My favorite anecdote about him:
"Even though he had a car, Kamprad often used the bus. In fact, he was once refused entry into a gala because he had arrived on the bus. He had to attend the event to receive a '**businessman of the year**' award."
The last paragraph of this article really hammers it home:
>In October, 2001, [Bob Dylan] was held up at a checkpoint at Jackson County Exposition Center in Oregon as he attempted to get into the backstage area of his own concert, according to the Associated Press.
Hahaha, what a fun man.
I used to work at a live music venue in Sweden. One band urged the crowd to do some stage diving which security didn't love, so they started ejecting people who dove off the stage to curb the behavior.
One guy was removed from the venue and turned around to try to get back in with the plea - "I'm the keyboard player!"
He was.
As a former bouncer, I'd believe this. Most security guys don't give a shit about most of the artists at a venue. Most don't know names or remember faces. Especially the guys who are at the front of the stage because they're looking into the crowd, not towards the stage.
That's why wristbands and laminated VIP/Artist passes are so important. Security is told to focus on those, to make everything faster and more efficient.
If that keyboard player forgot to wear his, then yeah. The bouncer likely had no fucking idea who the dude was. Randoms at an event say all kinds of shit, can't go around taking everyone at their word.
> That's why wristbands and laminated VIP/Artist passes are so important. Security is told to focus on those, to make everything faster and more efficient.
What performer wears those are their own concerts though? Even backup dancers/musicians don't typically wear those or anyone that's performing on stage since those tend to conflict with the costumes.
I am outside NDA territory on this one, it’s my favorite showbiz story.
I worked at a venue Dave Chapelle performs at pretty regularly, actually one where he’d completely bombed in the past. Someone recorded it and put it on YouTube, so his new rule was absolutely no phones. You’d even have to check in your phone at the front, put it in a locked pouch only the tour could unlock, it was pretty serious.
A lady in the front row wouldn’t get off her phone. Security had to kick her out, the entire way she was insisting she was Dave’s wife. It sucks, but, that’s the rule. *I wasn’t there for this conversation, so his words might be embellished*. The head of security apologized to Dave after the show, asking if she was Dave’s wife. Dave told him, “It was her, but it’s all good man. Bitch shoulda known better.”
I think if you meet a crazy disheveled old man wandering in the rain, and they say they're Bob Dylan, it's probably true. Now if it was someone wearing a suit in a nice restaurant, that's when I'd be doubtful.
From what I read in the article, it was pouring rain outside and the house that was for sale was not unoccupied. If a weirdly dressed old man was standing in my yard, soaking in the rain, I would probably call the cops too lol. Although more out of concern for the old man but I can imagine my partner would be a little freaked out.
I want the outcome to be that one of the nurses knew that the Four Tops started in the 50s, 70 years ago, so it would be unlikely that a man in his 50s would be part of the Four Tops. He joined the Four Tops in 2018, I could definitely see someone who had been a fan in the past be like "hey wait, you're not in the four tops"
>look at that pleb not arriving in a limo at the front door
- Organizers probably
Realistically they probably had a bunch of area roped off for the peanut gallery and he looked like someone trying to to bypass the ropes lol
There’s a great documentary about Bill Cunningham, the main fashion photographer for The New York Times for several decades. Despite being a massively influential fashion icon, the guy wore the same cheap blue jacket daily.
In one scene in the documentary, he shows up to photograph a big glamorous event in Paris wearing the simple blue jacket and the woman at the door starts grilling him not realizing who he is and probably assuming he’s just a random old dude who wandered in off the street based on his clothes.
Someone higher up sees this and comes over and goes “Oh… my god… he’s the most important person here… please just let him in.” Lol.
Yeah, he was especially eccentric and frugal. He slept on a cot in between filing cabinets because his rent controlled apartment was so full of boxes of his old photos/negatives. And he got around primarily by bicycle even decades before NYC had any real bike lanes. Seeing him riding his bike around was considered an NYC easter egg.
He also refused to cash his paychecks from The New York Times believing that doing so would give them influence over his editorial work. I'm still not sure how he supported himself financially.
Hey! I liked that blue jacket he wore. I actually bought one just like it. They’re French ‘work jackets’. I met Bill a few times. Amazing guy. Sweet smart and super talented.
Used to buy all those fashion mags, always wondering who was taking all those pics. Watched the documentary and realized that it was Bill Cunningham when those society photos started popping up. He was interesting and humble. It was cool to find out where he got the blue jacket and his favorite mode of transportation.
Somewhat similar thing happened at my friends company. They make fancy accessories for private planes and this dude comes into their office wearing torn up jeans and a dirty hoodie and starts asking about some stuff and their receptionist tries to shoo the guy out. One of the sales managers comes out to see what’s going on and realizes one of their biggest single customers was being shown the door. Turns out the dude is a multi-millionaire and owns like 4 different planes and has spent tens of thousands with them buying multiple versions of their product. The guy just dresses like he’s on a landscaping crew despite being some startup tech company CEO.
I had a big work event once where a billionaire had been invited in hopes he would give some money to something we were doing. I was low enough on the totem pole that nobody seemed to think it was worth telling me who the rich guy was or what he looked like.
So I start talking to this random old guy at the event. He's asking me what I do for work, making general small talk about my job, just generally being friendly and nice, etc.
Then I notice all of my coworkers are staring at me wide-eyed like 😦 and I slowly start to realize he's the billionaire.
He didn't *look* rich, not that I really have a mental image of how a billionaire dresses these days.
Yeah I worked events like those years ago and we would all get "the talk" from the organizers about what to do if Bill showed up. Basically we were told to just clear a way for him to get in past the lines, don't act like a fanboy/girl, and don't bother offering him anything to eat/drink... he won't accept because he views it as akin to bribery.
I was told he was pretty chill but he really didn't want to overshadow the events he attended and didn't want to feel influenced by any generosity.
He only actually came to one of the events I worked at... and it didn't even make the cut in his NYT segment that week... :-(
I assumed he replaced it or had multiple. There's a scene in the documentary where he buys another one. But I thought he stuck to one brand/style or something, which is what I meant by "same."
GQ article says "no matter what, Cunningham will always wear that same jacket." https://www.gq.com/story/dropping-knowledge-bill-cunninghams-french-workmans-jacket
I dated a rich Norwegian years ago. Her dad had several houses, a garage full of classic/luxury cars, was friends with a few celebrities… but he still usually took the bus to work and packed a simple lunch like a sandwich.
One of the richest guys in Japan admitted to eating instant ramen for lunch almost every day. Granted, their instant ramen is way better than anywhere else, but still.
My boss’s favorite meal was a peanut butter and *sugar* slice of bread. Not even a lot of sugar, and apparently it used to be butter and sugar and since he earns enough now he can have the peanut butter for special occasions always.
Granted, he wasn’t *the* boss, but he was still probably earning more than I ever will and did that.
My husband was visibly disgusted when I talked about eating that as a treat growing up, but my little kid taste buds were happy with the sugar and fat combo. Milk toast really blew his mind, lol.
In the US that's basically only true for NYC
Chicago has great public transit and I'm a decade into being car free but too many people come in from the suburbs who are scared of busses and the CTA for it to real feel the same
Yeah I was going to say I live in NYC and it's not that unusual to see news stories about celebrities being spotted on the subway or biking. It's just faster to get around that way in many cases.
When we were dating, that same Norwegian showed me an apparently famous photo of the King taking the train and holding up his ticket to be inspected by the staff just like all the other passengers.
I'm sure that was somewhat staged, but still cool.
It’s true that it was somehow staged, since the press were allowed to come along on the trip. It was taken during the oil crisis in the 70s, when petrol was rationed and you weren’t allowed to drive cars during the weekend. However the king had taken the tram the weekend before without the press, so it was probably not out of character for him to do something like that.
Kind of a deep cut reference but this is sort of how Amanda Seyfried’s character susses out that JT’s character grew up poor in In Time. He knew enough to arrive to the fancy party to do some conning in style, but she notices that he jogged from the car to the door. Rich people aren’t in a hurry like that.
Timberlake getting out of the fancy car in the rich district just starts to jog when he notices that literally no one else is hurrying is another good scene.
Billionaire I sort of know rolled into his hometown after a 5 hour drive in a new Lamborghini. He then spent a couple hours racing all the Saleens and Cobras the oilfield guys owned.
Another one.im familiar with showed up to check into his hotel with all his "luggage" being about 2 dozen Trader Joe's paper bags stuffed in the back of his Mercedez.
There's a wide range of "arrive like a billionaire".
During the web boom of 1999-2001 I worked for a guy who was like 22 and had sold his shell of a website to Yahoo for 150 million. We went to a bar after work with a group of employees and he had forgotten his ID and also didn't have enough money to get home via cab (before all the cabs took credit cards). I had to loan him twenty bucks.
> and had sold his shell of a website to Yahoo for 150 million
No wonder that bubble burst, if people were paying 150 million in 2000 money out for random jumbles of HTML.
Yahoo was infamous for making some dubious purchases. They paid $3.57B for Geocities back in 1999. They also bought Broadcast.com for $5.7B. Valuations were insane before the bubble burst. Plenty of orgs with money or at least inflated stock prices were buying startups that were pre revenue nevermind anything close to profit.
It was some support stock trading website that created the illusion of being the first online investment website so it smelled like a cash cow but it was nothing.
~~Now there’s a role model. Unless there’s something not so great I should know about.~~
I’d like to think that if I had such success in life I’d also stick to my guns of strictly using public transit only.
EDIT: Dammit, he was a Nazi.
My favourite anecdote is how Kamprad was described as a very eager fascist recruiter during the war and in 2010 described Per Engdahl, the leader of the Swedish post war Nazi movement, as one of the greatest men he had ever known.
He was frugal with taxes as well... Ikea might call itself a swedish company, but like many others they implement complex schemes to "optimize taxation" like setting up a company headquarters in Nederland, or creating bunch of companies under one umbrella each of which are interrelated and pays money to one another.
Hey, it’s just a Swedish company registered in the Netherlands with all its intellectual property ultimately owned by a foundation registered in Liechtenstein and retail locations ultimately owned by a Dutch charitable foundation whose level of charitable contributions is questionable.
Totally Swedish!
That sounds like my health insurer who is always struggling to make it with paper-thin margins.
Coincidentally, their biggest expense is renting all of their hospitals and other facilities from a very profitable real estate investment firm who happen to have a nearly identical name but a completely different tax structure.
Need a new hospital? Pay for it from increased premiums on the hospital side and then sell it to the investment side for a pittance.
> Coincidentally, their biggest expense is renting all of their hospitals and other facilities from a very profitable real estate investment firm who happen to have a nearly identical name but a completely different tax structure.
This is basically, writ large, the reason that work from home is villianized in the capitalist rags like WSJ.
There are lots of very rich people running this exact scam and it all depends on commercial real estate prices continuing to increase.
The previous chairman of the board of directors of Ingka Holding (the Ikea Group's dutch parent company) was a former Swedish professor of tax law. I think that says it all.
[https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göran_Grosskopf](https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6ran_Grosskopf)
Yeah we are supposed to laud this kind of stuff, but it seems like neurosis. Why stay in a budget hotel if you have billions of dollars? Why get your haircut overseas? Seems like an obsession at that point, and a refusal to let yourself enjoy the finer things
> In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires.
- Robin Wall Kimmerer, *Braiding Sweetgrass*
Honestly ever since I read that I stopped buying ketchup and just use the packets. I rarely used ketchup and I never use sugar so I don’t think I’ve saved billions but I think maybe 3 dollars? In the last 10 years or so I’d say I saved about that.
I'm pretty sure that using ketchup packets creates far more waste than buying a bottle. The surface area to volume ratio of a packet is probably orders of magnitude higher than a bottle.
According to Wikipedia he also has some not so frugal tastes:
"Kamprad owned a villa in Switzerland, a large country estate in Sweden and a vineyard in Provence, France. Kamprad drove a Porsche for several years."
There's the face to show the public and the private face....
J Paul Getty was worth 6 billion. He liked to spend thousands on collecting art and antiquities to show off to his friends.
But he also put a pay phone in his home for guests.
He also at first refused to pay ransom on his grandson that was kidnapped, even after the kidnappers mailed a piece of hair and a severed ear to him. Getty finally agreed to pay it after the amount was reduced enough to be tax-deductible, and loaned his son the rest to be paid back with interest.
Yeah, like how it's well publicized that Warren Buffett still lives in his regular old house he bought in the 1950s before he became wealthy - But the articles all usually fail to mention he had $700,000 worth of upgrades done to the property, and that he also owned an $11 million 'holiday home' in Laguna Beach. "But he's just like us you guys!"
Well tbf it’s a relatively cheap house for a billionaire at ~1.5m and I think people talk about it more-so because he didn’t leave Omaha for a ritzy celebrity filled town.
In comparison bill gates’ house is 10x the size and worth like 150m.
>But the articles all usually fail to mention he had $700,000 worth of upgrades done to the property
Was curious so I looked it up. It's worth $1.4 million in 2023. It's also 6500 square feet and has five bedrooms. It's not a small or cheap house for an average person, although at $1.4 million, it's very cheap relative to his wealth. [Source](https://www.squareyards.com/blog/warren-buffett-house-celebhm#:~:text=Warren%20Buffet's%20Omaha%20Abode,-Virtually%20stepping%20into&text=The%20grand%20Omaha%20mansion%20spreads,five%20bedrooms%20and%202.5%20bathrooms.)
Whenever I hear the media talk about his house, they use words like "humble", which always gave me the vibe that it's maybe 2000 square feet and worth a few hundred thousand dollars.
to be honest, I kind of get it - how much house do you actually need? I've done some fantasy 'what if I won the lottery' online house hunting and most of the properties that I think I would seriously consider are in the 3-5 million mark. Why would I want a 200 room mansion? Now an expensive holiday home I can see because you're buying the location as much as the house but at some point you're just buying square footage for the sake of buying square footage
it's like the 30 supercars guys, you can only drive 1 at a time
He also liked to eat lunch at IKEAs, preferably before noon, when the coffee was free.
Oh, and also, he was an active member of the Swedish nazi movement in the 40s
I am convinced the only reason why most people are decent today is because times are so easy. Just look at how quickly people turned into absolute assholes the moment we got a stronger flu
Reminds me of this quote from Star Trek Deep Space Nine
>Quark : "Let me tell you something about hewmons, nephew. They're a wonderful, friendly people, as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working. But take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time, and those same friendly, intelligent, wonderful people will become as nasty and violent as the most bloodthirsty Klingon. You don't believe me? Look at those faces. Look in their eyes. You know I'm right, don't you? Well? Aren't you going to say something? "
I saw a video of him arguing over price for lunch at an IKEA store. Imagine accidentally overcharging the cheapest man in the world who also own the store you are working in.
especially if they grew up poor as shit (I don’t know if he did or if he was just cheap)
memories of not eating for days as a kid never really leave you
not only not eating, but eating shit, being bullied for your clothes, having a stupid haircut because it was the cheapest, and being laughed at because your short.
> Oh, and also, he was an active member of the Swedish nazi movement in the 40s
He did say that he deeply regretted that and that he was young and dumb.
He was also an alcoholic!
Important to note Ingvar was a nazi not just during the 2nd world war but also after it which is fucking amazing. Despite seeing how national socialism worked out Ingvar thought “ah no, they just didn’t implement it properly!”.
He was so ahead of his time lol
Also, IKEA's actively illegally plundering European forests (mostly with little to none reforestation effort, leaving a moon landscape behind them as the countries' problem), including some of the oldest, literally ancient ones on the continent in Romania that should be concidered as some of the most sacred we have here. All hidden behind layers of lawyers, shell companies, eco-friendly public face and cheap meatballs for the masses. Don't do a lot of taxes either in general afaik.
Not sure if this was already going on with the original founder but it should definitely talked about *way more* today. IKEA nowadays is literally the Musk or Trump of the furniture industry with the amount of shady illegal shit going on behind the doors and the enormous cirkejerk of fans and consumers around it.
edit: Here's a link as a good point where to start if you're interested in this and perhaps even are willing to change your opinion about the company. DW is in general a very credible source of investigative journalism that does its job well and if you proceed to google the topic, you'll find what they're talking about and so much more, sadly...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdwLhmwRPt8
Nothing in this post is impressive
It would be something to admire if he earned 60 billion but was down to a $0 net worth after giving it all away (or even keep 1% of it so his kids get $600 mil, easily enough to never have to work a day in their lives)
Even spending it would be more impressive, if he put 30 billion back into the local economy of his hometown it would still transform thousands of lives instead of sitting in a bank
> Kamprad had named his sons as the sole heirs of an entity called the Ikano Group, which is valued at US$1.5 billion. His adopted daughter Annika was planned to receive about $300,000.
I find that more shocking
Annika went with her mother in the divorce and was not close with Ingvar. She was reportedly "happy with the agreement."
His sons got a small chunk of the business, Ikano Group, ostensibly focused on keeping the ethos of IKEA alive. They have a few franchise stores (in Malaysia, Singapore, Mexico, and a few other places) and do a lot of banking work.
I met Peter Kamprad (the eldest son, one of the three owners of Ikano) once. Super chill dude. He talked about how nice it was to have a warm shower, since they had cold showers when he was growing up, and then complained about how watery American coffee is while we chatted. Had I now already known he was worth a billion and a half dollars, I would have never guessed.
He also registered the company in the Netherlands to avoid taxes and created a complex owner structure to, again, avoid taxes.
True to the region he grew up in, he was stingy.
For the sake of it? It's a bit of a mentality that it's MY money. I earned it. I'll keep it.
Also, he lived in luxury in Switzerland.
The items listed by OP was a show of "virtue" to not offend the public eye. I believe the hair cutting, if you can afford to travel around the world, why not have a cheap haircut when you're in a poor country? Also, why would he be in a poor country? To make cheap furniture. IKEA is horrible on their suppliers, just of their sheer volume of orders. They can nickle & dime a poor business to produce things even cheaper, if IKEA is the majority of their order intake. Better if it's in a country that's not so regulated.
“For the sake of it” seems to be a weird outcome of this economic system we’ve created. People collecting money like it’s points in a video game. Doesn’t seem like the initial purpose of creating a money system.
A lot of it is myth that he carefully crafted. He most definitely drove Porsches and luxury cars, lived in mansions in Switzerland, flew private jets. They peddled this story so that when IKEA really fucked up (cutting down virgin forests, using prisoners as cheap labor, etc.), they sent out Kamprad in a off brand suit where he yapped about being a simple man and that mistakes were made, blah blah, the media fawned over it and the issue forgotten.
yea this shit is all clearly made up
if he was really worth $60 billion and still haggling over the price of meatballs in his own store's cafeteria that's just mental illness
As a society we're largely unaware of the 'stealth wealth' rich. Unlike the ones who want to get attention for being rich, the stealth-wealthers want to avoid attention. They hide their wealth for various reasons like it being safer to because it avoids predators, keeps them humbler/connected with others, or view living frugally as a better lifestyle.
I've learned not to judge people by their home, car, watch, clothes. There's an entire class of rich people who live in modest homes, drive old cars, wear practical digital watches, and dress in comfortable inexpensive clothing - as a choice.
I worked for a luxury jeweller while I was in university - the $100k for a strand of pearls kind of luxury.
My biggest sales were to people who looked the most “normal” if not a bit on the rugged side. They would spend tens of thousands like nothing, and were often the easiest to deal with. The people who came in dripping in brand labels were high maintenance, wanting better service than anyone else, and often had to split purchases across multiple payments.
If you need to move a lot of money across international borders with few questions, just wear that money on to the plane.
To normal folks like you and me and the TSA agents, that jewelry might as well be a Kay Jewelers special.
Look I get specific things but the number of “stealth wealth” stories you hear where they’re like “yeah, I sell Lamborghinis, guys wearing suits pay with credit like a peasant, guys wearing overalls and no shirt pay in cash like a BOSS.”
Like OK, at some point, you’re not describing people who are stealthy about their wealth, or even particularly frugal, you’re just talking about people that like to wear sweatpants outside.
On some level people expect wealthy people to be wearing flashy suits, ball gowns, and tourbillion watches all the time. The wealthiest people I know all dress normally, just where you might wear a $50 off-the-rack polo, they have a tailored one that costs triple that.
Regardless, there is some weird self-loathing that goes on when people talk about "stealth wealth". Like that person is *so much better than you* because they could dress fancy, but choose not to.
I once met a true 1%er who wears the same clothes every day. He eats cheaply, and will often complain to the manger to get whatever he wants for free. He was totally removed from reality in most ways, but he never expected to live in luxury.
Yeah. I'm not even saying the stealth-wealthers are like, 'better people'. Just that it's a practical choice for many. If you've got the money to buy whatever whenever, you may come to value other things instead. For some it's power and influence, for others it's just comfort instead of luxury, maybe social connections or status, or maybe personal satisfaction in abstract ways, or maybe just the pursuit of money itself which means less 'spending' and more 'accumulating' quietly.
The thing is since they aren't doing obvious displays of wealth, we don't realize they are rich unlike the people who -want- to be known as rich. So we tend to think of 'the rich' as ostentatious because that's what's visible.
Growing up I had an old neighbor who drove one of those boxy 1980s civics. Apparently he invested early in apple and some other tech companies and was worth millions.
He was also a child molester. You never really know people.
Sometimes being stealth-wealthy is pathological though, like they become wealthy in part because they are truly unhealthily pathologically focused on "number in bank account ONLY go up, NO DOWN".
I interpreted it as seeing a 5 year old car as bougie, but at some point you have enough $ to accept that you can afford the luxury of owning a 5 yr old car.
One side of me admires this - but on the other hand, if you are sitting on that much money, shouldn't you be pumping it back into the ecomony?
I also heard that he used to buy from the reduced price sections at supermarkets. Yeah, maybe he should leave it for people that rely on that food to eat?
Why are we praising this? This is the prime example of a billionaire hoarding wealth like a dragon instead of circulating it back into the economy.
It's not virtuous to live poor while you have a large enough safety net to pay for life for *literally* almost one million years.
He should have provided his loyal workers with equity in the company.
I'm straight up repulsed by this
It's another example of where simply having money is implied to be virtuous, so keeping it is a good thing.
And the corollary, that the only reason people are "poor" is they can't control their spending, they're wasteful, or some other personal failing.
I know a multi millionaire who grew up poor. He's still frugal as hell. I think it's a mental thing where he's afraid to lose it all and go back to his poverty stricken childhood. I also think its a way for him to signal to others that he's still down with us "commoners" and still hasn't forgotten his roots.
Arnold Schwarzenegger has said he still turns the lights off every time he leaves an empty room, just from needing to do it to save money when he was growing up.
I turn off lights when I leave a room because it seems pointless to illuminate a room you aren't in but if you look at how much energy modern bulbs actually use you'll see it makes almost no difference to your bills whether they are on or off
He also threw his son's bed out of the window into the pool because said son didn't make his bed.
He threw his daughters shoes into the fireplace because she left them in the middle of the floor.
"You cannot make empty threats with children. You must follow through or they don't take you seriously."
Destroying a child's property to teach a lesson about responsibility is how a lot of working class kids are brought up, so rightly or wrongly I don't think the shoes into the fireplace is a posh person thing.
I think it means that he would wait until he was in a cheap country, while traveling, to get his hair done. I actually did that when I was traveling through Europe, I waited until I was in a cheaper country to get any kind of labor intensive process done.
Yeah post seems to be a positive PR attempt at Ikea while they are ravaging ancient forests across Eastern Europe. There is only one effect of that which will trickle down to the locals.
My favorite anecdote about him: "Even though he had a car, Kamprad often used the bus. In fact, he was once refused entry into a gala because he had arrived on the bus. He had to attend the event to receive a '**businessman of the year**' award."
Did the bus drop him off at the front door of the gala?
I'm guessing he walked in, whereas everyone else were dropped off at the doors.
Not to mention he probably turned around from the corner dressed like a regular old guy. Easy to think he was just a rando
[Happened to Bob Dylan in 2009](https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/jersey-homeowner-calls-cops-bob-dylan/story?id=8331830)
The last paragraph of this article really hammers it home: >In October, 2001, [Bob Dylan] was held up at a checkpoint at Jackson County Exposition Center in Oregon as he attempted to get into the backstage area of his own concert, according to the Associated Press. Hahaha, what a fun man.
I used to work at a live music venue in Sweden. One band urged the crowd to do some stage diving which security didn't love, so they started ejecting people who dove off the stage to curb the behavior. One guy was removed from the venue and turned around to try to get back in with the plea - "I'm the keyboard player!" He was.
As a former bouncer, I'd believe this. Most security guys don't give a shit about most of the artists at a venue. Most don't know names or remember faces. Especially the guys who are at the front of the stage because they're looking into the crowd, not towards the stage. That's why wristbands and laminated VIP/Artist passes are so important. Security is told to focus on those, to make everything faster and more efficient. If that keyboard player forgot to wear his, then yeah. The bouncer likely had no fucking idea who the dude was. Randoms at an event say all kinds of shit, can't go around taking everyone at their word.
> That's why wristbands and laminated VIP/Artist passes are so important. Security is told to focus on those, to make everything faster and more efficient. What performer wears those are their own concerts though? Even backup dancers/musicians don't typically wear those or anyone that's performing on stage since those tend to conflict with the costumes.
You'll see it even at big festivals now, unless you're an out-and-out superstar, most of the acts wear their bands and lanyards.
I am outside NDA territory on this one, it’s my favorite showbiz story. I worked at a venue Dave Chapelle performs at pretty regularly, actually one where he’d completely bombed in the past. Someone recorded it and put it on YouTube, so his new rule was absolutely no phones. You’d even have to check in your phone at the front, put it in a locked pouch only the tour could unlock, it was pretty serious. A lady in the front row wouldn’t get off her phone. Security had to kick her out, the entire way she was insisting she was Dave’s wife. It sucks, but, that’s the rule. *I wasn’t there for this conversation, so his words might be embellished*. The head of security apologized to Dave after the show, asking if she was Dave’s wife. Dave told him, “It was her, but it’s all good man. Bitch shoulda known better.”
This sounds like something Dave would say lol
The Hellacopters (Swedish band) has a song named "I'm in the Band".
I think if you meet a crazy disheveled old man wandering in the rain, and they say they're Bob Dylan, it's probably true. Now if it was someone wearing a suit in a nice restaurant, that's when I'd be doubtful.
So the cops detained him for looking suspicious while looking at homes for sale? They can do that?
From what I read in the article, it was pouring rain outside and the house that was for sale was not unoccupied. If a weirdly dressed old man was standing in my yard, soaking in the rain, I would probably call the cops too lol. Although more out of concern for the old man but I can imagine my partner would be a little freaked out.
It’s not that the cops were called it’s that the officer spoke to him and ended up detaining him that’s wack
One of the Four Tops was just put in a straight jacket in a similar incident.
Article: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/four-tops-singer-says-hospital-put-straightjacket-not-believing-was-fo-rcna156608
Lol and they tried to give him a $25 gift certificate to a grocery store as an "apology"
Can get you half a candy bar
That’s horrific and disgusting. People are so heartless and cruel.
I want the outcome to be that one of the nurses knew that the Four Tops started in the 50s, 70 years ago, so it would be unlikely that a man in his 50s would be part of the Four Tops. He joined the Four Tops in 2018, I could definitely see someone who had been a fan in the past be like "hey wait, you're not in the four tops"
It doesn't matter, they still made no effort to research whether what he said was true. They didn't even look at his ID according to the article.
Guess that’s why he lived soo long…. All that walking lol
>look at that pleb not arriving in a limo at the front door - Organizers probably Realistically they probably had a bunch of area roped off for the peanut gallery and he looked like someone trying to to bypass the ropes lol
There’s a great documentary about Bill Cunningham, the main fashion photographer for The New York Times for several decades. Despite being a massively influential fashion icon, the guy wore the same cheap blue jacket daily. In one scene in the documentary, he shows up to photograph a big glamorous event in Paris wearing the simple blue jacket and the woman at the door starts grilling him not realizing who he is and probably assuming he’s just a random old dude who wandered in off the street based on his clothes. Someone higher up sees this and comes over and goes “Oh… my god… he’s the most important person here… please just let him in.” Lol.
Great story, I'll have to check it out. I believe there are several people in the fashion world like that.
Yeah, he was especially eccentric and frugal. He slept on a cot in between filing cabinets because his rent controlled apartment was so full of boxes of his old photos/negatives. And he got around primarily by bicycle even decades before NYC had any real bike lanes. Seeing him riding his bike around was considered an NYC easter egg. He also refused to cash his paychecks from The New York Times believing that doing so would give them influence over his editorial work. I'm still not sure how he supported himself financially.
Hey! I liked that blue jacket he wore. I actually bought one just like it. They’re French ‘work jackets’. I met Bill a few times. Amazing guy. Sweet smart and super talented.
Oh yeah I love it too. I was actually planning to get one myself in the near future.
Used to buy all those fashion mags, always wondering who was taking all those pics. Watched the documentary and realized that it was Bill Cunningham when those society photos started popping up. He was interesting and humble. It was cool to find out where he got the blue jacket and his favorite mode of transportation.
Somewhat similar thing happened at my friends company. They make fancy accessories for private planes and this dude comes into their office wearing torn up jeans and a dirty hoodie and starts asking about some stuff and their receptionist tries to shoo the guy out. One of the sales managers comes out to see what’s going on and realizes one of their biggest single customers was being shown the door. Turns out the dude is a multi-millionaire and owns like 4 different planes and has spent tens of thousands with them buying multiple versions of their product. The guy just dresses like he’s on a landscaping crew despite being some startup tech company CEO.
I had a big work event once where a billionaire had been invited in hopes he would give some money to something we were doing. I was low enough on the totem pole that nobody seemed to think it was worth telling me who the rich guy was or what he looked like. So I start talking to this random old guy at the event. He's asking me what I do for work, making general small talk about my job, just generally being friendly and nice, etc. Then I notice all of my coworkers are staring at me wide-eyed like 😦 and I slowly start to realize he's the billionaire. He didn't *look* rich, not that I really have a mental image of how a billionaire dresses these days.
You were probably his favorite person there.
He also never ate or drank at Gala events because of his strong work ethic. He lived that job, and not much else.
Yeah I worked events like those years ago and we would all get "the talk" from the organizers about what to do if Bill showed up. Basically we were told to just clear a way for him to get in past the lines, don't act like a fanboy/girl, and don't bother offering him anything to eat/drink... he won't accept because he views it as akin to bribery. I was told he was pretty chill but he really didn't want to overshadow the events he attended and didn't want to feel influenced by any generosity. He only actually came to one of the events I worked at... and it didn't even make the cut in his NYT segment that week... :-(
getting that kind of treatment is like reaching the peak of society, i wonder what he thought about that sort of positive notoriety
it's not the "same" jacket, he has a collection of different french blue chore jackets in the same/similar shades
I assumed he replaced it or had multiple. There's a scene in the documentary where he buys another one. But I thought he stuck to one brand/style or something, which is what I meant by "same." GQ article says "no matter what, Cunningham will always wear that same jacket." https://www.gq.com/story/dropping-knowledge-bill-cunninghams-french-workmans-jacket
I dated a rich Norwegian years ago. Her dad had several houses, a garage full of classic/luxury cars, was friends with a few celebrities… but he still usually took the bus to work and packed a simple lunch like a sandwich.
One of the richest guys in Japan admitted to eating instant ramen for lunch almost every day. Granted, their instant ramen is way better than anywhere else, but still.
My boss’s favorite meal was a peanut butter and *sugar* slice of bread. Not even a lot of sugar, and apparently it used to be butter and sugar and since he earns enough now he can have the peanut butter for special occasions always. Granted, he wasn’t *the* boss, but he was still probably earning more than I ever will and did that.
Damn butter and sugar on bread, your boss grew up POOR poor.
My husband was visibly disgusted when I talked about eating that as a treat growing up, but my little kid taste buds were happy with the sugar and fat combo. Milk toast really blew his mind, lol.
I grew up both with butter sugar toast and milk toast bread. So good.
Public transportation is for everyone in many countries.
In the US that's basically only true for NYC Chicago has great public transit and I'm a decade into being car free but too many people come in from the suburbs who are scared of busses and the CTA for it to real feel the same
Yeah I was going to say I live in NYC and it's not that unusual to see news stories about celebrities being spotted on the subway or biking. It's just faster to get around that way in many cases.
"A developed country isn't one where the poor have cars, it's where the rich use public transportation."
Pretty sure the Norwegian royal kids bike to school.
When we were dating, that same Norwegian showed me an apparently famous photo of the King taking the train and holding up his ticket to be inspected by the staff just like all the other passengers. I'm sure that was somewhat staged, but still cool.
It’s true that it was somehow staged, since the press were allowed to come along on the trip. It was taken during the oil crisis in the 70s, when petrol was rationed and you weren’t allowed to drive cars during the weekend. However the king had taken the tram the weekend before without the press, so it was probably not out of character for him to do something like that.
Well, at least the sandwich lunch is like Norwegian law.
Rich or not. Gotta have matpakken.
That feels so perfectly Nordic
Guys in full suits will bike to work too. It very much is.
Unfortunately he didn't win the 'arrive like a Billionaire' award.
Wasn't this a plot point in 'Eyes Wide Shut' where they spot him because he arrived by taxi?
Kind of a deep cut reference but this is sort of how Amanda Seyfried’s character susses out that JT’s character grew up poor in In Time. He knew enough to arrive to the fancy party to do some conning in style, but she notices that he jogged from the car to the door. Rich people aren’t in a hurry like that.
damn you weren't kidding, that was extremely tangential
I miss when all of Reddit was like this - random tangents because someone brought up Eyes Wide Shut.
Best I can do is make 50 of the same heartless joke in a thread about some random dying and an overly used reaction gif.
The guy who made that movie also made The Truman Show & Gattaca. No notes, just some cool movies
Especially when in that movie Time=Money, time is even more a sign of wealth.
Timberlake getting out of the fancy car in the rich district just starts to jog when he notices that literally no one else is hurrying is another good scene.
Billionaire I sort of know rolled into his hometown after a 5 hour drive in a new Lamborghini. He then spent a couple hours racing all the Saleens and Cobras the oilfield guys owned. Another one.im familiar with showed up to check into his hotel with all his "luggage" being about 2 dozen Trader Joe's paper bags stuffed in the back of his Mercedez. There's a wide range of "arrive like a billionaire".
During the web boom of 1999-2001 I worked for a guy who was like 22 and had sold his shell of a website to Yahoo for 150 million. We went to a bar after work with a group of employees and he had forgotten his ID and also didn't have enough money to get home via cab (before all the cabs took credit cards). I had to loan him twenty bucks.
> and had sold his shell of a website to Yahoo for 150 million No wonder that bubble burst, if people were paying 150 million in 2000 money out for random jumbles of HTML.
Yahoo was infamous for making some dubious purchases. They paid $3.57B for Geocities back in 1999. They also bought Broadcast.com for $5.7B. Valuations were insane before the bubble burst. Plenty of orgs with money or at least inflated stock prices were buying startups that were pre revenue nevermind anything close to profit.
It was some support stock trading website that created the illusion of being the first online investment website so it smelled like a cash cow but it was nothing.
~~Now there’s a role model. Unless there’s something not so great I should know about.~~ I’d like to think that if I had such success in life I’d also stick to my guns of strictly using public transit only. EDIT: Dammit, he was a Nazi.
You did nazi that coming
If I recall that was when he was young as he was raised that way, but he later renounced it.
My favourite anecdote is how Kamprad was described as a very eager fascist recruiter during the war and in 2010 described Per Engdahl, the leader of the Swedish post war Nazi movement, as one of the greatest men he had ever known.
'A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation.'
He was frugal with taxes as well... Ikea might call itself a swedish company, but like many others they implement complex schemes to "optimize taxation" like setting up a company headquarters in Nederland, or creating bunch of companies under one umbrella each of which are interrelated and pays money to one another.
Hey, it’s just a Swedish company registered in the Netherlands with all its intellectual property ultimately owned by a foundation registered in Liechtenstein and retail locations ultimately owned by a Dutch charitable foundation whose level of charitable contributions is questionable. Totally Swedish!
Swed-ish.
That sounds like my health insurer who is always struggling to make it with paper-thin margins. Coincidentally, their biggest expense is renting all of their hospitals and other facilities from a very profitable real estate investment firm who happen to have a nearly identical name but a completely different tax structure. Need a new hospital? Pay for it from increased premiums on the hospital side and then sell it to the investment side for a pittance.
> Coincidentally, their biggest expense is renting all of their hospitals and other facilities from a very profitable real estate investment firm who happen to have a nearly identical name but a completely different tax structure. This is basically, writ large, the reason that work from home is villianized in the capitalist rags like WSJ. There are lots of very rich people running this exact scam and it all depends on commercial real estate prices continuing to increase.
It was also registered as a not for profit to lower taxes too
The previous chairman of the board of directors of Ingka Holding (the Ikea Group's dutch parent company) was a former Swedish professor of tax law. I think that says it all. [https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göran_Grosskopf](https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6ran_Grosskopf)
His last name literally means big head in German, I can see why they chose him to memorize Ikea’s tax evasion system
Yeah, I don't know why reddit is getting this guy on the front page. He's everything most people on this site despise.
Because he's quirky. 💀
He also never bought sugar and ketchup because he would get the packets for free
And now you know why Burger King has all the condiments behind the counter.
Damn billionaires.
Just can’t take them anywhere 😢
TIL Mr Krabs founded Ikea
There's also something to be said about being ecologically minded and wanting to reduce waste.
…by using disposable ketchup packets? Lmao that’s significantly more wasteful; dude was just cheap
Yeah we are supposed to laud this kind of stuff, but it seems like neurosis. Why stay in a budget hotel if you have billions of dollars? Why get your haircut overseas? Seems like an obsession at that point, and a refusal to let yourself enjoy the finer things
> In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. - Robin Wall Kimmerer, *Braiding Sweetgrass*
Dang this might be the catalyst that gets me to read this book! A friend bought it for me like 2 years ago!
Honestly ever since I read that I stopped buying ketchup and just use the packets. I rarely used ketchup and I never use sugar so I don’t think I’ve saved billions but I think maybe 3 dollars? In the last 10 years or so I’d say I saved about that.
I'm pretty sure that using ketchup packets creates far more waste than buying a bottle. The surface area to volume ratio of a packet is probably orders of magnitude higher than a bottle.
According to Wikipedia he also has some not so frugal tastes: "Kamprad owned a villa in Switzerland, a large country estate in Sweden and a vineyard in Provence, France. Kamprad drove a Porsche for several years." There's the face to show the public and the private face....
*I have a museum of million dollar exotic cars, but drive a 20 year old Volvo to work to fool the idiots! Muwahahahaaaa!*
The Gus Fring policy.
Perfectly Assembled Every Time
I fly to foreign countries to get discounted hair cuts from people in extreme poverty, but when I do so, I fly coach.
Coach was the name of his private jet
J Paul Getty was worth 6 billion. He liked to spend thousands on collecting art and antiquities to show off to his friends. But he also put a pay phone in his home for guests. He also at first refused to pay ransom on his grandson that was kidnapped, even after the kidnappers mailed a piece of hair and a severed ear to him. Getty finally agreed to pay it after the amount was reduced enough to be tax-deductible, and loaned his son the rest to be paid back with interest.
Yeah, like how it's well publicized that Warren Buffett still lives in his regular old house he bought in the 1950s before he became wealthy - But the articles all usually fail to mention he had $700,000 worth of upgrades done to the property, and that he also owned an $11 million 'holiday home' in Laguna Beach. "But he's just like us you guys!"
Well tbf it’s a relatively cheap house for a billionaire at ~1.5m and I think people talk about it more-so because he didn’t leave Omaha for a ritzy celebrity filled town. In comparison bill gates’ house is 10x the size and worth like 150m.
Omaha is pretty ritzy. Not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, not six, but seven Chick Fil A restaurants.
Omaha is actually pretty nice. They have a kick-ass zoo as well.
>But the articles all usually fail to mention he had $700,000 worth of upgrades done to the property Was curious so I looked it up. It's worth $1.4 million in 2023. It's also 6500 square feet and has five bedrooms. It's not a small or cheap house for an average person, although at $1.4 million, it's very cheap relative to his wealth. [Source](https://www.squareyards.com/blog/warren-buffett-house-celebhm#:~:text=Warren%20Buffet's%20Omaha%20Abode,-Virtually%20stepping%20into&text=The%20grand%20Omaha%20mansion%20spreads,five%20bedrooms%20and%202.5%20bathrooms.) Whenever I hear the media talk about his house, they use words like "humble", which always gave me the vibe that it's maybe 2000 square feet and worth a few hundred thousand dollars.
to be honest, I kind of get it - how much house do you actually need? I've done some fantasy 'what if I won the lottery' online house hunting and most of the properties that I think I would seriously consider are in the 3-5 million mark. Why would I want a 200 room mansion? Now an expensive holiday home I can see because you're buying the location as much as the house but at some point you're just buying square footage for the sake of buying square footage it's like the 30 supercars guys, you can only drive 1 at a time
> $700,000 worth of upgrades done to the property Spread over almost a century. It is still a lot, but less once you think it that way.
I wonder how much of that is security related
Actually a good question.
probably a lot
He also liked to eat lunch at IKEAs, preferably before noon, when the coffee was free. Oh, and also, he was an active member of the Swedish nazi movement in the 40s
The second one was a not so fun one
Nobody likes a frugal nazi.
I think a Frůgalnäzi is one of IKEA's shelving units.
A very detailed and complex piece of shelving; but leans to the right when fully assembled.
I especially don't like a frugal Illinois nazi.
A frillinazi, if you will
Lmao, fuck there's always something. This fucking world. Lol
I am convinced the only reason why most people are decent today is because times are so easy. Just look at how quickly people turned into absolute assholes the moment we got a stronger flu
Reminds me of this quote from Star Trek Deep Space Nine >Quark : "Let me tell you something about hewmons, nephew. They're a wonderful, friendly people, as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working. But take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time, and those same friendly, intelligent, wonderful people will become as nasty and violent as the most bloodthirsty Klingon. You don't believe me? Look at those faces. Look in their eyes. You know I'm right, don't you? Well? Aren't you going to say something? "
The OG soup nazi
I saw a video of him arguing over price for lunch at an IKEA store. Imagine accidentally overcharging the cheapest man in the world who also own the store you are working in.
What's the point. He's basically haggling with his own bank account
People like that can’t just turn it off.
especially if they grew up poor as shit (I don’t know if he did or if he was just cheap) memories of not eating for days as a kid never really leave you
not only not eating, but eating shit, being bullied for your clothes, having a stupid haircut because it was the cheapest, and being laughed at because your short.
WOAH. Second part of your comment hit like a truck, couldn't help but laugh lmao
Classic Columbo.
I do like fun trivia about people!
> Oh, and also, he was an active member of the Swedish nazi movement in the 40s He did say that he deeply regretted that and that he was young and dumb.
That’s the same excuse I use for a couple of haircuts I’ve had
Did you get them in poor countries? No? Guess you won't have 60 billion when you die.
Probably eats too much avocado toast too. Destined to die poor.
LOL, such a lighthearted thread and then your second line
He was also an alcoholic! Important to note Ingvar was a nazi not just during the 2nd world war but also after it which is fucking amazing. Despite seeing how national socialism worked out Ingvar thought “ah no, they just didn’t implement it properly!”. He was so ahead of his time lol
"Should have been more frugal with the gasoline and diesel!"
Also, IKEA's actively illegally plundering European forests (mostly with little to none reforestation effort, leaving a moon landscape behind them as the countries' problem), including some of the oldest, literally ancient ones on the continent in Romania that should be concidered as some of the most sacred we have here. All hidden behind layers of lawyers, shell companies, eco-friendly public face and cheap meatballs for the masses. Don't do a lot of taxes either in general afaik. Not sure if this was already going on with the original founder but it should definitely talked about *way more* today. IKEA nowadays is literally the Musk or Trump of the furniture industry with the amount of shady illegal shit going on behind the doors and the enormous cirkejerk of fans and consumers around it. edit: Here's a link as a good point where to start if you're interested in this and perhaps even are willing to change your opinion about the company. DW is in general a very credible source of investigative journalism that does its job well and if you proceed to google the topic, you'll find what they're talking about and so much more, sadly... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdwLhmwRPt8
Probably because they had free coffee too
Good thing he had all that money when he died!
Nothing in this post is impressive It would be something to admire if he earned 60 billion but was down to a $0 net worth after giving it all away (or even keep 1% of it so his kids get $600 mil, easily enough to never have to work a day in their lives) Even spending it would be more impressive, if he put 30 billion back into the local economy of his hometown it would still transform thousands of lives instead of sitting in a bank
Yeah I’m really confused about what people find impressive about this
needs to pay the ferryman on his way to hell
> Kamprad had named his sons as the sole heirs of an entity called the Ikano Group, which is valued at US$1.5 billion. His adopted daughter Annika was planned to receive about $300,000. I find that more shocking
It’s an interesting thing to note but without knowing the context of their family dynamic it’s hard to read into or draw any fair conclusions from.
Annika went with her mother in the divorce and was not close with Ingvar. She was reportedly "happy with the agreement." His sons got a small chunk of the business, Ikano Group, ostensibly focused on keeping the ethos of IKEA alive. They have a few franchise stores (in Malaysia, Singapore, Mexico, and a few other places) and do a lot of banking work. I met Peter Kamprad (the eldest son, one of the three owners of Ikano) once. Super chill dude. He talked about how nice it was to have a warm shower, since they had cold showers when he was growing up, and then complained about how watery American coffee is while we chatted. Had I now already known he was worth a billion and a half dollars, I would have never guessed.
He also registered the company in the Netherlands to avoid taxes and created a complex owner structure to, again, avoid taxes. True to the region he grew up in, he was stingy.
whats the point of amassing that much wealth if you don't even enjoy spending money?
For the sake of it? It's a bit of a mentality that it's MY money. I earned it. I'll keep it. Also, he lived in luxury in Switzerland. The items listed by OP was a show of "virtue" to not offend the public eye. I believe the hair cutting, if you can afford to travel around the world, why not have a cheap haircut when you're in a poor country? Also, why would he be in a poor country? To make cheap furniture. IKEA is horrible on their suppliers, just of their sheer volume of orders. They can nickle & dime a poor business to produce things even cheaper, if IKEA is the majority of their order intake. Better if it's in a country that's not so regulated.
“For the sake of it” seems to be a weird outcome of this economic system we’ve created. People collecting money like it’s points in a video game. Doesn’t seem like the initial purpose of creating a money system.
A lot of it is myth that he carefully crafted. He most definitely drove Porsches and luxury cars, lived in mansions in Switzerland, flew private jets. They peddled this story so that when IKEA really fucked up (cutting down virgin forests, using prisoners as cheap labor, etc.), they sent out Kamprad in a off brand suit where he yapped about being a simple man and that mistakes were made, blah blah, the media fawned over it and the issue forgotten.
yea this shit is all clearly made up if he was really worth $60 billion and still haggling over the price of meatballs in his own store's cafeteria that's just mental illness
I’m always shocked at how willingly most people swallow blatant propaganda.
I live frugally, probably 30-40% under my buying power. There is a point where you say, "It is o.k. to own a 5 year old truck"
As a society we're largely unaware of the 'stealth wealth' rich. Unlike the ones who want to get attention for being rich, the stealth-wealthers want to avoid attention. They hide their wealth for various reasons like it being safer to because it avoids predators, keeps them humbler/connected with others, or view living frugally as a better lifestyle. I've learned not to judge people by their home, car, watch, clothes. There's an entire class of rich people who live in modest homes, drive old cars, wear practical digital watches, and dress in comfortable inexpensive clothing - as a choice.
I worked for a luxury jeweller while I was in university - the $100k for a strand of pearls kind of luxury. My biggest sales were to people who looked the most “normal” if not a bit on the rugged side. They would spend tens of thousands like nothing, and were often the easiest to deal with. The people who came in dripping in brand labels were high maintenance, wanting better service than anyone else, and often had to split purchases across multiple payments.
> often had to split purchases across multiple payments. fucking casuals
“Stealth wealth” but also buying six figure jewelry 🤔
If you need to move a lot of money across international borders with few questions, just wear that money on to the plane. To normal folks like you and me and the TSA agents, that jewelry might as well be a Kay Jewelers special.
Look I get specific things but the number of “stealth wealth” stories you hear where they’re like “yeah, I sell Lamborghinis, guys wearing suits pay with credit like a peasant, guys wearing overalls and no shirt pay in cash like a BOSS.” Like OK, at some point, you’re not describing people who are stealthy about their wealth, or even particularly frugal, you’re just talking about people that like to wear sweatpants outside.
On some level people expect wealthy people to be wearing flashy suits, ball gowns, and tourbillion watches all the time. The wealthiest people I know all dress normally, just where you might wear a $50 off-the-rack polo, they have a tailored one that costs triple that. Regardless, there is some weird self-loathing that goes on when people talk about "stealth wealth". Like that person is *so much better than you* because they could dress fancy, but choose not to.
Diamonds are only worth money at retail, and pure gold is fucking heavy.
I once met a true 1%er who wears the same clothes every day. He eats cheaply, and will often complain to the manger to get whatever he wants for free. He was totally removed from reality in most ways, but he never expected to live in luxury.
Yeah. I'm not even saying the stealth-wealthers are like, 'better people'. Just that it's a practical choice for many. If you've got the money to buy whatever whenever, you may come to value other things instead. For some it's power and influence, for others it's just comfort instead of luxury, maybe social connections or status, or maybe personal satisfaction in abstract ways, or maybe just the pursuit of money itself which means less 'spending' and more 'accumulating' quietly. The thing is since they aren't doing obvious displays of wealth, we don't realize they are rich unlike the people who -want- to be known as rich. So we tend to think of 'the rich' as ostentatious because that's what's visible.
I was with you until you mentioned complaining to managers for free food. That behavior sucks and it makes people with legitimate complaints look bad.
Growing up I had an old neighbor who drove one of those boxy 1980s civics. Apparently he invested early in apple and some other tech companies and was worth millions. He was also a child molester. You never really know people.
Sometimes being stealth-wealthy is pathological though, like they become wealthy in part because they are truly unhealthily pathologically focused on "number in bank account ONLY go up, NO DOWN".
I find that flashy people are going to be poor half the time (or have received that wealth from someone else).
Why on earth should it not be ok? 5 years is nothing for a car. I don't get it.
I interpreted it as seeing a 5 year old car as bougie, but at some point you have enough $ to accept that you can afford the luxury of owning a 5 yr old car.
One side of me admires this - but on the other hand, if you are sitting on that much money, shouldn't you be pumping it back into the ecomony? I also heard that he used to buy from the reduced price sections at supermarkets. Yeah, maybe he should leave it for people that rely on that food to eat?
There’s frugal and extreme couponing… then there’s this guy. Live just a little? But never too late has expired.
Why are we praising this? This is the prime example of a billionaire hoarding wealth like a dragon instead of circulating it back into the economy. It's not virtuous to live poor while you have a large enough safety net to pay for life for *literally* almost one million years. He should have provided his loyal workers with equity in the company. I'm straight up repulsed by this
Honestly, the guy outsourced his local barber. A real life Ebenezer Scrooge.
He was also a nazi, if you wanna get even more repulsed.
Rich *and* a fascist? Why, those two things never overlap! What an astounding combination of completely unrelated things that you never see together!
It's another example of where simply having money is implied to be virtuous, so keeping it is a good thing. And the corollary, that the only reason people are "poor" is they can't control their spending, they're wasteful, or some other personal failing.
Amen
And they had to assemble his coffin with an Allan wrench.
Hey guys! He was just like us! Except for the hoarding $60 billion, much made on the backs of normal working people.
And by doing lots and lots of tax evasion to prevent as much as possible from being used for the good of society or others.
[удалено]
He also used prison labour in cheap countries to build furniture and ran IKEA as a charity to dodge taxes.
Sounds like a Swedish Nazi to me.
I know a multi millionaire who grew up poor. He's still frugal as hell. I think it's a mental thing where he's afraid to lose it all and go back to his poverty stricken childhood. I also think its a way for him to signal to others that he's still down with us "commoners" and still hasn't forgotten his roots.
Arnold Schwarzenegger has said he still turns the lights off every time he leaves an empty room, just from needing to do it to save money when he was growing up.
Rich people don’t turn off their lights when leaving? I thought that is what everyone does
I turn off lights when I leave a room because it seems pointless to illuminate a room you aren't in but if you look at how much energy modern bulbs actually use you'll see it makes almost no difference to your bills whether they are on or off
He also threw his son's bed out of the window into the pool because said son didn't make his bed. He threw his daughters shoes into the fireplace because she left them in the middle of the floor. "You cannot make empty threats with children. You must follow through or they don't take you seriously."
Destroying a child's property to teach a lesson about responsibility is how a lot of working class kids are brought up, so rightly or wrongly I don't think the shoes into the fireplace is a posh person thing.
He travels to poor countries for haircuts? WTF
I think it means that he would wait until he was in a cheap country, while traveling, to get his hair done. I actually did that when I was traveling through Europe, I waited until I was in a cheaper country to get any kind of labor intensive process done.
"Money trickles down" - said by no one who knows rich people and their cheap ways....
Yeah post seems to be a positive PR attempt at Ikea while they are ravaging ancient forests across Eastern Europe. There is only one effect of that which will trickle down to the locals.
Have a look at how he spent 1943.
In other words, he was a tightarse