Survival of the richest💰

I'm on a towel at the Jersey Shore, they're on a gigayacht ⛵ in the Maldives.

“In order to be reputable, it must be wasteful.”

— Thorstein Velben

How do you distinguish a member of the uber wealthy from the measly super rich?

One tell is clothing labels. Or lack thereof. The uber set would not dare don attire with pop culture references. Another is the frequency with which one hosts numerous house guests simultaneously, the implication pointing to plenty of spare bedrooms for anxiety-free lodging (“There is no enjoying the possession of anything valuable unless one has someone to share it with,” as the Roman stoic sentiment goes.) Keep an eye out for tardiness (“proles arrive punctually”) and rumpled bow ties (“If neatly tied, centered and balanced, the effect is middle class.”)

The rich hire chefs; the uber wealthy employ an entire kitchen staff, a rotating team of nannies and an in-home laundress to iron your shirt before dinner.

But there may be no greater showcase of modern spectacular affluence than the size of one’s yacht.

In the days leading up to the wedding of the year, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez hosted a foam party on his $500 million super-yacht, Koru, off the coast of Croatia. It’s a boat so obnoxiously large it was denied entry to the Port of Monaco, a place designed for extravagance. David Geffen, the music and film executive, employs a staff of 57 for his 454-foot yacht, which performs as a sailing dais for celebrity sightings in the Grenadines and St. Barts. Measuring in at 590 feet, the current title-holder for the world’s largest yacht belongs to the president of the United Arab Emirates. But the sheikh’s reign looks endangered. A 728-foot “yacht-liner” is currently under construction in Norway. Once finished it will feature 30 luxury private residences and amenities on par with a six-star hotel, a rating I wasn’t aware existed.

In his book, The Haves and Have-Yachts, Evan Osnos pulls the canopy back on the billionaire sundeck, exposing the lifestyles of the richest people on earth that they’d rather keep out of sight. (Unless you’re fortunate enough to score an invite aboard, which is unlikely because another telltale trait of the uber wealthy is that they largely only socialize with one another.)

The fury over economic inequality has dominated our political culture for the past decade, powering movements from MAGA to Mamdani. Osnos uses the upper echelons of society as a canvass to draw an evocative and entertaining picture of how that wealth gap plays out in places that you and I will likely never see.

While the ostentatious spectacle is fascinating, Osnos dots the marina with warning buoys.

Peter Turchin, a professor at the University of Connecticut who studies how societies invite chaos, has settled on a sobering conclusion on the economic stratification in decade we now occupy. “At some point during the 2020s, the model predicts, instability becomes so high that it starts cutting down the elite numbers,” he says. Turchin leaves the *who* in his sentence to the imagination. “We are not there — yet,” he says.

Donald Trump was never comfortable on boats. “Couldn’t get off fast enough,” he