What fun it must be to be a multi-billionaire!
You can pretty much buy anything or do anything you want.
Like Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, net worth $25.2 billion and the world’s 19th richest person. He just bought the Washington Post, one of America’s most respected newspapers, for $250 million out of his own pocket, less than one per cent of his net worth.
That’s not quite as much as the Qatar royal family paid for Paul Cezanne’s The Card Players: $259 million for the painting, one of five in a series, immediately making it the highest price ever paid for a work of art.
For the rest of us punters, there's one in the
Musee D’Orsay in Paris that looks just like it and it only costs 9 euros to get in. Look but don’t touch. If so inclined, the Qatar royal family can smear their Cezanne with ketchup.
Speaking of ketchup, billionaires are not only interested in buying interesting stuff. They also like to make interesting stuff. Just the other day, Sergey Brin, one of the Google billionaires and the world’s 21st richest person, funded the creation of test-tube hamburger. An ordinary person would hit the drive-thru, but when you’re a billionaire, you can get them to whip up magic meat in the lab that almost tastes like the real thing, and no animals are harmed in the making of this burger. I wonder how much it would cost to create real bacon from scratch?
When ordinary people plan a surprise birthday party, it’s a big deal if they rent a clown. When Lululemon founder Chip Wilson threw a surprise birthday party for his wife over the weekend, he rented the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He’s only the world’s 490th richest person, but you can’t buy that kind of cool, can you? What am I saying? Of course you can!
Of course, some billionaires prefer to continue to squander their wealth on conventional toys. Russian Oligarch Roman Abramovich, the world’s 107th richest person, bought a yacht called the Eclipse for (once it’s all outfitted) a rumoured $1.5 billion. Hard to believe, but at 162.5 metres, it’s only the world’s second longest privately owned yacht; the longest is the Azzam, rumoured to be owned by powerful Saudi billionaire Al-Waleed bin Talal, the world’s 26th richest person.
Both the Eclipse and the Azzam are monuments to excess (or is that excessive monuments?). The Azzam is longer than a British Type 45 destroyer. The Eclipse has not one but two helicopter pads, carries a mini-sub on board and requires a crew of 70 to operate.
Not every billionaire is so conspicuously consumptive. Speaking of ketchup (again) Warren Buffett, the world’s 4th richest man, who just bought Heinz ketchup for $23.2 billion. Even though Warren is the richest man in America, he still lives in the same house in Omaha he bought in 1958 for $31,500.
Oh, and thanks to Jeff Bezos and his most recent purchase, Buffett’s shares in the newspaper’s parent company have increased in value 9,000 per cent since he bought them.
Some multi-billionaires just like to collect…more money.