A Down Year for Our Deepest Pockets?

Lamborghini had an even better 2022, with 9,233 vehicles sold, a 10-percent jump over last year. The company’s biggest market? The United States. Americans drove off Lamborghini lots with 2,771 new cars in 2022. The automaker’s most popular model runs about a quarter-million.

Realtors who cater to the ultra-rich set had an equally boffo year in 2022. In a down overall real-estate market, the highest of high-end residences still pulled in mega sums at closing time. The year’s top ten home sales in the United States, notes the luxury-oriented Robb Report, “totaled roughly $1.165 billion, proving that, impending recession or not, luxury real estate will always be traded.”

How can all this luxury be? How can the richest of the rich be spending fantastic sums in a year when they’re seeing fantastic falls in their personal net worths? Simple. In the realms of the super rich, losing a billion — or even many billions — off your personal fortune makes no difference whatsoever in real daily life. Net worth down a few billion? You can still afford anything your heart could possibly desire.

No one alive today needs fortunes worth dozens of billions to live astoundingly large. A mere billion will suffice. So, truth be told, would a mere tenth of a billion. Indeed, in the neighborhoods of our super rich, the number of billions a billionaire may have holds no practical significance. The number of billions our super rich have accumulated essentially only matter as a way of keeping score in the ongoing status competition our deepest pockets so relentlessly wage.

But we need to note one exception here, one aspect of rich-people life where the size of your fortune does make a real difference. Adding billions upon billions will never make a billionaire any more comfortable. Adding on those extra billions will make a billionaire more politically powerful.

At the expense of the rest of us. We need more than a dip in grand concentrations of private wealth. We need a world without billionaires.