So... Alright - People with too much money and the dumb shit they buy

Episode Date: January 23, 2024

Geoff takes a look at how much money some people have, and how much more money some other people used to have. Sponsored by DraftKings Download the DraftKings Sportsbook app and use code ALRIGHT Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So I was reading the other day about this strawberry in Japan that's so expensive it costs like 10 bucks per berry. And I was thinking, man, I really, I don't want to pay 10 bucks for a strawberry, but I must admit, as a lover of all fruits, the idea that a strawberry would be worth 10, would taste good enough to be a $10 value. I really do want to try that strawberry. I don't know. Maybe next time I go to Japan, if I ever find occasion to go to Japan again, or the opportunity rather to go to Japan again, maybe I will keep my eye out for that strawberry. But that just got me thinking in general about the most expensive things in the world right

and so i googled it and would you like to know the most expensive things in the world in 2023 number 15 is the damien hurst dead shark the one that he uh in the tiger shark i believe that he stuck in formaldehyde uh that thing sold for i think eight million dollars last year that doesn't seem most expensive at all what is this i guess these are just most expensive things bought in 2023 mariah carey's engagement ring well she's worth more than 300 million dollars on her own. And her fiance, I think, was not too shabby himself. Anyway, apparently he bought an engagement ring for her that cost $10 million. Jesus Christ. It's the highest purchase price ever for a celebrity engagement ring.

Well, they felt the need to mention the word celebrity, which tells me that there are just normal people that have bought way more expensive rings than that. The perfect pink diamond. Christie's Hong Kong sold a 14.23 carat intense pink diamond to an anonymous buyer for just over 23 million. That was in 2012. I guess it's just just most expensive purchases ever

stupid list all right the chopard 201 carat gemstone watch is worth 25 can you imagine having a watch on your wrist worth 25 million dollars oh lord oh here's a good one i don't know if you guys have heard about this i've been thinking $25 million. Oh, Lord. Oh, here's a good one. I don't know if you guys have heard about this. I've been thinking about doing an episode devoted to just it, maybe. You ever heard of Jeff Bezos' giant clock? If you're not familiar with it,

he's having this clock built somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, and it's going to be designed to run for 10 000 years and that's all it does i think is it just ticks away for 10 000 years and that clock supposedly it's still being built i think i think it's being built like on an island or in a and i don't know i gotta look it up i gotta look it up i don't want to give you guys bad information but uh it is definitely costing him 42 million dollars uh 1962 ferrari gto sold for 48 million dollars that's got to be the most expensive car ever sold right i wonder what is the most expensive car ever most expensive car ever sold right it's probably that no no no no no no there was a 1955 mercedes-benz 300 slr

uhlenhout coupe uh that sold for 135 million dollars in 2022 now i gotta admit they had a picture of it it's real pretty 135 can you Can you imagine? Of course you can't. Who can imagine having $135 million, let alone what they would do with it? Interesting. The carinsurance.com domain name, according to GoDaddy, cost $49.7 million.

The purchase was made by Quinn Street. i don't know what that is but it's probably an investment firm or something 49.7 million dollars for a domain uh if anybody's looking i have eric's boss.com uh oh and jeff's boss.com i bought both of those domains i'll sell you those for nine million. Hell, I'll sell it to you for I'll throw both of them in together. And an email address. Well, I mean, you'd be on it. You could do whatever you want to with it, right?

I would throw both of them together for. Hold on, let me do some quick math in my head. OK, I could let them go. Jeff's boss.com. Eric's boss.com. I feel confident in a bundle deal. Individually, they're going to cost you more, but if you buy them together, I'll cut you a deal. I would let them go $800,000. I'll sell each of them individually for $500,000, but if you want them together, I'll give you a hell of a deal. That's like a 20% discount and you get them for $800,000. That is so much less than the $49.7 million that I'd like you to focus on that part of the transaction and not how much money $800,000 is because in the grand scheme of things,

I mean, if you just stare at that only, sure, $800,000 seems like a ridiculous amount of money to pay for my two vanity domain names, unless you compare it to carinsurance.com, in which case you're paying next to nothing and you're getting twice the domain names carinsurance.com is one domain name anyway if you're interested in buying my domain names let me know now there's another watch the graph hallucination watch 55 million dollars lawrenceff is the chairman of Graff Diamonds. Man, there are so many people out there

that are so rich and fancy that you and I have never heard of. Damn. 110 carats on that thing. How do you fit all that on a watch? The Gustav Klimt painting, Portrait of Adele Block, $135 million.

Jeff Bezos' Beverly Hills House is $165 million. Wow. Eat your heart out, Notch. Your house was only 70 something. Jeez Louise. Well, he, so, okay. So he has this $165 million Beverly Hills house. He has $119 million mansion. He has a $23 million New York City condo, a $23 million house in Washington. And interestingly, they cost the exact same. Well, I guess except for the $165 million estate that he bought from David Geffen. Interesting. The card players painting. There's a lot of paintings on here. Let's just go through. Okay, there's a couple there's a bunch of paintings. The most expensive painting seems to be

450.3 million. that is for leonardo da vinci's salvatore mundi well now i kind of want to see what that looks like let's see oh well that is a it's a pretty cool painting um the internet had it for free so i've seen it i guess i don't own it but you know i can look. Saved myself half a billion dollars. Villa Leopolda, $506 million for a mansion on the French Riviera. It holds the title of second most expensive private residence. The building served as a hospital during World War II and has changed hands several times since its construction in 1902 for Belgian King Leopold II, hence the name. There you go. Via Leopolda. Have you guys ever seen that place? Or Villa Leopolda? Sorry. Villa Leopolda. Fuck me. Good lord. Okay. I think I've seen that in a thousand movies. Okay, yeah.

That one's pretty fancy. thousand movies. Okay, yeah. That one's pretty fancy. So this is an ad from DraftKings to help keep us going. DraftKings Sportsbook is an official sports betting partner of the NFL playoffs, and they're bringing you an offer that'll help you make the playoffs electrifying. And you can't see the copy that I'm reading, but they italicized electrifying, which if I know anything from my journalism experience, that means they're serious about it. And I think that they mean business. New customers can bet five bucks and that is bolded, which leads me to believe they're really serious about that one on any game and get 200 instantly in bonus bets the nfl playoffs are going on right now uh point there were some insane games

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It's obviously got movie theaters and all that kind of stuff in there. I mean, it's a 27-story building. theaters and all that kind of stuff in there. I mean, it's 27 story building. It is owned by billionaire Mukesh Ambani, the richest man in India, who has a net worth of about $84.2 billion. I wonder what that puts him on the richest people in the world today. And then the number one item on this list is the History Supreme Yacht. It's not the largest in the world. That one goes to Jeff Bezos' super yacht, but his only cost a mere $500 million, whereas this one cost $4.5 billion. It took three years to design. It is outfitted with some of the world's priciest materials and amenities. I mean, it would have to be. Can you imagine that ship sinking? Sorry, I took a break to imagine it in my head. It's, uh, good lord. The yacht features gold and

platinum structural fittings, plus gold alloys in the base deck railings, dining area. It better have gold Q-tips for $4.5 billion. It's believed that the Malaysian businessman Robert Kuak, who owns the Shangri-La hotels and resorts, purchased the boat. Oh, I have stayed at a few different Shangri-La hotels in my life. So in some ways, I feel like I helped pay for that boat. Oh, here's OK. These are the most expensive expensive here's a different list let's see what we can get so the oh this is cool the international space station is worth about 150 billion dollars so what's the richest person in the world right now worth richest person that worth elon oh elon musk is number one again great uh. He's worth $245.1 billion. I guess that's why he doesn't give a shit if he ruins Twitter.

$245 billion. So he could theoretically buy the International Space Station and live in it off planet. I wonder how long. Now, okay. So every mega billionaire has a space company now right like uh obviously musk uh richard branson i think his might have just crumbled maybe not bezos has his as well how long until one of those dudes puts a house in space like just a floating orbiting mansion that they hang out in. Do you think it'll happen in

your lifetime? It has to, right? I mean, if you think about I'm 48, I was like 18 before the Internet was a thing. And then it wasn't really a thing until I was in my mid 20s. And then I was around before digital cameras. I was around for cell phones like I've seen cell phones in my lifetime go from those giant go from non-existent to those giant bricks to iPhones that have more processing power than probably the entire United States military and NASA combined in the 1970s. that a billionaire or trillionaire, which I imagine we'll also probably see in our lifetimes, could end up generating so much wealth that they could pull something like that off. I wonder how quickly it'll happen, more than anything. Hubble telescope is only $2.1 billion.

So you're telling me that there's a yacht on earth worth more than the hubble telescope that seems out of whack or or or it seems like somebody overpaid for a yacht maybe that's the answer there all right so i think where i was going with all this i'm trying to remember before i got before i took 11 off ramps, richest person of all time, right? Because we were watching, or we were talking, my wife Emily and her friend Meg, they're both fans of the Gilded Age, which is that, I don't know if it's Netflix or HBO,

but that's some show that exists in like Victorian New York around the time of the Vanderbilts and like the Rockefellers and the Astors and all of those like turn of the century oil and rail and fur barons. And those people were, I think if you if you account for inflation, those people were way richer than than the richest people are now. So, yeah, like John D. Rockefellereller it's estimated 2023 net worth would be 320 billion dollars so dwarfing the richest people now like elon musk uh can only dream of being worth 320 billion dollars cornelius vanderbilt would be worth 250 billion dollars today now is he he would be 250 billion dollars today now is he he would be anderson cooper's great grandfather how is anderson cooper related to core nealius vanderbilt great great great grandfather

all right so the rockefellers and the asters and shit they were like the richest americans ever but that's not america's but that's nothing. There have been way richer people in the world. Let's look at the top, the richest people of all time. We'll just do top three. Yeah. Emperor Xinzong, who lived from 1048 to 1085. So not a whole, not a long life. Uh, he was from China, the Song Dynasty. He's estimated to... Holy shit. I don't know. I can't put a price tag on it, but they say that the Song Dynasty, at the time that he ran it, the nation accounted for between 25 and 30 percent of the world's economic output. So at the time that he was ruling the Song Dynasty, they were responsible for 30 percent of the world's economic output. That's fucking crazy. Number two is Augustus Caesar. Now, that's interesting because if you

watch our Monday face adjacent show called the break show where we open up baseball cards, sports cards, non sports cards, silly cards, whatever, Alf cards, Dallas cards. We opened up some historical cards the other day and I got an a relic card that had a piece of an outfit from Augustus Caesar and from Julius Caesar on it. So the second richest person of all time is officially entered into the F*** Face Collection. That's pretty cool. Good for him. That's how you know you've made it when you make it into the F*** Face Collection. He lived from 63 BC to 14 AD in Rome, obviously, and his wealth is estimated at about $4.6 trillion. His empire also accounted for about 30 percent of the world's economic uh output at the

time and but they estimate yeah he uh he he holy shit augustus personally owned all of egypt while he was alive yeah and they uh they think it was his fortune would be the equivalent of 4.6 trillion which is nothing compared to apparently mansa musa who who was the king of Timbuktu and is referred to often as the wealthiest person in history. It just lists his wealth as richer than anyone could ever describe. There's no, I'm just going to read this from here. There's really no way to put an accurate number on his wealth. Records are scarce if non-existent, and contemporary sources describe the king's riches in terms that are impossible for the time. Some tales of his famous pilgrimage to Mecca,

during which Musa's spending was so lavish that it caused a currency crisis in Egypt. What? His vacation caused a... Well, maybe I shouldn't say it was a... That's not fair. It wasn't a vacation, it was a pilgrimage. But his pilgrimage caused a currency crisis in Egypt.

He spent so much money. He carried with him hundreds of pounds of gold. They say one year of Malian gold production probably generated about a ton. Others say his army consisted of 200,000 men with 40,000 archers. Okay. But to get caught up in the king's exact wealth is to miss the point, according to Rudolph Ware, an associate professor at the University of Michigan. His riches were so immense that people struggled to even describe them. And this is a direct quote from him. This is the richest guy anyone's ever seen. That's the point. They're trying to find words to explain that. There are pictures of him holding a scepter of gold

on a throne of gold, holding a cup of gold with a golden crown on his head. Imagine as much gold as you think a human being could possess and then double it. That's what all the accounts are trying to communicate. Well, I guess they can't put a number on it, but they can rate it higher than 4.6 trillion, so we can assume that he was worth at least 4.7 trillion,

although it sounds like way more than that. I wonder what it was like to be that rich. I have a feeling I'll never know. All right.