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Billionaires Are Free
')PRINIT
And, these days, a dime a dozen. But even for today's b boys, there are
some things money can't buy.
• By Vanessa Grigoriadis
Deep in the wilds of Chelsea, there is a door. The door has a screen, and the jet-black eye
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of a promoter behind that screen, peeping out to gauge your social viability. Are you a
model? Or a billionaire? It will be hard to get in otherwise.
Around midnight, the most beautiful young models in the city arrive, squired in quickly,
their backs with shoulder blades like arrows disappearing inside. Door, as the nightclub is
creatively called, popped up late this summer. No one is supposed to know it's there. It is
where moguls go: After the Yahoo board meeting, Jerry Yang and David Filo came by.
Another night in the fall, Sergey Brin and Larry Page were there. Supermarket billionaire
Ron Burkle, Virgin head Richard Branson, and Steve Bing, the down-to-earth
Democratic donor who inherited nearly a billion dollars from his real-estate-magnate
grandfather, the developer of some of the most beautiful Art Deco buildings on Park
Avenue and the West Village. Advance men for President Clinton. Few other guys can
get in, except for a couple of model wranglers, those handsome, usually South American
guys who round up models at their apartments and herd them to nightclubs. Promoter
Danny A., a friend of Ron Burkle's, runs this place—he even got to go on a trip to Israel
with President Clinton. The wranglers are the only people in here not having fun: One
hand on a mojito, they are nervous as they text madly on the phone to more girls, more
girls, more girls.
For the rest of the city, the door is closed. A few handsome bankers wait on the sidewalk
outside the club for a half-hour, scraping their shoes. "I guess I'm a zero-value-added
person in this equation," says one, stepping away, disappointed.
At the very pinnacle of the New York social scene these days is the billionaire, once a
reclusive character who secretively moved world markets from his castle on the hill but
now is more likely to be dining at a booth next to you. They're everywhere: This year, for
the first time, everyone on the Forbes 400 list was a billionaire, up from thirteen
billionaires in the early eighties. One can imagine them, swathed in Pyrex, looking down
from their apartments in new designer buildings at our tenement buildings and bobbing
umbrellas, as though the world outside were some vast boho terrarium.
Now that it seems you need a million dollars just to stay alive, the cultural imagination
has been captured by a billion. "I've met six billionaires!" crowed a friend of mine,
counting them on his hands, and then correcting himself—"Seven!" Our mayor, of
course, is a billionaire five times over, with seven homes, a few worth $10 million, and a
Florida estate he bought for his daughter to strengthen her equestrian training. Over
brunch on a recent Sunday, my girlfriends and I chatted about their Saturday night out—
this one talked to one of the Dells; that one sat next to Stewart Rahr, the pharmaceutical
mogul and owner of the most expensive home in the Hamptons; and everyone saw Ian
Schrager.
"He's not a billionaire!" huffed one of my friends, outraged at our ignorance.
To be a billionaire is to be radically free. You are your own galaxy. You make your own
rules, hang out with the former president, send tourists to space. Billionaire investor
Jeffrey Epstein, who lives in the largest dwelling in Manhattan, a 51,000-square-foot
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palace on 71st Street—though his business, naturally, is located on a 70-acre private
island in the Virgin Islands—was humiliated this summer when his lifestyle was made
public. Epstein was known to be a womanizer: He usually travels with three women, who
are "strictly not of our class, darling," says a friend. They serve his guests dinner on his
private 727, and are also there for touching.
But it seems that he was also interested in younger women: Over the past few years, a
then-17-year-old [REDACTED], brought at least five high-school
girls between the ages of 14 and 16 over to Epstein's house in Palm Beach to "massage"
him, which meant watching him masturbate and even allegedly having sex. Epstein's
defense seems to be that he didn't know the girls were minors, and that he is "very
passionate about massage," as one of his lawyers says.
Those who know Epstein say he's unfazed by his travails. "He's totally open about his
life: His life is about making money and living an erotic life, and his escape isn't alcohol
or drugs—it's sex," says a friend. "I was talking to him the other day, and he said to me
that he was doing well and working steadily—between massages."
In books, the billionaire has become a symbol of ultimate power and freedom—they're
Gatsbys, yes, but they own the light at the end of the dock. In Michael Tolkin's The
Return of the Player, the player tries to make a fortune working for a $750,000,000 man
(a pauper) and the billionaire who pulls his strings. The billionaire tells the player: "You
don't know what a few extra decimal places taste like. There are wines—my God, you
don't know what they do for you—from vineyards that stopped selling to the public about
forty popes ago ... The provenance of this [Rembrandt] is without blemish, and the
painting has never been publicly catalogued, like a lot of the most amazing pieces in the
world, and I paid for it using the interest of the interest of the interest. A hundred and
twenty-five million dollars. I had more money an hour after I signed the check than I did
when I bought it."
But art falls short when describing the lives of billionaires. Steve Wynn is free enough to
afford to buy a Picasso, even when his eyesight is famously challenged, and to rip a hole
in that Picasso with his elbow while distractedly showing the painting before he closed
the deal with hedge-fund billionaire Steve Cohen to buy it for $139 million, which would
have been the highest price ever paid for a work of art. Convinced that the elbow gaffe
was fate, Wynn decided to keep the picture—what's $139 million, after all, to a man like
him?
A billionaire has the wherewithal to match his moral vanity: While the rest of us struggle
to keep our heads above water, billionaires are saving the world. There's Branson's
pledge to invest the next ten years of profit from his Virgin Group's airline and train
businesses in renewable-energy initiatives, worth $3 billion. Bing, along with Burkle and
others, has pledged $1 billion to do the same. In June, Warren Buffett, the thrifty bridge
player with the five-bedroom house in Nebraska, donated $31 billion to the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation for education and global development. Buffett plans to give
away 70 percent of his fortune. "If I wanted to," he has said, "I could hire 10,000 people
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to do nothing but paint my picture every day for the rest of my life. And the gross
national product would go up." But "there's no reason future generations of Buffetts
should command society just because they came from the right womb. Where's the
justice in that?"
Billionaires can seem to have a power to conceal their actions that the Greek goddess
Athena would have understood—and they are as susceptible as any mortal to believing
their own mythology. But this can lead to problems when their power is questioned, as
possibly happened to this year's chattering-class billionaire, Ron Burkle, the mysterious
53-year-old who made his fortune in the very non-mysterious business of investing in
supermarkets. Burkle—who also works with President Clinton—is a fixture at the Mercer
Hotel, where he prefers to have breakfast and meetings when he's in town, instead of in
his office at Clinton's headquarters in Harlem. He has a pied-a-terre under renovation in
New York—which he splits with Leonardo DiCaprio—but is looking for something
nicer. He offered $17 million in cash to the owner of Sky Studios, the city's preeminent
bachelor pad, with rooftop pool, on lower Broadway, several times, but the owner,
himself a rich man, won't take anything under $17.2 million. They go back and forth
about it—pennies between stubborn men.
A large part of Burkle's life is spent doing business for unions—hence the script on his
757 private plane, "770BB," or Box Boy Local 770, the union he was in when he started
as a bag boy. He has given generously to the Urban League, Harlem Children's Zone, and
UCLA, among others. Some portion of the other half of his life is spent being glamorous.
He's invested in Scoop, the fancy boutique chain, and has anonymously underwritten
model enthusiasms, like his $200,000 contribution to Petra Nemcova's charity benefit for
tsunami victims. His stunning home in Los Angeles, Green Acres, is the most exceptional
charity-event space in the city—$100 million has been raised there in the past year, with
$1 million at a recent Clinton event. This fall, when the California governor asked his
help, he flew the Dalai Lama from New York and back.
It's difficult to live in the public eye while keeping full control of your image, even for a
billionaire, as Burkle found when he made the acquaintance of a "Page Six" writer of
questionable wardrobe and integrity named Jared Paul Stern. Burkle caught Stem on tape
allegedly trying to shake him down—but possibly in this case the cure was worse than
the disease, with Burkle, by many accounts an ordinary guy who does his own laundry,
suddenly as famous as Brad Pitt.
To defend his zone of privacy, Burkle has put together a fearsome, cloak-and-daggerish
security apparatus, including crisis manager Mike Sitrick (who was brought in to quiet
things down when hedge-fund manager Bruce McMahan was accused of conducting an
affair with his own daughter) and Frank Renzi (who was in President Clinton's Secret
Service detail).
His wife—who petitioned for alimony of $410,000 per month but eventually received
$40,000—provided a sobering view of the end of billionaire romance: "My husband is
enormously wealthy, a billionaire, has his own 757 jet, and literally could track me down
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anywhere in the world," she testified. "He is used to exerting control over all the people
he comes into contact with, including myself ... He cannot stand losing—anything!"
It may not always be this way with billionaires. The new crop of Internet billionaires
seem to have learned from the example of their forerunners and are determined to live
life differently in the "Gooveau Riche" era. Sergey Brin and Larry Page guard their
privacy so closely that little is known about where they live other than it's in Palo Alto,
and the most impressive cars they own are Priuses. When Brin and Page met with the
Stanford grad students who started YouTube to negotiate the deal earlier this week, it was
for lunch at a Denny's. They do, however, own their own Boeing 767 jet, which includes
two bedrooms and hammocks hung from the common-room ceiling.
Hammocks may not be the style of billionaire Roustam Tariko, the Russian banking and
vodka tycoon, but he has a similarly freewheeling approach to life. Tariko had one of the
city's most incredible parties at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, to toast his new brand of
vodka. Over a thousand people, dressed in their finest bling, gathered there to eat borscht
and caviar under the lit statue. I remember Tariko running around, slightly flushed in a
pressed suit with a crisp white collar, greeting everyone from Helena Christensen to
Donna Karan as Duran Duran played their old hits onstage.
More recently, it was rumored he'd bought Picasso's Dora Maar With Cat for $95
million. Tariko told Lillian Ross that he had done nothing of the sort. "Not me," he said.
"Art dealers from all over the world are now asking me to buy Picassos, other
Impressionists. I prefer Renaissance, Caravaggio. But I do not buy them. I'd rather invest
in my freedom, rather than in my walls."
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