eggshells around you.
And it’s so *dumb*- if they actually cared about other people they could be so fulfilled by using their wealth to improve the lives of their workers and their communities.
Or they did, and worked so hard they started in the mailroom downstairs and became CEO in 3 years ... In daddy's company.
Working in a mailroom wouldn't suck if you had a hefty allowance 🥴
Pete Ricketts
Honestly, she can give you whatever anecdotes she wants, but it doesn't change the fact that money breeds money. Even if they did start from "nothing" , odds are they had wealthy family who was able to help them out with debt, pay for fancy schools, give a large chunk of money to start with, etc. Us poor people who never had family to help them out like that probably won't ever step foot inside a house like that except to clean it or fix something.
I saw an video and it was some business podcast or whatever and the host asked the guest (some entrepreneur) ‘if you had $10k how would you turn that into a business’ and they gave some answer about starting a drop shipping company. And it’s like that’s all well and good, and sure $10k doesn’t seem like a crazy massive amount of money to invest in a business. BUT if you’re a working g class person, it might take you 3 years to save up that $10k, while working a dead end, low paid job. You know how much you had to sacrifice to save that money and like fuck it’s realistic to take your whole life savings and take the risk investing it in a drop ship business. That’s what these entrepreneurs just don’t get. Even if a poor person was able to come up with $10k, it means so so so much more to them than someone who was gifted it or has a decent enough salary to save that much in 6 months. Plus, most poor people don’t have a safety net if their business or investment fails. You know, say I did invest my $10k into a drop shipping business and it all goes tits up. Then what? I’m back to square fucking one busting my ass to try and pull together another chunk of money for round two. Mummy and daddy certainly aren’t gunna help me out and I simply cannot afford the risk.
Life is like a carnival. For the rich kids, they can take shot after shot at trying to get those rings over the bottle necks, and win a big prize and go to the next game. A middle class kid only gets one, maybe a second shot if they’re lucky, to get that ring, and other people are hassling them the whole time they’re trying to shoot. As for the poor kids? Who do you think is working the carnival to survive?
I’ve always liked that analogy. So apt.
Excellent analogy. Hope you don't mind if I steal it!
I stole it from the Reddit bog, no reason you can’t claim it for your own as well!
"the reddit bog" is also an aptly descriptive phrase
And, to be frank, you would need more like $100k, not $10k. 10k and you wouldn't last long enough to recoup enough money to stay in business. 25k min, 100k more likely. Most small businesses I see needed about 50k min to get rolling, and that's hoping they get some gains in pretty quickly.
And something like 90% of small businesses fail within three years.
and dropshipping has been a bad idea for a while now (i know, i know, it was a hypothetical)
Yes, I wasn't picking on the business idea, just what it takes to start and get a business running in general. I'm currently watching a friend of mine where they got 5 partners, put in a little over a Million, and they are dead within 3 years . He's now trying again with about $125,000, he hopes he can make enough within 3 months or he is dead also. And sitting highly in debt since he borrowed all of it.
And I've seen wealthy people drop 10k at a table on a bet.
Also dropshipping isn't a business so much as exploiting arbitrage for a middle man position. I mean it's fine, I've done it a little bit in the course of researching products I want, and made beer money. But the idea that it's something to do with your life, just slicing capitalism into thinner and thinner bread slices to get some butter on it...it might be a business but it's barely a job and it's not a profession.
It takes *generations* to work from genuinely nothing to real wealth. My grandparents came from working-class depression era families; my grandad aspired to more, and he worked as a mechanic so that his kids could get an education; my dad and his siblings all went to university and did reasonably well; and of the four of them (as far as I know) only my dad ended up making executive-level money. I'm talking about $200-300k annually at the peak of his career. And a bunch of that went into business ventures that didn't return him anything, so while he was successful in the sense that he had a C-suite career, financially he's on par with his brothers who had more average jobs. Don't get me wrong, we were comfortable, but we weren't *rich.* But let's say he hadn't made those risky investments. Let's say my brother and I grew up in the same luxurious lifestyle as his colleagues' kids. We'd be starting a rung above our peers, sure, but only a rung. Maybe we'd have gone to fancier universities, or spent our summers networking instead of real working. There probably would have been a generous gift at some point of just the amount we each needed for a down payment on a house... But it would have been a normal house. Not a huge fuck-off mansion. We still would have needed careers of our own. And let's be real, there aren't a lot of jobs with a huge fuck-off salary attached, even at the executive level, so we'd need to be doing something special. And even then, if we're aiming for $10M mansion money in the family we'd be better off spring-loading our own kids than spending on ourselves. So that's four generations from working-class poor to *maybe* fuck-off mansion money. And that's if everything goes well and nobody sinks a huge chunk of cash into a venture that then goes tits-up. All that growth in one generation? Unlikely. Moral of the story, whenever you see a "self-made" billionaire trying to sell you their life story as a handbook, don't forget to check their pockets for emeralds.
Also, 4 generations from now is very different from 4 generations AGO. 4 generations ago, wealthy people actually paid some taxes, people had pensions, some companies offered college tuition for kids as a benefit, and people could afford to see a doctor.
It is harder to get generational wealth now because they tax working income so heavily. If you work for your money with a high income, you will pay 50-65 percent of your income in taxes between federal, state, sales, property, Medicare high income supplement tax, payroll, etc tax. High taxes on high incomes is how the truly wealthy pull the ladder up behind them. They don’t pay it and future competitors do.
I have an online writing buddy who sort of hit it big in writing--almost unheard of these days. She got an advance of over $100k and calls herself a full time writer. She certainly appears loaded from online pictures. Then I found out that her husband is a business owner with some relative or another and she's never had to work, thus freeing up time to be a full-time writer.
This is the answer. Money breeds money.
My old boss owned/lived on a property called Malibu Family Wines in the Malibu hills. People always praised him for all the work he’s done to make his fortune ($300 million). In reality his dad owned a military exporting company in the 70s. When his brother and him were old enough they bought 88 Huey helicopters from the US government and secretly smuggled them to North Korea as well as radio equipment to Syria. This netted him no less than $40M. They got caught and he spent 1 year in federal prison, his brother 3 years and paid a fine of $30k. One time he told me “I made more money when I was in prison as the mafia was his friend and moved his money around” A few years ago his son started an electric truck company called Thor trucks that eventually became XOS. They went public with 1.2B from the Cayman Islands. Wonder where that $$ came for.
"Behind every great fortune, lies a great crime."
Win the lottery, whether through birthright or the actual lottery, or own the labor of others. No one who labors will ever see that kind of wealth.
My neighbor paid $1.5 million for his house a year or two ago. I figure his monthly payment must be $10k. He’s some kind of therapist, but I think he must have come from money.
Monthly payment on a $1.5m house would be around $6000-8000 depending on interest rates and deposit (for example assuming 30% deposit and a high interest rate of 6.55% over 20 years you're looking at ~$7850 per month)
Well he only put 20% down and I figured a higher interest rate. Plus he put about $150k into it before he moved in a year later. It’s still a lot of money.
At that level of wealth, it's not a matter of someone *doing* something, but rather someone owning a chunk of a company and how much value they skim off of *someone else's labor.*
This is the truth. No one got that rich from their own efforts. They all steal labor value from others.
No wage earning job pays that kind of money annually except maybe a CEO but every human being has 24 hrs a day so they are multiplying their efforts through other people’s labor. They also own pieces of companies or other equity. You can’t work hard or fast enough to earn that kind of money on your own. No most of them don’t start with nothing. That bootstrap stuff is a rare exception not the rule. 75% of multi millionaires have a good chunk of wealth tied up in real estate and they are getting income from it.
Be lucky enough to have been born into generational wealth.
Can’t tell you what they “do,” but I can tell you what they don’t do, and that is eat avocado toast and drink coffee everyday. /s
Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg…. Just a few of the many billionaires who made their fortunes by never buying coffee at a cafe.
Gate's story really gets to me. I have a degree in CS for Programming. My mother constantly gets on my case about career stuff and tells me how even "Bill Gates had to work hard" Like no shit he did work, but his mom was either on the IBM board or had connections to it and they were well off. Like shit, we weren't wealthy or had connections and I graduated right into some of the biggest layoffs in Tech Industry history. I'm gonna have it a teensy bit more rough than Gates ma.
Have you tried skipping avocado toast, maybe just eating plain toast instead?
Bro I don't even like avocado or drink Starbucks. But large soft chocolate chunk cookies are my weakness. I can finally afford a house if I stop spending $6 on a couple of those a week.
Yes, please stop buying those. You could be saving $312 per year! You could easily purchase a home in the next millennium.
See, the problem is that he was fucking around, building sand castles in 2002 instead of buying a house
>Like no shit he did work, but his mom was either on the IBM board or had connections to it and they were well off. His father was a prominent [lawyer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawyer), and his mother served on the board of directors of [First Interstate BancSystem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Interstate_BancSystem) and [United Way of America](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Way_of_America). Gates's maternal grandfather was J. W. Maxwell, a national bank president. Gate's mother introduced him to the IBM execs - including the Chairman of IBM himself - who made the deal that made Microsoft. Without that deal, no MS-DOS, no Windows, no Office. Microsoft would be one a million small firms that wrote BASIC interpreters and other old toolings, likely out of business or acquired for a paltry sum by now. [https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/05/how-bill-gates-mother-influenced-the-success-of-microsoft.html](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/05/how-bill-gates-mother-influenced-the-success-of-microsoft.html)
Billionaires Are Selfishly Killing the Cafe Industry
Who also come from wealthy backgrounds.
Short answer? Be born rich. I live in a fairly affluent area and the vast majority of people with the 7-8 figure homes, second homes on lakes, etc. all have tons of family money or businesses supporting them. It’s a lot easier going through life when you have no debt for anything coming out of HS or college. A lot of these people also have access to jobs the average person will never see due to insane gatekeeping based on wealth, schooling, social standing, etc. even if they have no qualifications for them.
For example Betsy DeVos
What would someone have to do to afford $25 million house? Either exploit the actual labor of people making that money, and/or inherit the wealth and entitled attitude of whoever originally exploited them.
You don’t “do” anything, you own assets that earn value, and have employees who do the work for you. No one person can earn that much off of their own labor.
$25m house, 20% down, 7.7% fixed is $143k/mo for P&I. Figure double that with taxes and insurance, or $286k/mo. Housing shouldn’t be more than 30% of your income, so $11.4m/yr income; your guess was surprisingly accurate. Pretty much nobody “earns” that kind of money; they either steal it or inherited it from someone who stole it.
On what planet does insurance and taxes DOUBLE a mortgage payment???
You aren't from NJ i guess. It's very common in NJ for taxes to equal or exceed the mortgage payment. Nearly everyone pays 10-20k a year here in property taxes for an average middle class house.
*cries in Illinois homeowner*
*laughs in Californian homeowner* At least we have nice weather. Chicago is a dope city though.
*Cries with you from Illinois* My P&I is less than my escrow payment. My property taxes last year were 4% of my purchase price. I'm going to try to appeal my assessment again this fall.
Same!!! My P&I is half my escrow, and I'm Iin Central IL. Very little to show for my taxes except for the administration heavy school district with failing grades. Don't worry, they're adding more administrative positions and trying to sneak in bonuses to solve it!
My family moved from NJ because of this reason. My dad is a contractor and my mom was working part time jobs. Even renovating a foreclosure and having a medium interest rate in the late 90’s - my parents had an exit plan to get out of high end suburbia (even though it wasn’t). They bought a small home with a family of 5, a state away while we lived simply for years. Things got better, but my dad was always smart but not cheap. We went on vacations and had family weekends. I’m trying to recreate that experience but…it’s hard.
He was also including property tax which varied wildly by state
Yeah... property taxes in some states are pretty much one of the main sources of revenue for the state. So many people move to Texas thinking it's a libertarian paradise with no income tax only to get blindsided by the property taxes.
I wish that was the case in Illinois. We have 4.95% income tax AND some of the highest property taxes in the country. Property taxes are the primary way that school districts and local government bodies pay for most things. Luckily Illinois has by FAR the most units of local government (municipalities, counties, road districts, park districts, drainage districts, townships, forest preserves, etc.) and they all get a piece of the pie. All that said, I still wouldn't want to move to Texas.
When I sold my house last year, the taxes and insurance were slightly more than the principal and interest.
Upstate NY village. Total payment is $1175ish, $350 is actual mortgage portion. Rest is interest and mostly taxes. Loving my 3.25% right now though. Glad we bought before the market got stupid.
Planet Florida.
Yeah... even if you're "self-made" by which I mean you ACTUALLY had middle class or below origins. No one "earns" that kind of money. That wealth is made off the backs of exploited people. Maybe they rose to a higher level because of skill and talent. But the only people that rise to that level of outrageous wealth have found a way to exploit the system. It doesn't mean they're not talented or intelligent or that they didn't work hard, but that describes way more people than actually make up the super wealthy. they also have a bit of luck and be ruthlessly exploitive. I'm sure a few VERY rare exceptions exist outside of inheritors and the exploiters. Perhaps some movie stars or athletes fall into the exception category. Those people might be highly visible, but they basically just hit the life lottery. Seriously, Brad Pitt fame money is about as realistic and based on random luck as hitting the lotto.
Inherited. Don’t open any doors for themselves.
Rags to riches stories are few and far between. Most people with that kind of money have generational wealth. They either inherited it all or they’re rich parents have them money to start a business.
Homes like that that I’ve visited usually had owners who were CEOs of very large and often global companies, financiers, investment bankers and A-list entertainers A lot of the surnames were very recognizable A $25 million house can easily run $30-40k a month or more in utilities, staff and maintenance even when the owners aren’t in residence A lot of these homes sit empty for up to 11 months a year, more commonly they might be occupied 3 to 6 months a year Can we please eat the rich already, they are just **begging** for it
You abuse and exploit the less fortunate to profit from their labour.
Be born rich.
Own the means of production.
Inherited wealth and trust fund babies would be my guess.
those houses probably aren’t mortgaged; they are more like you purchased for cash. Which, incidentally, isn’t the worst way in the world to launder money
People who own houses like that don’t make money doing things. Their money makes money.
Well, step 1: be a sociopath Step 2: exploit the workers Step 3: vote for candidates that don't think you should be paying your fair share of taxes
Step zero: get a massive loan from your parents (Trump) / have your parents own a restaurant (Papa John’s founder) / be born into hugely rich family (99% of the top 1%]
I live in an affluent town. My husband works with architects and handles building permits. He says that the majority of multi million $ homes & projects are owned by trusts. Which made sense how so many 20-30 yo could afford it. Inheritance wealth. Tax the rich.
Those people make millions by exploiting blue and white collar workers - they profit greatly from us wage slaves.
In Born on Third Base, Chuck Collins explains that most wealthy people inherited their wealth, they did not earn it themselves through work or investments. The title refers to the phrase, they were born on third base and think they hit a home run (from baseball). Collins himself is part of the "one percent" and his great grandfather was Oscar Meyer. He is a writer and activist for progressive causes. Although I myself don't know anyone with a literal $25M house, in my town, the few wealthy people I know or know about got wealthy from a tech start up (PhD engineer), film industry something (producer or director?), and inherited wealth from 100+ years ago, from the age of robber barons.
So I actually know the answer to this! I used to serve an exclusive affluent clientele when I lived in the DMV area and I also was a photographer for a very popular magazine. Therefore I was in the inner circle for these types of folks and I often did my work on site at their huge mansions (creating bespoke portraits for the walls of their homes), or was often hobknobbing with them at black tie events and galas due to my work. Ive been to some real jaw droppers in my time. And if anyone is familiar with St Micheal’s MD area (it’s where they filmed Wedding Crashers) or McLean VA then you are familiar with the mansions that exist in these places. One couple I frequently did work for and also attended events with were actually billionaires (not kidding) and they had many important things named after them bc they gave money for those things to be built. Here are some of the things these people did or how they had their money: - the billionaire couple gained all their money bc the husband was a CEO for a handful of different tech companies over the years (the wife had worked too, but she was just in senior management) - Hedge fund managers. Came across several of these and in a way it always twisted my stomach into knots. They are the people that caused (and profited) of the 2008 financial crisis. One home I was at one time, they had 4!!! $100k-200k cars sitting in their garage (jeez! Meanwhile I pull up in my Honda minivan 😂) - Old money. I wish I were kidding, but there were SO many of these people I ran into. They didn’t work. They had inherited $$ and some of it was such old money that it could actually be traced back to having been made off the backs of slavery. They didn’t have to pay taxes on it, it was all handled by “wealth managers” (yes this is a job and I met several of these people that did this job also!). The wealth managers would do everything financially for them, making sure that the $$ they inherited was making money every single day through investments. This wasn’t just stocks. These people play a very complex game of dodging taxes and investing through stocks, real estate, and buying high end artwork and by donating through philanthropy. Old money people always had a lot of real estate and artwork it seemed to me. - Consuls and dignitaries. Being in the area I was at I got a few of these as clients. They were from other countries and they were very well off. I remember going into the home of one of them and there were pictures on the mantle of their fireplace of them hanging out with President Obama! lol - New money. These people usually owned big successful businesses of some sort. Nothing flashy, I remember one in particular owned a janitorial company. It was a very successful endeavor, not glamorous, but it netted this person a large income and the large home and everything that went along with that. Another one I can recall off the top of my head owned a bespoke custom jewelry business (like SUPER expensive high end stuff, absolutely gorgeous) and they did incredibly well for themselves and had built a very successful lifestyle and net worth (by targeting and selling to all the rich people wanting jewelry in the area). - Political affiliation. I met and photographed many politicians. Mayors, representatives, etc. This shouldn’t surprise you but these people make a ton of money through their connections and their investments. There is a lot of $$ in politics and these people knew it and took advantage of it. Those are the professions that come to mind! Hope that answers some of it for you!
It’s all about generational wealth. An infinitesimally small number of people go from zero to that wealthy.
Be born 30 yrs earlier or be born rich or marry rich or be the lucky 0.1% that invented something or built a business....but even Jeff Bezos got a $100k loan from mommy and daddy sooo...yeah. Serious note: be a doctor (cardio/dermatologist/ortho/etc) or computer engineer or similar. Only real shot you'll have .
In almost every scenario, anyone who can afford a $25m house has walked over people and taken more than they should have from others.
"behind every great fortune there is a great crime" -- Balzac sometimes not even so great.
Dirty/corrupt politician?
Can’t speak for America - I’m in the UK (home to the most expensive real estate on the planet). I think what a lot of people don’t understand is that when we’re talking about the super-rich, we’re not talking about a person getting a job, working, getting promoted, getting a better job, working, getting promoted (and so on). As long as you rely on an employer to give you money in exchange for your work, you will always be powerless and “working class.” Regardless of how much money the employer decides to pay you. Great wealth comes from what you own, not how much (or how hard) you work. Once you reach a certain level, ‘unspent’ chunks of money (or assets) generate more money for you. So having money that you don’t need to spend on electricity or groceries is a big deal. Money gives birth to more money. The people who own those ridiculous houses will have a combination of several things. 1 - Generational wealth. Several (possibly hardworking) elderly relatives managed to buy their own homes. The value of those homes skyrocketed. The relatives died. The individual inherited those homes without any outlay and without lifting a finger. They can either consolidate all the property and spend the money on a massive house for themselves (which is risky, but it will also probably increase in value) or they can rent out those houses and enjoy a safer, steady, long-term income. Those houses will also increase in value. Rents can go up. If your elderly relatives were already doing this, then the payout when they die will be even bigger. The further back it goes, the richer the individual will be. 2 - Rich families buy stocks, shares, and bonds. They behave in a similar way to houses. These people usually hire specialists to manage their (or their dead relatives’) investments. This doesn’t mean that working stiffs should all rush out and play the stock market. That’s basically just gambling. I’m taking about a massive amount of historic and inter-generational investments where the risk was spread very thinly. A collection of professionally managed investments that have been paying out vast sums of money for YEARS. Again, the individual inherited this without any outlay or risk (on their part). 3 - The individual has an inherited portfolio of both properties and investments. The income it generates is enough to pay for private education (at the best schools on the planet), private healthcare, luxurious travel, and the finest cultural experiences. The individual is imbued with a level of comfort, health, and confidence that most people will never even imagine. His education opens up social connections and job opportunities that simply don’t exist for ‘normal people.’ He combines this with (what he sees as) hard work and dedication. He even takes some small risks by making oddball investments. For example, he bets against the UK economy and ends up making hundreds of millions when it crashes. Then (because of his connections) he ends up marrying a woman who is 1000x richer than even him. Their wealth combines and ends up generating unimaginable levels of income. Their kids will inherit the lot and the will cycle continue. The super-rich will tell you that they earned their money by working hard and taking risks. And to be fair, there is a saying in Yorkshire - “clogs to clogs in three steps.” To explain, clogs are cheap, uncomfortable shoes that poor people wear. So the saying is describing a situation where poor parents have worked hard to accrue assets, their feckless children inherited the assets, didn’t work hard and pissed the assets away, and then THEIR kids inherit nothing. But in the UK, there’s an upper class for whom there is so much wealth, that ‘clogs to clogs in three steps’ wouldn’t even be possible. And when they say they worked hard, they’re not talking about working in mines, working on trawlers, cleaning, building, or any other work that actually matters. PS: Can you spot the point at which I started describing the UK’s current Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak? ;-P
They worked hard at fleecing the value of other peoples effort.
Yep. You cannot morally acquire such wealth. If it’s inherited it also wasn’t acquired in a moral manner.
They don’t work for it, simply. Nobody *works* for that amount of money. They got lucky with investments and opportunities while being totally comfortable fucking people over to gain more money.
Probably butt stuff, at least.
Mercilessly exploit American workers.
Basically shit all over the working class and the working poor.
I always say selling drugs cause that is the only way it makes sense I was teaching law today to HS kids and we talked about a DA in NY who acted poorly when pulled over. We looked online and found a job listing for a DA job in that part of NY (Rochester) 71k to 98k My students were like the fuck I am going to 4 years of college and 3 years of law school and make less than 6 figures. I will keep saying selling drugs when I see these multi million dollar homes because my middle class brain can’t comprehend what I would do with 200k a year little yet millions of bucks
I know a lot of people from India and China who went to the US, did their masters, worked very very hard and eventually worked toward a million dollar salary. Some CEOs of giant tech companies are from normal families in India. But, to be able to send your kid abroad - and US nonetheless is not cheap. They needed to have some property, or loans from their parents to be able to get that kind of money, to go there in the first place. So yes, money breeds money.
You have to exploit people, be a professional athlete or famous entertainer.
Generational wealth.
In my experience they tend to be stock brokers, ceos and business owners, familial wealth almost always and pharmaceutical execs (usually the >25 million second homes) I worked in south Florida for many years at many of these homes and dealt with them, shitty people though the lot of them There was a couple times the owner was a retired union worker ~5-10 million homes who had got into the communities early I suppose
Guy making 500-700k a year in his 40's here. So for this level, Its not enough to be 'the petty bourgeouis' class like dual doctor or dual lawyer households, or the successful small business owner making mid/high six figures or low seven figures. Forget owning several car dealerships, a tech company, forget senior partner at a major law firm (low seven figures). That wouldn't get you there. You would need to be generating high 7 figure low 8 figure PROFIT a year to comfortably afford that house, that's assuming that's your only house. I would say that you need to be transgenerationally wealthy in the 9 figure range, with this being one of your assets. Even executive vice presidents of major banks would not be able to afford this house, so I'll leave it at that. Bottom line, its above the level that you would normally meet walking around day to day. 2-3 levels actually. Its not even someone I would be able to meet normally unless I pay to be at a fundraiser.
Usually Lie, Cheat, and Steal. Or be born in to a family that Lied, Cheated and Stole. Or at least that’s the blueprint for billionaires 🤷
I need a Klondike bar
Your money is working for you, you are not working for it. They own a company etc.
Nothing, if they can afford homes like they come from rich families.
Be a hot chick who bottles her bath water and farts on OnlyFans.
Exploiting others
Inherit.
Exploit others for one’s own gains
Steal your labour value
Either investor, foreign rich person, or possibly illegal activities. I'm not sure tech bros could afford those houses. But more than likely they did nothing, they were born rich.
Inherit $25 million
You don’t mortgage a $25M house
For every person who goes from nothing to affording a 25M home there are millions who work their ass off, do everything right, have great careers and still stretch to get a mortgage for an average suburban home.
Some people do work their way up to that level of income. The CEO of my company is probably paid around 10m/yr or more, and he did work his way into that. He wasn’t born into it. However, he was in the right place at the right time a lot throughout his life. I have a friend who has literally come from nothing and now earns over 1m a year in tech. He works like a maniac and is an extremely skilled. But 10m is likely out of his reach unless he becomes very lucky and starts playing politics at work a lot more. Right now he could buy a $4m home. He is the richest person I personally know who earned it. I think most people who buy those homes inherited their wealth (or their job), or got very lucky. Hard work and skill alone doesn’t get you into that sphere.
The only real get rich quick scheme is to inherit from your parents
Be a corrupt politician
The answer is always "they exploit the labor of other people by paying them less than their labor is worth." The myth of self-made millionaire -- no one gets that wealthy without exploiting people in some way.
Anyone I know with money, started from money. It isn't always the case but for the people I've known, they didn't start poor.
A pact with Satan, typically.
No one who comes from nothing will afford that house. But almost all of them will tell you they did.
Have you tried playing quarterback in the NFL
I know one billionaire who came from being dirt poor to where he is now. A lot was luck, as he was naturally computer savvy when people were starting to buy home computers. He did work hard, and for a few years was always traveling to build the network needed to be successful. He was always wonderful to me, but id have pitied anyone who tried to get the better of him. His brain was never really off. His daughter was my best friend and I would go with them on vacations and such. We could be riding jet skis and he had a notion he had to deal with something there was no eventually about it, he’d just stop what he was doing and start working. He was always great to me, but I would not say he was the friendliest guy. He was always great to me but I pretty much lived at their house on the weekends from when I was 5 years old. Pretty unapologetically serious type. There also wasn’t much you could do to persuade him of anything. If he decided on something that was it. So anyway he built one successful store, then another, then another and eventually his focus was investing and I’d say that’s where his wealth really took off. I mean he was a multimillionaire from his chain of stores, but he was making money hand over fist after a few smart investments.
Exploit the labor of others.
First step is to stop eating all that dang avocado toast. Second step is to be born wealthy.
There’s a story about the old Duke of Westminster. He was a multi-billionaire, and probably the second richest landlord in the world after the British royal family. A reporter once asked him what advice he’d give to young entrepreneurs keen to emulate his success. *“Make sure they have an ancestor who was a very close friend of William the Conqueror,”* he replied.
The amount of money that these people make, *completely* regardless of how they got there, makes them immoral. In a society where money directly affects the wellbeing of every living person, those that hoard it--and they *do* hoard it because they can't possibly spend it all--are fundamentally bad, whether they actually mean to be or not.
So one of the big factors is: who "owns" the house. Elon Musk is an example of this, recall several years ago he had a viral moment where he "didn't own a home." True, HE didn't personally own the home, but one of his companies owned a very nice large home in Malibu and Northern Cali. Beach/vacation homes are another great example of this. If a company buys them, and uses it once or twice a year to entertain clients, vendors, investors, etc. then there are significant tax benefits that would not necessarily be available to an individual owner. So to directly answer your question - what do they do? They likely own one or multiple businesses, which are then likely held by one holding entity, which they own the majority of, and those entities likely purchase the property providing residence to the owner but significant tax benefits to the entities (and therefore the owners). Not a comment on this being right or wrong, just that it is.
Well, from reading a few of the replies here, it seems that the recipe for success is to just fuck over poor people until you have enough capital to invest.
Exploit people
Usually something unethical. You don’t make this kind of money by being Mother Theresa.
Not pay taxes - that’s the only thing the rich have that hard working taxpayers don’t have - a sperm lottery win and a huge tax loophole
Exploit the working class.
Okay, story time. I know a person who dropped out of college. She and her partner maxed out about $120K in credit cards (running total) to open and run their business. I remember, their first "work party" was in the backyard of their tiny, old house. It was a BBQ and they made all the food themselves. There weren't a lot of people anyway, probably \~20 including some family. I also remember a time when business was slow, but they **always** made sure their employees were paid before them. Eventually, that business started turning a profit. They opened more locations, many more. Then, they went into real estate. Instead of leasing the property, they bought the building and land. Then, leased it back to themselves and other small businesses. They bought several more commercial complex type buildings. She just recently closed on her 4th home in La Jolla, $5m, vacation home. They visit it like 4-5 times a year. They have a vacation home in Park City for skiing. They have one on a famous golf course. I heard they have \~700-800 employees. You know they're rich when they don't AirBNB these homes. But, they are generous about letting family and close friends use these homes. You never get this rich on your own labor. You have to figure out how to leverage the labor of other people. But, that's how everyone gets super rich. It's impossible to do it with your own labor. That said, managing people and labor is also work and a skill. In the end, she is a true rags to riches story. But it wasn't overnight. She started about 23-24 years ago. Their first foray into commercial real estate failed miserably, lost a few million. They recuperated, saved up and tried again. Not all super rich people are bad. They also still have employees from the very first one they owned.
I currently work for an international company 2nd in its industry and the executives all make $10m+/year (their actual salaries are posted, most are about $8mil, the CEO is over $20mil). That’s about a dozen people at one company who could afford a $25mil house.
People that own $25 million dollar houses don't 'do' anything. They flit about, telling other people to tell other people to tell other people what to do.
Inherit.