“The very rich are different from you and me”: “Yes, they have more money,” goes one of the most overused quotes of all time, the one we use as an alternative to the one about happy families. A spurious quote, moreover, allegedly reporting a dialogue between Francis Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Two writers who knew both American and European rich people well.<\/p>\n
They chronicled these two very different worlds, albeit with some points of contact\u2014the French Riviera, Monte Carlo, Venice\u2014with American rich people then as now making their grand tour, and the occasional European (more rarely) venturing to America, more to see how a factory worked so they could copy it than to admire its natural beauties.<\/p>\n
But does any difference still exist today between the rich on the two shores? There are no studies on the subject except one from Brown University\u2014an institution beloved by wealthy Italians who send their children there\u2014according to which wealthy Americans live longer than their poor compatriots, but not longer than poor Europeans, and therefore less than wealthy Europeans. Otherwise, wealth has expanded so much in recent years that it overflows: on one hand we witness a great celebration of American rich people: in historical version (The Gilded Age); catastrophic-tourist (The White Lotus and its derivatives); psychoanalytic (Succession), with a whole genre that has a name, “eat the rich,” which consists of putting rich people in unpleasant situations to see how they get out (though in our time there was already “Rich People Cry Too”). On the other hand, the celebration of European rich people is increasingly nostalgic; one of the buzzwords of the idiot-sphere of Instagram and TikTok is “old money,” so that any boor from Wisconsin who buys an old gold watch or an old Land Rover believes he looks in every way like a former Eton student.<\/p>\n
The dream of old Europe (as imagined by Americans) still works: with the boom in low-speed, high-luxury trains, the various Orient Expresses that now connect not only the old Paris-Constantinople route, but almost all cardinal points of Mediterranean tourism, allowing the harridan from Ohio to immediately feel like Lauren Bacall dealing with Poirot. The clash, however, is visible on high-speed trains, when Americans burst in with their thousand and one rolling suitcases, sitting in regularly wrong seats, and placing said suitcases in the corridor, blocking anyone’s passage (and then, what could they possibly put in those suitcases, if they spend fifteen days always and only in shorts and tank tops?).<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the rich are getting richer. The 400 wealthiest Americans are now worth 6.6 trillion dollars, 1.2 trillion more than just a year ago, certifies the usual Forbes magazine; there’s no data on European ones, because naturally the old continent has a smidgen more discretion\u2014one doesn’t talk about money and bodily extremities at the table; or at least one didn’t. It would also be better not to make money, but to inherit it. Thus the great European rich make the news often for stories perhaps of wills, which could have come from a nineteenth-century novel: aside from the Agnelli Elkann telenovela with new developments of possibly forged paintings and the Avvocato’s wishes possibly hidden; and then the Herm\u00e8s heir who wants to leave his assets to the gardener. If America had to coin a word, “nepo-babies,” to define those who inherit money, power and status, here we would need a word for those who create them from scratch. It would be an ugly word, because in Europe, new money is always tacky. Social mobility evokes sweat and other embarrassing things. A study I came across some time ago certified that the five richest and most powerful families in Florence today are the same as in the sixteenth century, when America had just been discovered; and yet today, while it’s true that almost all wealthy Europeans are not first generation (the Quandts of BMW, the Ferreros of Nutella, and the bombastic Fran\u00e7oise Bettencourt-Meyers, heir to the owner of L’Or\u00e9al, another story of donations and wills, with notable documentary), except for the richest of all, Bernard Arnault, a new generation is emerging, like the new bitcoin rich who occasionally pop up in rankings generating spectacular envy in us poor people: it’s one thing to be children of BMW or Nutella or L’Or\u00e9al shampoos, but how does one become extremely rich in one generation? And yet they exist, even here, like Giancarlo Devasini, former plastic surgeon holder of a fortune of 9.2 billion that makes him the 270th richest man in the world and fourth in Italy as inventor of Tether, a cryptocurrency or rather “stablecoin” that is the latest craze in this strange cryptocurrency world. Or Andrea Pignataro, another Italian tycoon, 26 billion in assets, built on data analysis.<\/p>\n
These are two Italian billionaires who could be American. Two worlds, again, that were once different: usually, complexed Americans married broke European nobility to clean themselves up. Now they’ve lost every complex, and the two shores of the Atlantic have similar customs; and they meet no longer at opera seasons in Paris or London to the delight of novelists like Edith Wharton or screenwriters like Julian Fellowes, but at Indian weddings of unpresentable tycoons, and there between perhaps Balenciaga flip-flops and global-trash oversized watches, distinguishing magnates from Wisconsin and Varese becomes impossible.<\/p>\n
But returning to the initial point, perhaps one point on which Americans are different is that they want to live longer, indeed forever. Obsessed with “longevity,” they aim to defeat death. Especially the “tech bros”: one of the first was Peter Thiel, first in many things, including supporting Trump ten years ago when it wasn’t fashionable: he has all these rituals of seeds, paleo diets and cryotherapies that will make him live a miserable life for at least 120 years. But even the new crop of Silicon Valley types don’t mess around: Sam Altman, the boy genius who created ChatGPT, is one of the few who declined the “lunch with the Financial Times” ritual, in which the British newspaper invites personalities to a restaurant to interview them. He preferred to cook for the journalist on duty himself, to be sure of eating right (then he was heavily criticized for his cooking). Well, in this Europeans seem more moderate. Hard to imagine a Bernard Arnault eating seeds, or a Fran\u00e7oise Bettencourt-Meyers doing cryotherapy (then maybe they do, eh: but perhaps because the old continent is so old that it’s lasted long enough, we’ve already seen plenty, we’re a bit tired, maybe even the rich, whatever).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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