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I used to work at the VVIP section of the casino. We know the Queen of Brunei (before we even know who is she) is a billionaire because she walks in with her crew of personal pilot and security guards.
I have two friends. One is surrounded by billionaires.
The other don’t know a single millionaire.
The friend who is surrounded by billionaires is able to point out the net worth of people we just met from our first conversation, and she is often right. She’ll make comments like “all these people are working class”, “these are the richest guys ever“, “this person’s family has $10 million” and “this person came from nothing”. I kept asking her how she knows, and she said, “Trust me, I just do”.
The other, tends to have no idea when she is amongst super rich people. When I told her that person bought an penthouse apartment in NYC in cash (because they’re foreigners so no mortgage) and is currently renting it out for $20,000 a month, she said she had no idea how rich that person is because she doesn’t seem like it at all. When she’s with “poor” people, she had no idea they’re “poor” either even though he was practically living in a van and that is as close to “homelessness” as you can get, but she thought it was just a alternative lifestyle choice.
Some friends could tell just based on pictures alone “oh that person is so middle class”. I’m surprised how accurate they could be.
Moral of story it depends on what you’re exposed to and recognise as wealthy. It is pretty much the same way you can tell if someone is educated or uneducated based on the conversation. There are always tell tale signs if you’re observant enough.
This is Hugh Grosvenor, he is worth £9 billion but worked as an account manager at a unknown startup. Most young rich kids would be working for their parents, running that unknown startup as backed with family money or working for a big establishment (before or after they receive their trusts)
Even if you don’t know who he is, you can tell he is a billionaire if you see his last name on the business/credit card matching the name on this building and the staff all seem to know who he is:
It is not easy to hide the fact that you’re a billionaire from a trained eye even if you say you’re broke (you can wear worn out shoes), because snippets of who you are will slip through, the way a person who is exposed to psychopathic narcissists would be able to identify them early on.
As for millionaires, a million, 10 million, 100 million and 500 million makes a lot of difference.
If you’re at a club in a prime area and there’s 100 bottles of Dom totalling to $100,000 all paid for by one person, you can damn right be sure that person is a multi-millionaire at the very least. Some people are oblivious to this, and can even say things like “oh real rich people (quoting Mark Zuckerberg) are not that flashy. Maybe he is in debt and the ones who only buy one drink is actually the multi-millionaire”. Sure kiddo, if that’s what you wanna believe but that’s more of a rarity than a norm.
This is Floyd Mayweather’s $18 million watch. To the uninitiated or non-watch person, they wouldn’t even notice it on someone’s wrist or might dismiss it as fake. I’ve seen a simple high school teacher carelessly playing with a watch of that much value and laughed. It was much later on, when someone pointed out the price to him, that he was shocked and said he though the watch was just a few hundred dollars and one of the bling bling toys you find in a hip hop video. He’s not exposed to the world of riches, so it never crossed his mind that a watch can cost 10 times more than his home.
Rich people aren’t flashy? But Floyd Mayweather is certainly rich. As for flashy, he blends in with others in the hip hop world. To the outside this display of cash is pukeworthy and criminalistic but to his tribe and culture it’s normal.
Yet I know someone who is worth around $100 million but complains that a $22 cocktail is expensive and gets really excited when he saves on parking.
A friend’s boyfriend drives a Lambo, throws dinners worth thousands of dollars often for groups of people and takes his girlfriend luxury shopping, frequently buying her $7000 purses, a $10,000 boob job, a Rolex, and $1000 shoes for her, but doesn’t own a single thing (Lambo is rented, no home ownership and at some point, couldn’t even fork out $50,000 cash he promised he would have invested in his girlfriend’s fashion project).
Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Michael Dell, Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Winklevoss love to brag how cheap their cars are but they’re all billionaires:
Kylie Jenner, Roman Aramovich (German billionaire), Ralph Lauren, Prince of Monaco and Sultan of Brunei are all legit billionaires and have very fancy car collection:
Some of them self-made, some inherited, some like to spend on fancy car collection and others drive modest cars but all mentioned above still fall in the “billionaire” category.
We live in a nuanced world and things aren’t always black and white. There’s lots of variation but pattern recognition gets better the more you’re exposed to somethin
