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| Lifestyles
of the Rich and Shameless |
 The year 2007 may go down in history — as the first that auto showrooms ever displayed current models with price-tags over $1 million. Two 2007 models, the Bugatti Veyron and the Lamborghini Reventón, now list in the seven digits. But today's most expensive motorcars remain antique classics. This past May, a Ferrari Testa Rosa built in 1962 auctioned off at $9.3 million. In all, 15 classic cars have sold for at least $2.8 million in 2007. What explains this booming market for antique autos? More folks “can afford them,” says Business Week, as “the rich get richer.” November 26, 2007 |
| Indian tycoon Mukesh Ambani may not yet be the world’s richest man, but he’s sure spending like one. News reports last week revealed that Ambani has just bestowed upon his wife a $82 million private jet. The specially outfitted Airbus 319, an airliner that normally seats 124 passengers. features a “state-of-the-art business office” and master bedroom, complete with showers and bar. Down on terra firma, Ambani will soon be taking occupancy of a new home he’s having built — for $150 million — outside Mumbai. The home will sport “27 floors, a health club, 600 staff, and parking space for 168 cars.” Ambani has a family of six. His current net worth, thanks to a 45 percent rise this year in India’s stock market: $50 billion. November 12, 2007 |
| A burning question for our top-heavy times: How do owners of the Rolls Royce Phantom — a 19-foot-long motorcar that typically costs about $500,000 — get about on their chauffeur’s day off? Rolls Royce has an answer: the “baby Rolls,” a new drive-it-yourselfer now due to hit showrooms sometime in 2009. BMW, the automaker that has owned Rolls Royce since 1998, has spent an estimated $1.5 billion on the new model’s development and expects to market the baby Rolls at around $260,000. But executives don’t expect their babymobile to cut into sales of the more regal Phantom. Explains Rolls CEO Ian Robertson: “Most of our buyers have a car for each occasion.” October 29, 2007 |
| Need more evidence to show how wonderfully the world economy is working — at the top end? Sales of Bentleys, the British-made luxury motor car, have ballooned nearly 1,000 percent since 1993. Last year, Bentley moved 9,386 units at prices that ranged from $170,990 for the company’s low-end model to $263,990 for the high-end Arnage sedan. Cars from Mercedes and BMW, says Kelley Blue Book auto analyst Jack Nerad, are no longer striking wealthy car-buyers as exclusive enough, with many complaining that now everyone on their block has one. Adds Nerad: “That's not true on my block or perhaps yours, but there are plenty of blocks in the U.S. like that.” September 24, 2007 |
| Google’s two billionaire co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have just had an agreement signed that gives their private jet — a Boeing 767 wide-body — access to a federal government airport in Silicon Valley that’s otherwise closed to civilian air traffic. The Google boys will pay $1.3 million per year for their new landing rights. In return, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration gets to place scientific instruments on the Google wide-body — a 180-seater Page and Brin had customized to sport a party lounge and multiple bedrooms — and two other Google private jets. NASA is calling the deal a “win-win.” Local residents, worried about excessive airport noise, beg to differ. They've been fighting, since the 1990s, to keep the airport — just a four-mile drive from the Google headquarters — off-limits to general aviation. September 17, 2007 |
| How do people so rich they have money to burn actually burn their money? Bertrand Des Pallieres, a Paris-based hedge fund manager, has just offered one answer. Seems that the 39-year-old needed a car for summer-time jaunts in London. So he spent $160,000 on a “lovely” Maserati, but then found himself too occupied with hedging to spend any time in London driving it. So the car sat, unused and unloved, in London’s exclusive Knightsbridge district, picking up parking tickets. Eventually, traffic officers impounded the car. Pallieres, once located by officials from Transport for London, known locally as TfL, insisted he was “too busy” to pick the car up. Finally, after three months, Pallieres claimed his car and paid an estimated $10,000 in fines. Noted the unembarrassed hedge fund chief: “In my defense, I would say that parking in the TfL car pound is not that expensive relative to the cost of parking in central London.” August 27, 2007 |
| Our globe's super-rich, these days, seem to come in just two basic varieties: those who buy mega-yachts and those who prefer to rent. The renters have plenty of choices. Among the yachts now available for hire: the Princess Mariana, a boat almost as long as a football field that rents for $606,500 a week, not including food, drinks, fuel, and harbor fees. The Princess features a heliport that, with the helicopter aloft, turns into a golf driving range. Households worth at least $10 million will average $384,000 on yacht rentals this summer, says the 2007 Elite Traveler/Prince & Associates Summer Spending Survey. August 20, 2007 |
| American Express CEO Ken Chenault left a lot of blips on air traffic control radar screens last year. He took $405,375 worth of personal trips on his company's corporate jet. Multiply Chenault by the Fortune 500, and that, says the airline industry, only hints at the stress corporate jets are placing on air traffic control. Corporate jets have become nearly ten-times more plentiful since 1969. But corporate high-flyers, the airlines charge, are shirking the burden these jets create. Commercial airlines now generate two-thirds of radar-screen blips yet foot 94 percent of air traffic control costs. That's creating a situation, notes Steve Blow of the Dallas Morning-News, where “those of us sitting in cramped center seats on the airlines are helping subsidize the swells sprawled on the hand-stitched leather of their private jets.” The top lobbyist for private jets, Ed Bolen, objects to that sort of characterization. Protests Bolen: “The airlines try to make this look like a bunch of people flying around to play golf. They are trying to create class
warfare.” August 13, 2007 |
The new Boeing 787 Dreamliner, a plane due in service the year after next, will carry up to 330 passengers on regular  commercial flights. But the “V.I.P.” version of the new Boeing, just announced by Lufthansa, will carry just 35. This new V.I.P. model joins a growing list of full-size corporate jets now available as private planes. The V.I.P. figures to go for $150 million a pop. Lufthansa has already outfitted a dozen jumbo 747s for the private luxury market, at about $230 million each. These airborne palaces can easily handle, one news report points out , both the complete entourages of their wealthy owners and “their Rolls Royces and racehorses.” October 23, 2006 |
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