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RICHISTAN

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction / THE BIRTH OF A NATION

1 / BUTLER BOOT CAMP

Housetraining the New Rich

2 / THE THIRD WAVE

The Era of the Instapreneur

3 / MAKING IT

Ed Bazinet, King of the Ceramic Village

4 / LIVING IT

Tim Blixseth

5 / LOSING IT

Pete Musser

6 / BARBARIANS IN THE BALLROOM

New Money vs. Old

7 / SIZE REALLY DOES MATTER

“My Boat Is Bigger Than Your Boat”

8 / PERFORMANCE PHILANTHROPY

Giving for Results

9 / MOVE OVER, CHRISTIAN COALITION

The New Political Kingmakers

10 / WORRIED WEALTH

The Trouble with Money

11 / ARISTOKIDS

We'll Always Have Paris

12 / THE WEALTH GAP AND THE FUTURE OF RICHISTAN

Notes

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright

To Rebecca

RICHISTAN

Introduction

THE BIRTH OF

A NATION

This book began with the discovery of a single, remarkable statistic.

In 2003, while writing a routine article about Wall Street bonuses, I stumbled onto a chart from the Federal Reserve Board. It showed that the number of millionaire households had more than doubled since 1995 to more than eight million.

Granted, a million dollars doesn't mean what it used to. But no matter how far up I looked on the wealth ladder—to households worth $10 million, $20 million, $50 million—all the populations were doubling.

Even more surprising was the fact that the United States was minting millionaires long after the tech bust, recession and terrorist attacks of 2001. The wealth boom, as the numbers showed, went far beyond the 20-something dotcommers in Silicon Valley and Wall Streeters in New York. It stretched across the country, to all age groups and to almost every industry. Never before had so many Americans become so rich, so quickly. The United States is now the world leader in producing millionaires—even if it lags behind China and India in other types of manufacturing. For the first time in history, we now have more millionaires than Europe.

After seeing the Fed numbers, I started to wonder about all these rich people. Who were they? How did they get rich? How was money changing their lives? Most importantly, how were they changing life for the rest of us? Why, in an age of “millionaire” reality TV shows and wealth voyeurism, did we seem to know so little about what this group was really like?

To answer these questions, my editors agreed to a bold experiment. In 2003, I became the first reporter at The Wall Street Journal to focus full-time on the life and times of the New Rich. I immersed myself in their world, hanging around yacht marinas, slipping into charity balls, loitering in Ferrari dealerships and scoping out the Sotheby's and Christie's auctions. I studied up on trust law, high-end investing and the latest trends in charitable giving. I grilled the top luxury realtors, jet brokers, party planners and resort managers. Mostly, I bothered rich people. I asked them endless questions and tried to get them to talk openly about their money and their lives. Surprisingly, many did. The resulting articles I wrote about this new culture of wealth proved surprisingly popular with readers.

This book began with that reporting. But its central premise—of a parallel country of the rich—took shape later, with a chance conversation at a yacht club. In 2004, I was walking along the docks of Ft. Lauderdale's Bahia Mar Marina during an annual yacht convention when I met up with a boat owner from Texas. As we stared out over the hundreds of megayachts lined up along the docks— most 150 feet or more, flying Caribbean flags emblazoned with fruit—he turned to me and said, “You look at all these boats and you'd think everyone's making loads of money. It's like it's a different country.”

The words stuck with me. Today's rich had formed their own virtual country. They were, in fact, wealthier than most nations. By 2004, the richest 1 percent of Americans were earning about $1.35 trillion a year—greater than the total national incomes of France, Italy or Canada.

And with their huge numbers, they had built a selfcontained world unto themselves, complete with their own health-care system (concierge doctors), travel network (Net Jets, destination clubs), separate economy (double-digit income gains and double-digit inflation), and language (“Who's your household manager?”). They didn't just hire gardening crews; they hired “personal arborists.” The

rich weren't just getting richer; they were becoming financial foreigners, creating their own country within a country, their own society within a society, and their economy within an economy.

They were creating Richistan.

As a former foreign correspondent, I set out to explore this new country. I spent 12 months traveling around and interviewing the most interesting Richistanis I could find—all worth $10 million or more. They are people you've never heard of, since so many of today's wealthy prefer to keep to themselves. And they have little in common with Donald Trump, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and the other well-known Forbes 400 superstars we read so much about.

Along the way, I discovered a new culture of wealth that's vastly different from Old Money. I found Richistanis who have made vast fortunes from things we barely knew existed—like miniature ceramic villages. And I learned that the very way that people get rich is changing, driven by vast pools of money sloshing around the world.

I met a song-writing, jet-setting timber baron named Tim Blixseth who typifies the new breed of “workaholic wealthy” who can't stop building empires even after becoming billionaires. And I met a risk-loving entrepreneur named Pete Musser who lost his entire billion-dollar fortune in the stock market and is now plotting his comeback.

I attended a black-tie ball in Palm Beach, where a brash pool-toy magnate tried to climb to the top of blue-blood Society, only to come crashing down (literally) on Donald Trump's ballroom floor. I sat in on a meeting of a wealth peer group, a new kind of group therapy for millionaires who need help with their money troubles. And I spent a day at Rich Kids Camp, where the new silver spoon set learn how to manage all the money they're about to inherit.

I jumped aboard some of today's biggest yachts, to see how Richistanis are reinventing the notion of conspicuous consumption. I also looked at how that spending is “trickling down” to the rest of America, for better and worse. I met a Jewish Irishman in Texas who's giving away half his fortune to help fight poverty in Ethiopia and embodies a new brand of philanthropy. And I explored Richistan's politics through a group called the Gang of Four—four wealthy Coloradans who helped fund a Democratic takeover of the state legislature and have helped to usher in a new kind of progressive, rich man's politics.

Of course, Americans are conflicted about all this wealth. On the one hand, Richistanis represent all that's great about the American economy and the ability of just about anyone anywhere to become wealthy. Yet Richistan also symbolizes the huge gap that's opened up between the rich and everyone else. Even as the rich have grown more numerous, they have also become more financially and culturally removed from the rest of America. Richistan's success highlights Middle America's loss.

The purpose of my journey isn't to take sides in this debate. I haven't set out to condemn the rich, or to turn them into heroes. The best foreign correspondents seek to bring readers inside a country, to explore its people and places and explain them to the rest of the world. I have the same goal with Richistan.

The economist John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote that “Of all the classes, the wealthy are the most noticed and the least studied.” That has never been more true than today. To understand inequality, we need to first understand Richistan and the people who live there.

So let's begin our journey with a quick tour.

Three Parts of a New Country

Before the late 1980s, the rich lived in a small, quiet enclave of like-minded people. They went to many of the same schools, belonged to the same clubs, had similar values and often married into each other's families. It was more like a village than a country. Breeding and pedigree mattered as much as bank accounts, and most Richistanis were born into their money, which usually flowed from oil, chemicals, steel, real estate and commodities.

New fortunes were rare, since the economy spread its gains far beyond Richistan, and the prevailing culture and politics of the time discouraged outsized wealth. When the first Forbes 400 list hit newstands in 1982, the richest man was a thrifty shipping magnate named Daniel Ludwig, who was worth $2 billion. After that, the roster was filled with turn-of-the-century, blue-blood names like Rockefeller, Hunt, Getty, Phipps and Du Pont.

In the late 1980s, the rich began to change. Soaring financial markets ushered in a new group of Wall Streeters, corporate raiders and tech pioneers. The number of billionaires jumped from 13 in 1982 to 67 in 1989. By 2000, with the bull market in full swing, the trickle turned into a tidal wave, and the population of millionaires more than tripled to eight million people—greater than the population of Sweden or Austria.

The rich became Richistanis—members of a distinct new generation of wealth.

Richistanis didn't inherit their wealth, but rose up through the ranks of the middle class or upper middle class to make it on their own. Paris Hilton aside, only 3 percent of today's multimillionaires are celebrities and less than 10 percent inherited their money.

They're also much younger than previous generations of rich people. “Before the 1990s, most of the wealthy I knew were retired, they were in their sixties or seventies,” says Peter Scaturro, former CEO of U.S. Trust, the wealth management firm. “Now they're in their thirties and forties. They have a lot of runway left in front of them.”

Richistan is also a country of deep divisions. The relatively homogenous culture of Old Money—with its boarding schools, social clubs, cultural institutions and sporty nicknames—has become atomized. Richistanis are far more diverse in terms of age, race, gender and geography. And they are more polarized politically, with a rising new generation of young, wealthy liberals squaring off against older-line Republicans.

The most surprising divide in Richistan, however, is between wealth levels. Just as the wealth disparities have grown between Richistan and the rest of the United States, they've also grown within Richistan, creating a new kind of upper-class warfare between the haves and have-mores.

Richistan, in fact, has at least three classes.

Lower Richistan

Lower Richistan is the sprawling suburbia of Richistan, with a population that's exploded to more than seven million households. Lower Richistanis live in McMansions, drive around in SUVs and relax in lawn furniture purchased from the Frontgate catalogue. Most of them are welleducated, work-a-day professionals: corporate executives, doctors, lawyers, bankers, designers, analysts and money managers. More than half their wealth is derived from income, with another third coming from investment returns. In an increasingly global, hightech, finance-oriented economy, Lower Richistanis have benefited from the growing demand for highly educated workers and rising pay at the top.

Lower Richistanis are conservative in their politics. A majority of them voted for George W. Bush in the 2004 election, saying he was the best candidate to help improve their personal financial situation. They're also strong advocates of abolishing the estate tax, since most would be targets.

Yet behind their newfound success lies a nagging sense of insecurity. Lower Richistanis may have more money than 95 percent of Americans, but they're becoming poorer relative to their fellow Richistanis. The economic distance between the poorest Richistani and the richest has more than doubled over the past decade. The average income for the top 1 percent of income earners grew 57 percent between 1990 and 2004, yet it grew an even better 85 percent for the richest one-tenth of 1 percent.

When they go to cocktail parties or their kids' soccer games, Lower Richistanis run into crowds of people with vastly more wealth. So to keep up with their richer brethren, Lower Richistanis are spending more and borrowing heavily. In 2004, Richistan's inflation rate topped 6 percent—twice the broader inflation rate in the United States—driven by all those rich people vying for the same private schools, nannies, BMWs, Jimmy Choo shoes and beach homes. Lower Richistanis have taken on billions of dollars in debt over the past decade. About 20 percent of Lower Richistanis spent all of their income or more in 2004.

Many Richistanis say that Lower Richistanis don't even belong in their country. They refer to the Lowers as “affluent”—the ultimate Richistani insult. In the words of Andrew Carnegie, that great Richistani patriarch, Lower Richistanis represent “not wealth, but only competence.”

So let's go a bit higher.

Middle Richistan

In Middle Richistan, families have net worths of between $10 million and $100 million. Here too the population has exploded, to more than 1.4 million. Yet life here is a little more comfortable. The homes are bigger, the art is nicer and most of the residents have vacation homes. Most Middle Richistanis make their money from salaries, small businesses or investment returns. As you move from Lower to Upper Richistan, however, the number of entrepreneurs and business owners starts to increase. Middle Richistan has twice as many entrepreneurs as Lower Richistan, showing that the surest path to big wealth is starting your own company and selling it.

Middle Richistanis are also more liberal than the Lowers. Most Middle Richistanis voted for John Kerry in the last presidential election, even though they said Mr. Bush would be better for their personal financial situation. The Middle Richistanis placed a higher emphasis on education, environment, and technology policy.

Still, living in Middle Richistan has its price. The inflation rate for Richistanis worth $30 million or more climbed to more than 11 percent in 2004, almost three times the national inflation rate. Since Middle Richistanis, as well as their wealthier brethren, have grown richer at a faster rate than Lower Richistanis, they have more to spend and fewer worries about running out of money.

Upper Richistan

The penthouses of Upper Richistan are filled with families worth $100 million or more. Upper Richistan has a population of thousands, though the exact numbers aren't known. Most made their money by starting their own companies and selling them, although CEOs and money managers (especially hedge funders) are rapidly joining the ranks.

The lives of Upper Richistanis have become incredibly complicated. To run them, they're creating “family offices”—large companies dedicated entirely to serving a family's day-to-day needs, from investments and legal work to travel plans and hiring house staff. Upper Richistanis rarely open their own mail or pay their own bills, which may help explain why the average annual spa bill in Upper Richistan is $107,000.

When you live in Upper Richistan, your entire philosophy of money changes. You realize that you can't possibly spend all of your fortune, or even part of it, in your lifetime and that your money will probably grow over the years even if you spend lavishly. So Upper Richistanis plan their finances for the next hundred years. They don't buy mutual funds; they buy timber land, oil rigs and office towers.

Still, Upper Richistanis have occasional feelings of inferiority. That's because they're being overshadowed by the residents of Billionaireville.

Billionaireville

Billionaireville had only 13 inhabitants in 1985. In 2006 there were more than 400, according to Forbes. Leslie Mandel, president of the New York–based Rich List Co., which tracks the wealthy, says her personal list has more than 1,000 billionaires in the United States, most of whom have stayed under the public radar.

The personal lives of billionaires are more like companies. Their homes are like hotels—sprawling campuses with their own logos, purchasing budgets and legions of staff. Ask a billionaire for his or her bank statement and you'll get a five-level flowchart of interlocking subsidiaries, holding companies, investment funds and foundations.

Billionaires have done especially well over the past decade. The total wealth held by the Forbes 400 has more than doubled since 1995, from $439 billion to more than $1 trillion today. Yet even billionaires are starting to feel common. Tim Blixseth, a billionaire timber baron and resort owner, told me about the time a multibillionaire came to his estate, which has its own private golf course. After playing 18 holes, the guest said he liked the place so much he wanted to buy it. He handed Tim a slip of paper with his offer: $400 million. Tim turned it down, but not without marveling at what could have become the ultimate impulse purchase.

“Now that guy,” Blixseth said, “he was rich.”

BEFORE we meet more Richistanis, let's take another look at how the world of the rich has changed —this time through the eyes of the people who serve them.

1

BUTLER BOOT CAMP Housetraining the New Rich

Dawn Carmichael stands at attention, holding two plates of almond-crusted sea bass with Moroccan salsa. The blond, ex-Starbucks barista is dressed in a blue suit and white shirt, with a crisply folded napkin draped over her left arm. She's lined up with three other servers in the cavernous kitchen of the Starkey Mansion, a prim, Georgian home in downtown Denver. When they get the signal—two taps on the kitchen door—the group will march into the dining room, greet their 12 dinner guests and begin their first public performance of the Ballet of Service.

The Ballet of Service is a complex routine where all the waiters must serve the plates to guests in perfect sync. It takes hours of practice. And it is one of the most demanding skills taught here at the Starkey Mansion—better known as Butler Boot Camp.

Ms. Carmichael visualizes the routine: Serve to the left, take two steps to the right, shift the second plate from right hand to left, and serve again. When “addressing” the table, she must lean in far enough for a smooth plate delivery, but not so close as to make the guests uncomfortable. After serving, she's supposed to take one step back, wait for eye contact with the other servers and exit the room counterclockwise.

Each step must look like a choreographed dance, building to a climax called the “crossover”—a plate-juggling pas de deux in which the butlers slide the second plate from their right to left hand with a quick body pivot, creating the illusion that the plate is suspended in midair while it's being transferred.

The Ballet of Service is designed to show off all the desired traits of a butler-to-be—discipline, agility, poise and intimacy with tableware. And it's one of toughest training exercises here at Butler Boot Camp.

Four times a year, aspiring butlers from around the country converge for Boot Camp training at Starkey, officially known as the Starkey International Institute for Household Management. Their aim: to become masters at the care and feeding of the rich. For eight weeks, the students hole up inside the mansion to cook, clean, polish, dust, wash and fold. They learn how to iron a set of French cuffs in seconds flat. They're taught how to clip a 1926 Pardona cigar, how to dust a de Kooning canvas and how to pair an oaky chardonnay with roasted free-range game hen.

They learn how long it takes to clean a 45,000-squarefoot mansion (20 to 30 hours depending on the art and antiques), where to find 1,020-thread-count sheets (Kreiss.com) and how to order Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey ice cream at midnight if your employer is on a yacht in the Mediterranean (a British concierge service). They will be able to divide a 30,000-square-foot home into “zones” for cleaning and maintenance. They will design “stationery wardrobes”—envelopes and letterhead specially designed to reflect the owner's wealth and social standing. They will be taught that sable stoles should never be stored in a cedar closet (it dries them out), and that Bentleys should never, ever be run through the car wash.

Most of the students live in the mansion during Boot Camp, following the strict Starkey rules. Everyone has to wear a uniform of khakis, crisp white shirts, blue blazers and brown shoes. First names are banned; everyone is “Mr.” or “Ms.” to stress the importance of boundaries. The students are required to rise from their seats every time a visitor enters the room. If there's a coffee cup that needs filling, a spoon that needs polishing or a visitor who needs welcoming, the Starkey students must spring into action. The butlers-to-be are so wired for service that when a class break is announced, they all pounce from their seats to fill each other's water glasses.

By the end of the course, the aspiring butlers will be masters at pampering the privileged. The rich, they will learn, like their shampoo bottles and toothpaste tubes always filled to the top. If their employers have four homes, chances are they'll want their dresser drawers and bathroom cabinets arranged exactly the same in every house, so they don't have to go searching for their socks or pills. And they learn that the rich live in constant fear of germs.

“They're health freaks,” says Raymond Champion, Starkey's chief instructor, standing at the whiteboard in Starkey's basement classroom. “These people are very successful and guess what, they want to live forever. These are very germ-oriented people. Get used to it. Germs are huge in this world.”

No butler leaves Starkey without learning about the two other priorities for the wealthy—pets and collections. At Starkey these are known as “BYJ” categories, as in Bet Your Job.

During one class, Champion tells a story of a Southern family that had an entire mansion filled with birdcalls, which the butler had to dust and maintain every day. There was the guy with 500 cars that needed hand-washing and the rich heiress who had a barn full of cats and employed three full-time litter changers and a full-time bird feeder to pour seeds around the barn to attract birds to entertain the cats.

“The guy who fed the birds got paid more than any of us,” he says.

Most of all, the Starkey students learn never to judge their employers, whom they call “principals.” If a principal wants to feed her shih tzu braised beef tenderloin steaks every night, the butler should serve it up with a smile. If a principal is in Palm Beach and wants to send his jet to New York to pick up a Chateau LaTour from his South Hampton cellar, the butler makes it happen, no questions asked.

Starkey students pay more than $12,000 for Boot Camp. While that may sound steep, the payoff is even bigger. Butlering has become one of the fastest-growing jobs in the United States. With so many Richistanis needing so many butlers, demand and pay are soaring. A good Starkey graduate can start at $80,000 to $120,000 a year—not to mention free room and board at the mansion.

First, they have to get through the Ballet. Tonight, Dawn Carmichael and the butlers are nervous. It's their first Ballet and they haven't had much practice. Dawn gets her signal and leads the other three servers into the dining room. Under a crystal chandelier, the dinner guests are arrayed at the table with perfectly spaced sets of flatware, finger bowls and assorted glasses.

The first plates go down smoothly. But on the crossover, Dawn moves before the other three servers. She freezes, trying to get back in sync. The other three also freeze. The guests glance up at the four panicked butlers standing motionless with their plates of sea bass.

Finally, the butlers nod, serve the plates and quickly march out of the room.

“I lost the rhythm,” Dawn says to the other butlers in the kitchen. “Oh man, was that bad.”

James Hopkins, a fresh-faced college grad from Maine, is equally disappointed. “It felt awkward,” he said. “We looked like robots.”

The next morning, Raymond Champion takes the class to task. A former marine, whose specialties include martial arts, weapons training and decorative baking, Champion has little patience for sloppiness. He served as an enlisted aide to several generals and served in combat during the first Gulf War. With his six-foot-two frame, square jaw and impeccable manners, Champion makes for the perfect drill sergeant for Butler Boot Camp.

“I was disappointed,” he tells the students the next morning, standing in front of his whiteboard. “Very disappointed.”

Champion says that aside from the crossover, there were other foul-ups. He looks at John Leech, a flamboyant bed-and-breakfast owner from upstate New York. Leech was in charge of wine during the dinner and his job was to keep all the glasses exactly half full. Yet he allowed some glasses to drop to a quarter full before refilling. Champion also says Leech paid too much attention to the guests' conversation, rather than maintaining the detached attentiveness required of a butler.

“What can I say, I'm a very social person,” Leech tells me later. “The guests were all telling interesting stories so it was hard not to listen. And I didn't keep the glasses full because I felt like I was being compulsive. But Champion was right.”

The next night the class hosts another formal dinner. It goes perfectly. Dawn leads an expertly choreographed Ballet of Service. Leech keeps the wineglasses exactly half full. And he successfully ignores the guests' stories.

Champion greets them the next morning with a broad smile.

“Congratulations,” he says. “Now that was service.”

Jeeves 2.0

The story of the butler boom is the story of all that has changed about American wealth over the past 15 years. It's not just a tale of more rich people needing more butlers, though that's a big part of it. It's also the story of a new culture of wealth emerging in America, driven by a new kind of rich person.

For much of the 20th century, butlers were a dying breed. The grand old mansions built during the Gilded Age and Roaring Twenties, with their armies of footmen, cooks, maids, drivers and butlers, began to fall into disrepair in the 1960s and 1970s as wealth creation slowed. The demand for butlers faded, along with many of the Old Money fortunes. Culturally, the rich fell out of favor, along with the notion of household staff. Butlers became relics of a distant world, existing only in P. G. Wodehouse novels and period films like Remains of the Day.

“The whole concept of a high level of service in the household vanished,” says Mary Starkey, Starkey International's founder. “It wasn't fashionable to have help.”

Now, butlers are making a comeback. The vast new population of Richistanis, with their huge homes, multitude of toys and large lifestyles, has created new demand for household help. Maids, nannies, personal assistants and private security guards are proliferating. Catering to the rich— once considered dead-end service work—is now a hot career track. And of all the occupations, the butler has seen the most dramatic transformation in skills and pay.

Butler placement agencies in New York, Florida, Texas and California have hundreds of postings for jobs and not enough qualified applicants to fill them. Butlers looking for work today often have a choice of working in a penthouse in Manhattan, a beach compound in St. Bart's or a log mansion in Aspen. A new Internet site for household managers, called EstateJobs.com, had more than 100 postings only three months after its launch in 2005. The ads, with their “Come-to-the-Beautiful- Bahamas” sales pitches, sound more like travel promotions than job classifieds. Here are two ads from late 2006: