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Originally Posted by Russic
I have this odd pull to give the CEO some credit here for getting on the thing every time. If you'd told me a billionaire hacked together a submarine following an afternoon adventure at Pick Your Part, I'd wager all my money that he'd be in the control room eating shark-fin soup and bloviating to the media about them "doing all they can to retrieve those brave souls." *blows gently on his soup*
I don't know that I can categorize this guy as a grifter. He is (was) very open about it being a fly-by-night operation and wrote out a contract that basically outlined that you're taking your life in your hands. People who have done it before reported saying goodbye to their loved ones and coming to terms that they may not make it back up. There's very little deception going on.
People want experiences, and it's in our nature to keep searching for the next impossible challenge. Sometimes that desire is healthy and it leaves you trying to run a 5k in under 27 minutes, sometimes it goes a bit extreme and you do increasingly dangerous things until you're crushed by 328,000,000 cubic miles of seawater.
I think being a billionaire does present some fascinating challenges. It's turning on god mode, but for life. We all have challenges so it might be impossible to square, but a life without challenge isn't all that fun. I think that's part of why we see billionaires often doing increasingly moronic things in the pursuit of feeling anything. As horrifically stupid as it is, going to the Titanic in a home-made submarine is pretty punk rock.
One thing I do find interesting is that this story is really a micro Titanic story itself. Rich people die in a poorly made boat, garnering tons of attention. This story will continue on for decades and it will annoy people, just as shipwreck fans find the constant focus on Titanic disproportionate and annoying.
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This is so true and I, too, find it fascinating. There just aren't really any industries set up to serve billionaires that aren't equally accessible to multi-millionaires worth a fraction of a billionaire's net worth. Bigger yachts? Bigger mansions, I guess? Problem with those is bigger isn't really that much better after a certain point that's not even all that big, I'd imagine. Like, going from a 10,000sf mansion to a 40,000sf mansion would be kind of unsatisfying.
At the end of the day, you spend eight hours a night in a bed no bigger than the one I have. You drop a deuce on a throne that probably looks cooler than mine, but really, I have a heated seat, heated bidet, LED-lit bowl and remote control with two profiles. How much better is a billionaire's? I'm guessing not
that much. So now you have an extra 30,000sf of mansion over the multi-millionaire's 10,000sf mansion? Awesome. You get to have a bunch of roommates (aka staff) to maintain it. That would suck.
So then you buy a private jet. Okay, the guy with 1/4 your net worth has one, too. You have a yacht? Okay, awesome. More roommates on your boat with you. Maybe you like having servants around? I wouldn't; it would feel skeezy. Like, when my kids were young my wife and I toyed with having a live-in nanny. Where I just couldn't do it is I refused to live in the same house as somebody, but live better than them. That's morally corrupt IMO. Like,
we're all going out for steak, nanny, there's some KD in the cupboard for you. Or,
we're going on vacation to Thailand...we'll say hi to your family for you while we're there. Would you like us to drop some of your paycheque off with them to save you from having to go to Western Union? My wife and I knew we'd just start treating this person as a total equal to us because we're not selfish psychos, but we didn't want another adult equal in our house, so we just carried on with a mix of after-school care, day homes, etc. while we worked.
So what can billionaire's actually buy with their billions? Luxurious time off, yes. Wild experiences (space tourism and deep-sea adventures, I guess). The step up in lifestyle from the poverty line to a net worth of, say, $2 million is incredibly dramatic. $2 million to $200 million insanely dramatic as well. $200 million to a billion+? I don't think you get that much richer of an experience. It's probably pretty isolating, weird and anticlimactic. And who are you going to complain to? Nobody wants to hear your poor little rich man story.