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This is a straight-faced handbook for the newly, absurdly rich, and a portrait of the real people who already are. It treats every billionaire problem as an admin headache: why you can't simply spend your fortune, why your bankers want you to borrow, what a family office is and why it ends up running you, what to buy when you have everything, and why the people of Rotterdam offered to pelt a yacht with rotten eggs. Then it follows the money into power, from ten-vote shares and Musk's pay package to rockets, airships, DOGE, Brussels, Beijing and the foundation that keeps your name on the door.
Running through it is a much older story. Medieval advice books for princes, Veblen on showing off, the Groom of the Stool, Galileo's patrons, Carnegie's gospel and an emperor who retired to make his clocks agree all turn out to have something to say about Silicon Valley. The last chapters take on marriage, heirs, longevity labs, Mars and bunkers, and the awkward question of what you should actually want once you can have nearly anything.
This is a straight-faced handbook for the newly, absurdly rich, and a portrait of the real people who already are. It treats every billionaire problem as an admin headache: why you can't simply spend your fortune, why your bankers want you to borrow, what a family office is and why it ends up running you, what to buy when you have everything, and why the people of Rotterdam offered to pelt a yacht with rotten eggs. Then it follows the money into power, from ten-vote shares and Musk's pay package to rockets, airships, DOGE, Brussels, Beijing and the foundation that keeps your name on the door.
Running through it is a much older story. Medieval advice books for princes, Veblen on showing off, the Groom of the Stool, Galileo's patrons, Carnegie's gospel and an emperor who retired to make his clocks agree all turn out to have something to say about Silicon Valley. The last chapters take on marriage, heirs, longevity labs, Mars and bunkers, and the awkward question of what you should actually want once you can have nearly anything.