All the Money in the World by Peter W. Bernstein

Author:Peter W. Bernstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307267702
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-12-16T16:00:00+00:00

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The rise of the billionaires has had a dramatic effect on a number of monied enclaves across the country, not least Palm Beach, Florida, where mansions regularly change hands for $20 million and up. Media mogul John Kluge14 owns a 21,000-square-foot mansion there, valued at $28 million. Financier Stephen Schwarzman paid $20.5 million for his 13,000-square-foot Palm Beach mansion in 2003, while Revlon billionaire Ronald Perelman sold his 33,000-square-foot Palm Beach mansion, set on six beachfront acres, for a record-breaking $70 million in 2004. On the West Coast15, the tech boom has fueled conspicuous construction in Medina, Washington, near Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters, where Microsoft programmer Charles Simonyi built a 22,000-square-foot lakeside home close to Paul Allen’s 74,000-square-foot, Scandinavian-inspired compound. Multimillion-dollar homes16 have also invaded small but notably affluent towns in Silicon Valley, such as Woodside, which is home to Larry Ellison, Gordon Moore, and software tycoon Thomas M. Siebel.

Few areas of America17 have been so transformed by the Forbes 400 in the past decade, however, as Greenwich, Connecticut. By the end of 2006, Greenwich (population 63,000) was home to between 6 and 10 percent of the world’s $1.2 trillion hedge fund industry, including Paul Tudor Jones in his $50 million home and Steven Cohen, with his fourteen-acre estate that includes a nearly seven-thousand-square-foot ice rink. According to Vanity Fair magazine, between 2000 and 2005 there was a threefold increase in demolitions in Greenwich as these moneymen flooded the area, acquiring old properties and replacing discreet estates with oversize mansions often positioned conspicuously within sight of passersby. By 2005 the average price of a Greenwich home was $2.5 million, with only seven homes selling for less than $500,000 that year; sixteen homes sold for more than $10 million. After speaking with Greenwich interior designers, Vanity Fair writer Nina Munk estimated that curtains for just one room in a Greenwich mansion cost in the region of $30,000 to $35,000, and a lighting system and light fittings for a home costs upward of $500,000. “The people who count now in Greenwich and everywhere else in America, it seems, are no longer Mrs. Astor’s 400, but the Forbes Four Hundred,” she wrote.

While huge spenders are by their very nature highly visible, they seem to be in the minority among the Forbes 400, most of whom wish to remain anonymous. But there are the colorful few who, for whatever reason, choose to live a life that others can only imagine. As Malcolm Forbes, inventor of the Forbes 400 list and a man who believed in the good life, once said, “I’m just doing with my money what anybody with this much money would do.”

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