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.
My guess is that it’s their only source of self-esteem since they don’t seem to have anything except wealth, most of it inherited.
The UltraRich need an enormous number of servants.
Are any of those servants not spitting in the food?
I despair at actually breaking the power of the oligarchs. It is out of control.
I am familiar with the many policy options people support -- wealth taxes, overturn Citizens United, etc. etc. I do not believe that you can beat the oligarchs at the game they have rigged.
I do believe that they are waging war against the rest of us, and have been since at least the 1950’s -- longer if you factor in the rich SOB’s who tried to sabotage FDR.
The one option I see as being effective is yet another option that will never be used: treat the oligarchs the way ICE treats anyone they don’t like. Grab the oligarchs and take away most of their money.
That would work, but it is not going to happen. Thus, the despair.
Well, as Kurt Vonnegut said: “The one thing I have that they will never have? Enough.”
Maybe the tech billionaires hope to make clones of themselves?
Considering their personalities it will probably go badly, like when Arnold Rimmer in *Red Dwarf* made a copy of himself.
I live in a large, old house (not out of choice). Back when it was built there was a large family with staff here, since it was an isolated settlement. So it made sense 160 years ago
It’s fucking weird, there are entire floors I never go in. When I’m here alone it feels like I’m trespassing, the only time it feels inhabited is when you pack an extra 10 people in
I have no idea why anyone would choose this if they had the option
The Sun King, Louis XIV of France, would be envious. His country retreat Versailles has 2300 rooms, but not a single toilet.
Why do you need so many bedrooms? WALLSPACE! I think my family could fill a mansion with bookshelves. Between various people’s collections of books, DVDs, decorative bricabrak, and videogames, we could certainly make a dent in one!
It applies to smaller (but still large) homes too -- my grandparents’ house in our South Indian ancestral village is a good 15000 sqft, and most of it is a working household for an agricultural family from that area. Cowsheds, place for storing equipment, stock of grain,.. The actual living area, while generous, is only a part of the whole.
The modern very large house, especially the urban one, is mostly showing off
As you’ll remember from your Wodehouse, the aristocracy were traditionally expected to be able to accommodate quite a large rotating cast of guests, often at zero notice. It would never do for a bunch of cousins, nephews, and madien aunts to all turn up by surprise and to be unable to accommodate them.
I seem to recall that at least some English stately homes were constructed to be able to accommodate the entire royal entourage, even though such visits might only happen once in a generation.
I have no idea whether our new aristocracy goes in for that sort of thing though…
Just for fun, I had to see how much Larry Ellison’s Hawaii island is worth.
Not as much as I thought, but still a lot of money.
You could buy it today for $1.2 billion.
He’s made money on it since his cost basis is around $800 million.
I can see a few drawbacks though.
It is a long way from anywhere, a small island in Hawaii.
It is also hard to get to. You have to fly in or fly to Hawaii and take a long boat ride to get there.
I doubt if he spends more than a week or two a year there.
I’ll pass.
I could think of better places to live for $1.2 billion.
Buckingham Palace was never a castle. It was built in 1703, was never fortified, and was enlarged in the 1800s.