The article I linked to yesterday about the potential AI bubble focused on Larry Ellison, founder and CEO of Oracle, who has invested much of his personal fortune and borrowed heavily in order to compete in the AI race. The opening sentence had a parenthetical remark that got my attention, which was was “Larry Ellison woke up in his 33-bedroom, 34-bathroom oceanfront mansion in Florida.” This is part of what has become known as real estate porn, where we are invited to vicariously experience how the rich and famous live. It is of course no secret that these people compete with each other for status symbols that display their wealth in the form of such mansions, luxury yachts, private jets, and even private islands.

But I began to wonder as to whether anyone would ever need so many bedrooms and bathrooms, other than to boast about them. The answer probably is that no one needs them, they just serve as wealth markers. But who stays in them on a regular basis? Are they mostly empty?

This got me thinking about the massive castles of Europe that likely serve as the inspiration for these modern day monstrosities, one of the most iconic being Buckingham Palace in London. It has 19 State Rooms, 52 Royal and guest bedrooms, 188 Staff bedrooms, 92 Offices, and 78 Bathrooms.

Why were these castles so large? It appears that these old castles were large because they also served functions other than being luxury residences for nobility, such as for defense and protection, centers for administration, and provide on site accommodation for servants, craftsmen, and soldiers.

Medieval castles typically served as residences for royalty, nobility, and other high-ranking individuals in the area — usually built in case they needed to defend themselves against potential invasions and rebellions. They were also occupied by household staff, soldiers and other people who helped to run the castle and manage the surrounding estate.

These modern mansions are unlikely to have many of those needs. They just seem like a colossal waste.

If Ellison still feels cramped, he can decamp to his private island in Hawaii that seems like a medieval fiefdom.

Tech billionaires love Hawaii. Jeff Bezos has a $78 million estate on Maui; Marc Benioff owns hundreds of acres and an oceanfront estate on the Big Island; Mark Zuckerberg is building a fortified compound on Kauai. But only Ellison owns his own island. Lanai is 140 square miles, and pretty much all of it — the 47 miles of shoreline, the gas station, the movie theater, the Four Seasons resorts and about 150 newly built rental houses for employees, decorated in Japanese style — belongs to him. Local residents, and there are about 3,000 of them, refer to Ellison as “ownership,” and the island’s unusual economic structure does give it a strange, plantation-like feel.

Rich people are so weird.