Until Ivy Getty walked down the aisle in a Galliano gown festooned with broken mirrors, most people had no idea who she was. But after the 26-year-old heiress’s November wedding was featured in Vogue, with 100 photos, Getty was catapulted into trending topics. The Getty affair—a three-day extravaganza in San Francisco with multiple couture-costume changes, DJ Mark Ronson, and I.V. bags for hungover partiers—looked like a scene from The Hunger Games that was edited out for being a bit too on the nose. The bride’s family wealth comes from her great-grandfather’s success as an oil tycoon. The ceremony was officiated by none other than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and attended by San Francisco mayor London Breed and California governor Gavin Newsom, just as the U.N.’s climate summit was getting under way. In the middle of a global pandemic. Those glittering shards adorning the young Getty suddenly seemed a metaphor for the grotesque state of our democracy—and the planet.
Yet a week later, nobody was talking about the wedding. Lesser decadence once outraged us more. Remember when Pelosi dared to get a haircut? Remember when Newsom went out for dinner? They both felt compelled to release statements about those perceived transgressions; these days, no explanation is necessary. Back in 2020, we cried foul when NBA players got access to COVID tests before everyone else. We mocked Mark Zuckerberg, face smothered in zinc, for surfing in Hawaii while we quarantined.
But following two-ish years of austerity for the rest of us, the billionaires’ collective fortune skyrocketed by 70 percent. High on the entitlement that comes with a far-flung portfolio of tax-exempt assets, they are going buck wild, buying up jets, Van Goghs, and NFTs, and building penis-shaped rockets that they ride to space. The optics from earth no longer seem to matter.
Art Basel Miami—which ran for a week in late November and is now partly owned by Rupert Murdoch’s son James—marked an apotheosis of pent-up demand, featuring a $115 million yacht up for auction via cryptocurrency, and culminated with a private Lenny Kravitz concert at coal and energy investor Wayne Boich’s waterfront mansion. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk—who is the first person to have a $300 billion net worth—arrived via private jet sporting an unusual haircut, three security guards, a baby, a nanny, and a Shiba Inu. A few weeks later, Time declared him Person of the Year. (This was before news broke that California is suing Tesla for discrimination and, a week later, that the SEC is investigating Musk and his brother for insider trading.) We have all the empirical evidence we need that trickle-down economics doesn’t work. Yet the ethos behind it, the idea that unearned wealth is somehow earned—and ought to be celebrated as a virtue—has trickled up.
Race car heiress Petra Ecclestone spent the lockdown trying and failing to outrun the virus, quietly jetting to London, Croatia, Switzerland, Monaco, France, and the Maldives. Although she has long cultivated a reputation in the United States for being fiercely private, Ecclestone is suddenly courting publicity, granting Architectural Digest a tour of her $200 million London home and sitting for a New York Times profile in which she admitted to being “constantly bored.” In that profile Ecclestone—who bought the 56,500-square-foot Spelling Manor in Los Angeles for $85 million, sight unseen, when she was 22, then sold it five years later for $120 million—revealed that she and her second husband have started a business catering to fellow ultrawealthy homeowners, helping them decorate, buy, sell, and, necessarily, staff their own ridiculous carbon-devouring homes, an Ouroboros of conspicuous consumption.
The zero-fucks-given public performance of wealth is happening in some unusual places. At the end of October, two of the world’s great thinkers on climate change—Jeff Bezos, he of the Bezos Earth Fund, and Bill Gates, author of How to Avoid a Climate Disaster—were spotted superyacht hopping in the Aegean Sea. The occasion? Gates’s 66th birthday, the first in almost 30 years to be celebrated without his ex, Melinda. (Their daughter Jennifer just married Nayel Nassar, an Olympic equestrian, at the sprawling $16 million horse farm that Jennifer’s parents bought her in upstate New York; Coldplay performed for guests.) For Gates’s birthday, 50 guests aboard the 350-foot Lana superyacht, which rents for $2 million per week, took helicopters to Turkey, where they danced, drank Champagne, and partook of local cuisine, according to local media reports. Bezos arrived via his own rented superyacht, Flying Fox—100 crucial feet longer than Gates’s—and then took a helicopter to the party. Two different Dutch companies are currently at work constructing Bezos’s new $500 million, 417-foot superyacht, the Y721, as well as a 246-foot support yacht, the YS7521, for helicopter landings. Never mind that superyachts emit roughly the same amount of carbon the average American produces in an entire year, and that the bigger boat is so large that it will require dismantling part of a historic bridge to pass through Rotterdam this summer.
They both flew to Glasgow later that week—Bezos via his private jet and Gates most likely by the same means. Gates expressed his views on climate change, specifically that the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius was not realistic. Bezos pledged $2 billion to “restoring nature and transforming food systems.” When President Biden gave a speech declaring that the United States was now “hopefully leading by the power of our example,” one had to wonder: Who is “our,” exactly?
Perhaps billionaires feel that regular folks won’t notice their hypocrisy. In 2021, the American economy grew at the fastest rate since the Reagan administration—a rising tide lifts all yachts, right? But if you look closely, we are pessimistic about the future. The University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index fell in early November to its lowest level in a decade. The rich, it has long been said, are different from us—but they weren’t always so different. While billionaires throw parties, zoom into orbit, and jet to climate change conventions to lecture us, we contend with supply-chain disruptions, inflation, a lack of childcare options, and myriad other quality-of-life issues.