One of my closest friends used to be a personal assistant for someone very, very wealthy. One of the first things she learned is that having that much money means you live life on a completely different scale. Money becomes almost meaningless for you and you do thinks like abandon entire vehicles in the desert because it's more convenient to just buy a whole new Jeep than to spend time trying to winch this perfectly good one out of the sand. Yup, somewhere in the desert near Baja there's at least one 2016 Jeep just sitting there because a rich dude didn't feel like putting in the effort of pulling it out when he could just have a brand new one delivered to his house.
One Reddit user wanted to know if other users have ever seen this sort of thing, so they asked:
Redditors who work with or around that ultra-rich: what's the worst excess or waste of money you've seen?
Believe it or not, it gets way worst than abandoning Jeeps. Brace yourselves, it's about to get privileged up in here. Some of these responses have been edited for clarity.
Private Jet So You Don't Miss Class
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I went to a college with a lot of wealthy kids. My roommate freshman year was one of them. She was awesome and humble but her family was loaded. We went to her condo in Cabo for spring break and our return flight was delayed by a day. Her dad was SO close to playing $10,000+ for a private jet to fly us back because I had two lectures the next day and my roommate had one. I wasn't planning on going anyway so I'm very happy we talked him out of it.
They ended up getting their own jet a couple of years later and I see a lot of pictures of their dogs with their own seats and tables on the plane. It's actually pretty damn cute.
$100k In LEGOs
A single child of a CEO around the age of 6 with a hundred grand worth of LEGO in two rooms.
Abandoned Expensive Toys
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My roommate last year in the one semester I knew him bought: (at least) 3 iPhones, 2 iPads, the gold Apple Watch, a MacBook Pro (which I never saw him use- he only ever used his gaming computer I think it was called Alienware), 2 bikes which he definitely never used, a skateboard, a longboard, again neither used, and to top it all off, he moved off campus second semester but kept paying the $4,000/semester rent and used the dorm as a storage locker for all his random stuff. Better yet he never came back for a bunch of his stuff so now I have a very expensive skateboard
All For Their Spoiled-Ass Tortoise
My friend is married to a plumber. He was once hired to set up a special room for a famous composer's wife's tortoise. It was a huge room in their mansion that his company set up to be arid all the time, like a desert. I believe it even had sand and cacti in it, and sun lamps. I don't know how much it cost, but it was more than most people spend on their houses. All for their spoiled-ass tortoise.
"It Wasn't Even That Comfortable"Â
In college I worked for a super high end interior designer who fully designed houses for the ultra rich. Like, he did Walton level money houses. I moved furniture for 15 bucks an hour. Anyways, this one particular house we had to move in a pair of custom built Italian recliners. These chairs were hand built, hand embroidered and I shit you not, the wooden legs were vigorously rubbed with a gold bar so as to embed tiny flakes of gold so it shimmered. We moved a pair of these chairs into a third living room on the second floor. The room looked like it had never, ever been used and we just plopped down 30k worth of window dressing in there like it was nothing. I did sit in this throne that would have paid my tuition for a year and you know what, it wasn't even that comfortable.
Took A Snapchat Picture
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My ex employer is very wealthy Arab dude.
Biggest waste of money I've personally seen is:
$7k on champagne, he doesn't drink, bought it, took a Snapchat picture and then left.
$50k for three days in Dubai, he didn't come back with any sort of luggage or anything.
$1.5 million in three failed businesses, opened within months of each other.
Cars he doesn't drive, Maseratis and Ferraris. He bought a brand top of the class Ferrari, had it for like three weeks and I never saw it again.
But. mostly just the way he does things, buys a super expensive coffee, has a sip, throws it away, buys expensive as f^ck clothes from expensive stores, never wears them. Has f^cking real gold on these shoes that come in a big fancy wooden box. Doesn't wear them.
Too Rich To Drink Coke
My boss's 8 y.o. daughter was at our office. I offered her drinks - water, tea or coke. She said: "My parents said that only poor kids drink coca cola."
She was too rich to drink coke. Damaged kid.
- Annieb01
Executive Catwalk
I managed the social media accounts of an entire car dealership network for about a year, it was family owned and they were hundreds of millions type of rich.
The daughter (probably early 30s) would send her assistant out to buy literally DOZENS of expensive outfits for her to try on. She'd then spend all Friday using the executive office area as a catwalk to try on her new outfits. Once she picked one she'd wear it to whatever club she was going to that night and have the rest put in storage never to be seen again.
Her assistant, who hated her job, once told me she bought the same expensive dress three times now, there's three of them in a storage room somewhere that have never been worn. Apparently each trip was around 10k or more, and she'd do this at least once a week. The only thing that wouldn't go into storage was the jewelry, she special room in her house for getting ready in and that's where she kept the literally millions of dollars in jewelry she bought over the years.
$30k Dog For Mommy's Little Sociopath
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Oh hell. Where to begin
I worked for the founder of a multi level marketing company once. She was no longer in charge of it but still collected her quarterly residuals. I was hired as a pilot but ended up helping other employees around the house because it was too much sitting around.
She had just moved and we unloaded 6 full sized Uhaul trucks of fur coats and stupidly expensive clothes into the 25,000 square foot house. There were not enough closets to store them all so we built rods in the attic and hung them all up there. I honestly doubt she remembers that they are up there. Most of the clothes still had the price tags on them.
We filled three storage units in town with priceless art and Antiques that I'm sure she forgot to pay the $100 a month bill on and they were probably bought at some auction.
She bought a $30,000 dog for her 11 year old son that was a sh!thead. It was a personal protection dog that was trained in Dutch. The trainer and his assistant flew down from Canada to drop the dog off and transition him to his new owner. They were less then pleased when I informed them that the new owner was an 11 year old sociopath but they did their best.
The dog was amazing and obviously extremely well behaved and would follow whatever command was given in Dutch. A few days later they had a birthday party and invited 80+ kids from their school. I watched from the far corner of the house as the 11 year old told one of the unpopular pudgy kids from school to run as fast as he could. He gave him about a hundred yard head start before he sent the dog after him. I grabbed the card with all the Dutch codes on it frantically from my pocket and gave the "down" command as the dog was about 3' from the kid running. The little sociopath just laughed and walked away. That dog would have torn the kid to pieces.
The place was just pure chaos all the time. I never did get paid. After about 2 months her attorney came in and convinced her that we were all stealing from her and let everyone go. Honestly it couldn't have been farther from the truth. Everyone was trying so hard to keep her from imploding. Came to find out a few years later that the attorney was embezzling from her the whole time.
Rich people live in an alternate reality because no one tells them no.
Personal Trainer
Flying a Personal Trainer from LA to Phoenix, five days a week, first class, for less than four hours each day, for two years, because the selection of Personal Trainers in Arizona apparently wasn't good enough.
H/T: Reddit