Rich guys make no sense. They can lose a few million on a trade in a single afternoon and keep their cool, but if a chief executive can’t find his car after a black-tie gala, his fury boils over with the force of a pent-up volcano.
I remember smoke billowing out of a banker boyfriend’s ears because he couldn’t jam his Tiffany barbell cufflinks into the too-small holes of his new $350 custom-made shirts.
The rule goes like this: the richer the guy, the more frustrated he gets with life’s inconveniences. Time, after all, is the only thing he can’t buy.
“Even though the Bordeaux futures they’ve bought are not going to be ready to drink for 10-20 years, they want it now,” says Dave Sokolin, founder of Sokolin.com, a rare wine merchant. “I tell them, ‘Buddy, it actually takes time to get wine out of a barrel, into a bottle, and on to a container ship bound for America.’” Rich guys get so exercised about pairing proper wines with meals — yet I find most of them could not tell a good vintage from a Dr Pepper.
This week, I conducted a poll of wives from Palo Alto to Park Avenue to see what incited the biggest blow-ups in their homes. I had trouble typing as fast as the women were ranting. Technology, it seems, is always tinder for a firestorm. If the WiFi isn’t fast enough, it’s life-threatening. Ditto the television. One woman who owns vacation homes in Vail and Palm Beach wrote: “He has 19 remote controls, and if he can’t get his sporting event on, one always goes flying through the flat screen.”
A Manhattan socialite told me that her husband gets agitated if the parking attendant at their garage has changed the memory seat setting before bringing up his Mercedes S550. “I’m, like, honey, just take two seconds and hit the memory button and your seat will be back the way you like it!”
Another woman from San Francisco: “My husband gets wigged out if he comes home to hang his suit and there aren’t five extra hangers at the front of his line of suits. If there are three or four, he starts asking who took the fifth and has a total fit.”
As a guest flying to Aspen, I learnt that the food served on a private jet is a hot-button issue too. At 40,000ft, my host decided it was an excellent idea to rage at the pilots in the cockpit: “Who made these sandwiches?!” He didn’t get that spending $100k on a round-trip doesn’t necessarily mean that the catering guy will execute the correct ratio of peanut butter to jelly. His temple veins popped again when the co-pilot cheerily informed him that we’d have to circle in dense fog. “You all woulda got here faster by flying commercial to Denver and driving!”
“In their universe, these men are masters, and when minor things happen, they lose the frustration tolerance their parents taught them as babies waiting for a warm bottle,” says Dr Harold Koplewicz, president of the Child Mind Institute. “They understand the markets, they engineered the hedge and, even if they lose, the money is still somehow in their control.” (It doesn’t hurt that hedge fund fees are charged whether there are gains or losses.)
Having to wait one’s turn for a table in a restaurant with other affluent people epitomises another such loss of control. The maître d’ at a top restaurant in the Hamptons tells me of one customer who “asks me to relocate guests already eating at a table by the window because ‘That guy doesn’t have any cash — I’m worth a hundred times what he’s worth.’”
Unlike professional hockey or baseball, there’s no off-season in the sport of one-upmanship. If you didn’t rent the hugest ski-in ski-out abode in Deer Valley, marry the hotter second wife (usually the yoga teacher), or hang the better Basquiat, you’re a loser.
In St Barths over the New Year, I was invited for a drink on a 60-metre yacht costing the family about $500,000 to charter for 10 days. The father of the family asked me, “How can anyone enjoy this sunset with Roman Abramovich’s Eclipse anchored at the next buoy?” (At 162 metres, the Eclipse has two helicopter pads, two swimming pools, and a crew of about 70.) Another lesson these guys can’t heed: no matter how much you make, there will always be a Russian oligarch who has something you don’t.
But you know what makes these rich guys angrier than anything? Getting their net worth wrong. At a tedious gala last year, my dinner partner told me that he had his PR department keep him off the Forbes 400 wealthiest list for the sake of “discretion”. Months later, this same man’s wife told me that he actually went berserk when he rushed to the magazine stands to find he was off the list.
The sangfroid required of these men to handle millions in market losses will melt at some point, just as the child who steels himself at nursery school will break down once safe at home with mummy. With so few people turning so many of the world’s financial dials, it’s no wonder one-percenters believe they can control every minuscule aspect of life. We should hardly be surprised that in these rich guys’ carefully constructed worlds, an off-kilter peanut butter percentage represents a most dire state of chaos.
