Singapore: The Newport of the New Gilded Age
What’s more, the new nouveau riche are openly comparing today’s Singapore to the Gilded Age:
But Ault, who moved to Singapore three years ago, says he “no longer feels the magic” in Gotham, which still bears the scars of a financial crisis that knocked the wind out of much of its most extravagant party culture. Singapore, he says, is another matter. This is where he says the rich feel, well, rich, and unusually secure. And where they seem to know only one common language, the language of excess—all too shamelessly displayed in his club.
“One night, there were these kids here—literally kids in their 20s—who all had their own private jets,” Ault recalls during another meeting, on a Thursday morning, leaning back on a leather couch in his club wearing bright-blue fuzzy slippers embroidered with a pink skull. “Serious jets, too. There was an A380 which was converted to include a pool and basketball court—it was ridiculous.”
“What I see here is what I imagined must have happened in the U.S. in the 1880s, in the Gilded Age, when it first took over England in terms of wealth,” he says. “It is truly shocking how much wealth there is—and how willing people are to spend it.”
If our plutocrats are going to reinvent the Gilded Age, maybe it’s time we common people reinvented some old school forms of protest.
I like how kids in their 20s owning their own jets wouldn’t be so impressive on its own, but these ones own serious jets.
Who the hell wants to play basketball in flight?
It sure would make it interesting though especially if the door gets opened.
Actual comment from the WSJ article: “I think this is a great article, shows that if you work hard you can end up being able to party anywhere in the world and money wouldn’t be an issue”
Those 20year old kids that inherited a couple billion sure worked hard for it.
It is a lot of effort smothering both your parents in their sleep at the same time.
Eduardo Saverin has a couple billion because he used to be friends with Mark Zuckerberg, so there’s that too.
and fifty grand laying around to loan him
I could be wrong about the amount, it was definitely… more grands than i had to fuck around with in college
Yeah, extactive industry trust babies and Saudi princes all worked verryyyy hard
Dude, my pitchfork’s been sharp for nigh on a decade.
I keep the wheels of my tumbrel well-oiled but after reading that story I’m thinking to myself: “Hmm…maybe a new coat of paint.”
I’m still working on learning knitting, but I’ll be ready when the time comes . . .
Put a cool name on the side in some badass flame font. ‘The Deheadinator’ or somesuch.
My guillotine is sharp and well oiled.
Would there even be historians around afterwards to shad a tear over that many worthless people? The Scalet Pimpernel would take one look at that article and switch sides
Haven’t gotten around yet to the business license for my tar/feathers/tumbrels store, but any day now….
For those who aren’t big into aviation, the airbus A380 is bigger than a Boeing 747-400 and costs around $300 million.
And if the orders list on wikipedia is to be believed, there’s only one delivered outside the airline industry, and it belongs to Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. Sorta narrows down the list of potential club-going 20-somethings who might have one…
(And now I have sort of a morbid curiosity about the engineering behind putting a swimming pool in an airplane. You can’t put baffles in a pool like you can in a big fuel tank, that leaves a lot of free surface to slosh around during turbulence and maneuvering.)
One imagines they drain it during flight.
… I hope.
I suspect that the story here may not be “Singapore is a haven of grotesque wealth” but “WSJ reporters believe anything they hear in nightclubs”.
Well, I, personally, have been in a jet with a bowling alley. So I can see “pool.”
What happens to the bowling balls when there is mid-air turbulence?
“What happens to the bowling balls when there is mid-air turbulence?”
i’m guessing the number of “300″ games takes a drop.
You say that, but you’re overlooking what happens to the pins when there’s turbulence.
Warren Terra: velcro bottoms.
Never met the rich? I’m guessing number of sycophants who score 300 games stays the same, ergo the number stays the same
How about a retractable cover with baffles?
What would be the point of having a pool on an airplane if you couldn’t use it during flight? You want to hang out on your airplane while it’s parked at an airport somewhere?
Well, sure. You head over to the local Four Seasons, and you still might bump into a mere millionaire.
That bit of the story is crap – that private A380 was only recently announced. Its not close to being delivered.
A nightclub owner, who takes credit for introducing bottle service (when he did not) and claims to make 100K a night, might be a liar? Shhhhh, don’t tell the WSJ…their collective erection might soften
I’ve always thought that the world would be a better place if, at the halftime of the Super Bowl every year, one of these assholes was marched to mid-field and blown up.
I mean, not seriously. But, seriously, that might keep them in line.
Wall Street Journal reporters?
Newscorp board members. At the occasional Liverpool FC match.
“Gross.”
Yes, those slippers sound hideous.
You know, I have absolutely no problem with absurdly wealthy people. If they want to parade up and down with diamond studded 24k strap-ons and drive their platinum Lotuses into the river, more power to them.
HOWEVER, I do have a problem with whiny absurdly wealthy people. The kind who squeal like stuck pigs if they think a new tax law will cut their net worth by a penny. Greed, sucks.
I have a huge problem with sliding scale justice systems that allow a rich kid with two pounds of coke in his pockets to serve a stint in rehab while a poor kid with a fleck of crack gets 20 years behind bars.
Also dumbasses who have less empathy than a spider. Upper class people who get the vaypaz about the homeless don’t know how close they come to getting my boot up them. For their own welfare they need to StFu.
However, being rich alone doesn’t make you a bad person any more than being dirt poor makes you a good person. I suspect what we all object to is that people are made to suffer so that Brad can have that new lambo. I don’t think it is necessarily an either or proposition.
Note for example Eduardo Saverin, cited in the article, who decided that rather than pay taxes he’d prefer to move to Singapore and be a citizen of the (wealthy) world.
In a just world, no civilized country would grant him an entry visa, nor would he be able to purchase the trappings of civilization by mail order.
Didn’t Gerard Depardieu move from France to Russia for similar reasons (and an impending DUI court date)?
Yes and one reason why I support nationalism and the nation-state is that I think the rich will benefit from a borderless world more than lower and middle income people. The state is th one institution that could ensure that lower and middle income people get a fair life and wage war against income inequality. There are no replacements for the state at the transnational level for this yet.
The rich still like having national armies and are truly unwilling and unable to foot the bill or dedicate the religion necessary to get a military like ours.
I think it isn’t right to force people to live in a certain place. Saverin wishes to emigrate, it’s his right to go.
He should, of course, have to pay the appropriate departure taxes on his earnings, and he has apparently done that. The US didn’t do badly out of Saverin.
Agreed. By all means, buh-bye it that’s the way you feel about it. That is actually preferable to people sitting about throwing tantrums because they don’t want to pay anything approaching fair taxes.
And frankly, Republicans claiming that people who are merely … how should I put this? Decorative, are significant job creators makes my teeth ache. No they don’t really.
On the other hand, if things go to shit in their current Xanadu, they should have to stand in line to get back in.
“The US didn’t do badly out of Saverin.”
no, not at all. the best part is, he left, and we have no legal/moral obligation to let him return, ever. i call that a win-win.
Seriously. Sorry the peasants are revolting, but if you’ll take a number, we’ll get back to you maybe never.
“The US didn’t do badly out of Saverin.”
he certainly happened to have fifty grand laying around to loan his friend to launch a revised version of myspace
why cna’t we all have the gumption to be 20 year olds with trust funds?
Or, said place would be a con-ocracy, whose sole purpose was to remove said wealth from said assface, before turning him into a galley slave
Alas, there is no such thing as merely “being” rich, as if it were a quirk of genetic fate like lefthandedness or red hair. Even those born into rich families have plenty of opportunity to give away all, or just most, of their wealth, and live like a normal person. They have all actively chosen not to, so that, regardless of how much of a smokescreen of non-wealth-harming, tax-deductible philanthropy they put up, deep down they love being rich, and having both stuff other people don’t have, and the power to ruin their lives. So fuck ‘em.
Well, that’s a mistake right there.
Thousands and thousands of people are working, building their useless jets, serving them in various ways, and so on. A huge amount of resources is spent on them, without getting anything in return, except pollution. In other words, they are thieves. In a more perfect world those workers would be doing something useful, and maybe all of us would be working 10-15 hours less every week, with the same standard of living.
Well I have a big fuckin’ problem with absurdly wealthy people. As long as there are also absurdly poor people, there’s no fucking excuse.
BTW, I love this comment
I frankly don’t believe that a twenty-something bought an A380 (the double decker job) and put a swimming pool and basketball court in it. Perhaps I just don’t want to believe it, though.
http://www.celebritynetworth.com/articles/entertainment-articles/saudi-princes-500-million-airbus-a380-blow-mind/
If you believe a word of this, I’ve got some extremely shrewd investment opportunities to offer you.
I believe the word “fortune”.
Much like Mitt Romney who struggled and made his own path with his own money.
Just his overall net worth actually went down, but he’s still richer than the rest of us!
Update. The whole thing may be a publicity stunt
http://boardingarea.com/blogs/thewanderingaramean/2013/02/so-about-that-private-a380-which-was-never-delivered/
The part of the article I find the most hilarious is the “more expensive than Air Force One” which just no- seriously.
I am looking for investors for a company that will make tumbrels and self-sharpening Guillotine blades.. any takers?
Have you considered Kickstarter?
Someone said on, I think, Alicublog some time back that pickup trucks could easily be made into tumbrels using an acetylene torch. I approve of this ecologically friendly business model.
I’m actually keen on the Viking funeral. Cram them into their $625,000 supercar along with their Rolexes, Armani, and all the booze and jewelry that will fit, and set the whole thing on fire. It’s easy to improvise with local supplies, so your costs are low, and some handcuffs or stainless-steel zipties will prevent your
victimshonored dead from attempting a premature departure from the ceremony.Your business model is intensely frustrating to the FGRoA.(Future Grave Robbers of America)
Even plastic zip ties are practically impossible to get out of. Don’t ask how I know this.
The Death of Crassus seems fitting enough. Let them eat their greed through molten gold down their throat.
Their dead body will be quite valuable. A high net worth individual indeed.
Who buys the entourage of slaves who get burned up too?
I look forward to the NY Times Style section piece on how terribly difficult and expensive it’s become to maintain an in-flight swimming pool on one’s private plane.
And the one about embattled young trust funders who are forced to share private jets. On the bright side, there will be quotes from jet brokers with ho tips on where the best deals can be found.
Damn that stuck letter “t”. But it works either way.
You want old school protest, Lysistrata is the woman to emulate. what would the club be like then? bottle service with a complementary fleshlight?
The wealthy feel secure on a far away island that can’t take for granted or demur whatever wealth arrives there. That’s not where their wealth arises from it’s where it goes to get away from bigger wealth that seeks to devour it.
This is assuming that all of the rich are heterosexual men and that women do not enjoy sex for its own sake but use it only as a bargaining chip. The original play derived its humor from the fact that the latter is utterly false, ffs.
What clubs do you frequent?
wearing bright-blue fuzzy slippers embroidered with a pink skull.
That would be the Barker Black velvet loafer– $825 at Neiman Marcus for the stock version. Probably more for the blue-and-pink kind.
Unutterably tacky at any price.
It always amazes me how tacky and gross so many rich people are. Money often seems to be wasted on those who least deserve it.
You can’t buy taste.
Oh. Hell. No.
And they recommend wearing those with a TUX?! Money can’t by fashion sense.
Do you sometimes wonder if the people who decree what is stylish are taking the piss out of the people who listen to said decrees? I know if it were up to me, I would be unable to resist the temptation to make my betters look like rubes.
But I also think women’s shoe fashions are evidence of an alarming level of misogyny somewhere in the pipeline, so what do I know?
As many mansions have shown, it also cannot buy taste.
Trump comes to mind.
Not to mention Napoleon.
They would look equally ridiculous on the boat.
The Alexander McQueen smoking loafer is a steal at $585.
If you’re into tasteless and you’re a woman, I’d head to the Charlotte Olympia boutique.
Her loafers have embroidered kitty faces on them.
Don’t ask me how I know this.
“The writing was on the wall in Dubai in 2007—we had made our money and it was time to move on,” says Chris Comer, a property developer who is bringing the exclusive Nikki Beach franchise—a global chain of beach party clubs in St. Tropez, Miami and St. Barts, with girls in elaborate bikinis and patrons who show up in Caribbean pirate outfits or zebra body paint—to Singapore.
Reminds me of Life, the Universe, and Everything: “The longest and most destructive party ever held is now into its fourth generation, and still no one shows any signs of leaving.”
Also reminds me of the Capital citizens in the Hunger Games. At least the zebra body paint part does.
The zebra body paint on these spoiled tycoons gives me a marvelous idea involving crocodiles.
Remember how that one ended?
Absolutely! And if somebody wants to crash a spaceship into this one, too, I’d have no objection.
How does one make a bikini elaborate? We need pictures, dammit!
“If our plutocrats are going to reinvent the Gilded Age, maybe it’s time we common people reinvented some old school forms of protest.”
Now that’s what I’m talking about. I’d only add two suggestions:
* Red Stripe bottles give you the best distance
* Diesel burns better than unleaded
Red Stripe has good aerodynamics, but I believe that Mickey’s would be the best choice for a combination of distance and aesthetics.
I had to laugh at this because I have a friend who kept two 12-packs of empty Red Stripe bottles for several years.
Yeah, it’s kind of astonishing how ignorant some folks are about just how flammable houses, cars, and airplanes are. Keep defunding public services, though, and they’ll find out.
Seriously? Diesel fuel? The same diesel fuel that will put out a lit match if you dunk it in a bucket of the stuff?
Yes, because you can-t tell how well something burns when lit from how easy it is to light.
Same goes for gasoline. It’s not the liquid, it’s the fumes.
Isn’t there a less pricey beer that one could use?
Loomis has class envy, and boy does he have it bad. Pretty pathetic for someone to resent another’s success rather than celebrating it.
Why stop there? Let’s throw a party to celebrate fleas, bedbugs, and tapeworms too!
Referring to people using the above dehumanizing language is the first step to the GULAG. Just ask the Kulaks.
Somehow, I think the super-rich will manage to survive, even despite my use of mean words for them.
You leave the Kardashians ALOOOOOOOOOONE!
Nah, I think we just need to give the super-rich the treatment they deserve; so bring back the guillotine. Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1989.
I think you mean 1789. 1989 was a good year for the ultra-rich because of Berlin Wall, and hence Commmunism, fell.
OK I don’t know how I missed that typo; fuck these comments need an edit button.
For those that stole the state assets it was very, very good.
1989? *repeatedly bangs head against desk*
May be a reference to Ceausescu.
Is someone here against the gulag for the worthless rich? I get how troll never even read Gatsby, but, jesus, who here magies these people accomplished anything?
JenBob has pancake envy.
Something the proles just can’t know: it’s hard work being born into money.
I blame TPM’s new, very troll-hostile moderator policy.
Yeah, come on, Loomis, they stole that money fair and square.
and then made the theft legal retroactively
I’d much prefer the old school form of protests from the 1780′s.
And if we can’t have them in English, then please no dubbing the French into English – I much prefer subtitles.
Aux armes, citoyens!
“Oh, Tish, that’s French!”
XOXOXOXOXO :-)
We can furrow our fields with their blood.
Also bring back the metric calendar…finally.
I’d be hard-pressed to believe a swimming pool in a jet. Water is heavy.
Maybe an infinite pool style. Much smaller.
It could conceivably be done. We transported an Orca on one of our planes once – in a specially designed water tank.
Water weighs approximately 10 pounds per gallon.
I hope I am not the only one who instantly thought of that Star Trek movie.
Oops…
No, you are not. Transparent aluminum!
I thought those where humpback wales in the Star Trek movie? Orcas are technically dolphins.
Yes, they were humpbacks. But you can still see how memory of that movie would be triggered.
Dear Jesus. I almost made the humpback clarification but then I thought, no because I’m the only person dorky enough to think that needs clarification.
Pleased to meet you, my brother.
P.S. Orcas are toothed whales.
Not everything can fly,” says Walter Heerdt, the senior vice president for marketing and sales at Lufthansa Technik. “We will not install a swimming pool or a fireplace. That is not possible.”
We transported an Orca on one of our planes once – in a specially designed water tank.
Why in the NAME OF SANITY was the US Air Force flying killer whales around the place during the Cold War?
Train them to recognise submarines, fit them with parachutes and then drop them over the G-I-UK Gap? No, that’d be a Navy tasking…
Can somebody explain to me why endless luxry is an attractive life-style? It seems a really terrible way to live. I’m not a prude, I’m not anti-pleasure. Yet, I’m unconvinced that life should be a pleasure-crawl whether its from the ultra-rich living fantasy-lives based on too much material wealth or cheper forms of hedonism. This doesn’t mean that life should be painful but that people should have goal in life besides contast seeking pleasure through goods or sex or whatever.
On a related note, I wonder if any of the mega-jet set ever bother to sample Singapore’s single greatest pleasure.
It’s not really about pleasure–it’s about gaining status by conspicuous consumption.
Ol’ Thorstein was on to something there.
Yes, he was.
One of the few good things about the New Gilded Age is that we just need to reprint the criticism from the Old Gilded Age and repackage it for modern audiences.
They need to go the rest of the way with their potlatch, and burn their jets just to show that they don’t care.
Thing is, potlatches also have a redistributive function as well, and I suspect this crowd will have considerably less enthusiasm for that part.
There is a type of pleasure in this, its a very mean pleasure because it relates to the joy that bullies feel but its a pleasure none the less. It just seems such a waste of one’s life.
D’you somehow imagine $825 slippers are any more comfortable than the $30 ones? They’re paying the extra $795 in order to show that they have the $795 to blow on slippers. And you don’t. You fucking prole.
It worked (for a short time) for iPhone apps. Why not try the shoe wear market?
Wow, that’s a great scam.
$825 for slippers is excessive but clothing in general and shoes in particular are one area where price does matter. Good, expensive footwear lasts a lot longer and has less damage to your feet than bad footwear.
Terry Pratchett covered this quite well
But seriously, no. A good $75 pair of shoes will last 10 years. How long are you planning to be around that you might need $750 shoes? There are limits.
For dress shoes, I think you should spend somewhere between $100 to $200. For sneakers somewhere around $100. My dress shoes last me a few years and I get a new pair of sneakers every two years or so.
in fairness has anyone here ever worn a pair of thousand dollar shoes?
like that shit could feel like your toes are suddenly dicks and your versaces are individually blowing every single one of them, i wouldn’t know
I feel bad knowing that our rich folks can’t keep up with their international rivals in the jets-with-basketball-courts department. Now I can see why my Medicare and Social Security need to be gutted so our 20-something billionaires can get some much-needed tax cuts.
Asia rocks!
[...] Singapore: The Newport of the New Gilded Age: Erik Loomis [...]
The reporter lost me in the very first sentence. Anyone who describes the turgid, muddy stream that flows through Singapore as the “sparkling Singapore River” is not to be trusted.
And the phantom private A380 reinforces my conclusion.