In reality, the Amazon founder isn’t the only American billionaire doing his best version of “Stars—They’re just like us!” The long pastime of underplaying wealth is baked into our nation and it’s recently gained the nickname “quiet luxury.”
It’s a tactic to seem humble, despite the inside of a pocketbook that would suggest otherwise. “Theodore Roosevelt said: ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick.’ The ultra-high-net-worth corollary to this would be ‘Don’t be flashy, and keep your wealth out of view,” David Sadkin, president of Los Angeles–based Bel Air Investment Advisors, told Fortune, adding that many clients engage in said behavior as to also avoid uncomfortable expectations from others.
So this wealth manager and her boss had been summoned to a country outside of Europe by a client who was sending a private plane for them. She showed up at the Zurich airport with her boss waiting for this plane. And she discovered that she’d left her passport back home in a different purse. And she said to her boss, I’ve got to go home and get my passport because we’re leaving Europe. And he said don’t worry about it. And she said again, no, they’re going to check my passport. They won’t let me leave Switzerland, much less enter another country. I’ve got to go home. And he said, no, really, don’t worry about it.
So she didn’t say anything further, figuring, you know, it would be his problem if she got refused the right to leave. Sure enough, the private plane pulls up. They get on it. Nobody checks a passport. It lands in this other country outside Europe. Nobody checks a passport. They get into the private car sent by the client. They’re taken to the client’s home. They have their meeting. Private car takes them back to the private plane. Private plane flies them back to Switzerland. They get off the plane and go home. At no point has anyone encountered passport control or a customs agent.
And this wealth manager’s comment was the lives of the richest people in the world are so different from those of the rest of us, it’s almost literally unimaginable. National borders are nothing to them. They might as well not exist. The laws are nothing to them. They might as well not exist. It’s potentially very, very dangerous. And I think she’s right about that.
This bit of an interview with a sociologist who studied wealth managers seems relevant
Jayzuz. And here I thought that only happened in movies.