Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller once attended a swanky party on Shelter Island at the home of a billionaire neighbor of their friend John Bogle, the index fund pioneer and philanthropist. At one point, Bogle later recalled in a collection of essays, Vonnegut informed Heller that their host, a hedge fund manager, made more money in one day than Heller ever earned for Catch-22.
"Yes," Heller replied. "But I have something he will never have: enough?
Bogle's anecdote was recounted as career advice for budding billionaires to: play by the rules, give back, and curb their bottomless lust for more. Today it's an apt marker of a generational shift among the elite, from the Bogles of the world to the Elon Musks, who are as venal as Prince Charles accepting a bag of cash from a Qatari sheikh, or your average TikTok influencer thirsty for the acclaim of the metaverse. In the new pecking order, it's not enough to be rich. If you've got a fortune, you must flaunt it. The state of affairs is an inversion of the old Methodist adage about doing all the good that you can in the world, except now it's about flexing as loudly as possible in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, for as long as you can. At a time when every Tom, Dick, and Barry can post on main from his Lürssen while idling on the Bosporus, or pontificate on Clubhouse from his Gulfstream on the way to Sun Valley, the mega-asset class has come down with a mean case of billionaire braggadocio. "Today's money is indeed shiny, brash, and vulgar," says Jill Spalding, author of Luxury: A History. "But so was Andrew Carnegie's until he cleaned it up through his foundation."
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