Morford of the Chronicle, a master of colorful rhetoric, swings at a very fat pitch ...
... the new home being built in Mumbai right now for Mukesh Ambani, the fifth wealthiest man in the world....
... is the world's first billion-dollar personal residence. Actually, $2 billion. Imagine the fanciest, most ridiculously overpampered, seriously egomaniacal hotel you can possibly think of, and dip it in solid gold. Then sprinkle it with diamonds and Bugatti Veyrons and the fine, tender pelts of a million baby seals. That's the parking garage...
...It all makes delightful contrast to the recent, awkwardly titillating article in this very newspaper that revealed the annual salaries of various Bay Area workers, from the head of the University of California school system ($591K) to the San Francisco police chief ($250K) to all those surprisingly well-paid firefighters (well over $200K), on down to the guy who runs the city's pothole-filling crew (over $100K and absolutely worth every penny because oh my God, potholes), and on back up to one of the pitchers for the Giants, Barry Zito, who rakes in a cool $14 million per season because, well, he's a pro athlete. They're supposed to be caricatures of real humans...
It's a wonderful read, but there's more than entertainment, awe and envy here. We're at a curious point in the history of wealth -- even an infinite amount of money does not buy an enormously better life than an upper-middle class American has.
Power, yeah, sure, money buys power. I'd like some of that power, which I would of course use only for Good.
Other than power though ...
I don't want a yacht. I don't want a plane. I would like to drop twenty years, but money can't buy that. Yet.
Interesting times.
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