Jackpot Quotes

“I love money. I love everything about it. I bought some pretty good stuff. Got me a $300 pair of socks. Got a fur sink. An electric dog polisher. A gasoline powered turtleneck sweater. And, of course, I bought some dumb stuff, too. —STEVE MARTIN”
― Michael Mechanic, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All

“I love money. I love everything about it. I bought some pretty good stuff. Got me a $300 pair of socks. Got a fur sink. An electric dog polisher. A gasoline powered turtleneck sweater. And, of course, I bought some dumb stuff, too. —STEVE MARTIN”
― Michael Mechanic, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All

“Researchers have found we all have a tendency to emphasize obstacles and downplay our own luck and privilege. “I run on the beach,” Paul Piff told me by way of illustration. “Some days I feel like I’m going particularly fast, and on those very same days, when I’m coming back, I feel like, ‘Whoa, that is a heavy wind, and it’s making me go slower. I didn’t realize when I was going fast that there was wind pushing me.’ ”
― Michael Mechanic, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All

“Sociologist Rachel Sherman, who wrote a book called Uneasy Street about the anxieties of wealthy Manhattanites, had one woman nearly cancel their interview because Sherman used the word “affluent” in an outreach email.”
― Michael Mechanic, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All

“The most notable aspect of our economy is not how innovative or resilient it is, Zucman says, but the fact that more than 165 million Americans today live with startlingly little income, a declining life expectancy, and profound stress about their ability to get by. Half of the population of the richest country on the planet “is not prospering,” he says. And soaring incomes at the top have left the rest of us fighting for crumbs.”
― Michael Mechanic, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All

“That’s where Janis Spindel comes in. Spindel is the founder of Serious Matchmaking, a Manhattan-based firm whose specialty is finding spouses for (mostly) straight men with Forbes 400–level wealth. “We’re the Rolls-Royce or the Bentley of matchmaking,” Spindel boasts. Her typical client has from two to nine homes, she says. “They have all their toys: cars up the wazoo, planes up the wazoo, yachts up the wazoo.” They are hedge funders, real estate developers, “captains of industries.… I have a lot of amazing-beyond-belief celebrities, politicians, entrepreneurs. I mean, clearly we don’t deal with teachers or blue-collar or white-collar people. That’s not what the women we deal with want.”
― Michael Mechanic, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All

“And remember how our friend Jonathan, who sold his online education company for $40 million, felt after his liquidity event: “You’re fear-based now.”
― Michael Mechanic, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All

“We’ve covered the time and work and responsibility a jackpot often entails, the isolation, trust and security issues, and the reluctance of the superwealthy to engage with outsiders. Well, all of the above was shaping up to be a hurdle for Bob Kenny, who was eager to learn about the inner lives of America’s wealthiest citizens. We met Kenny before. He’s a developmental psychologist and cofounder of North Bridge Advisory Group, which helps superwealthy parents and their children “manage the unique opportunities, dilemmas, and challenges that can accompany family money.” Back in 2007, though, he was the newly minted associate director of Boston College’s Center on Wealth and Philanthropy. The center’s data guru, John Havens, had projected that the baby boomers and their successors would leave behind about $59 trillion in private wealth between 2007 and 2061. Some portion of that would go to charity, and so getting a handle on the mindset of America’s elite was of big interest to the philanthropic world. With a $250,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Kenny and Havens set out to survey ultra-high-net-worth families. “If you’ve got kids and you got more money then you’re going to spend in your lifetime, you’ve got a dilemma,” Kenny explains. “And if you don’t think about it and plan it out a little bit, you’re going to cause a problem.… You gonna give it to them now, give it to them later, not going to give it to them at all? How do you talk about it? How do you think about it?”
― Michael Mechanic, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All

“But as he approached fifty, Kenny yearned to do something different. Someone told him that More Than Money—the same inheritors group Jeff Weissglass got involved with—was hiring an executive director. He landed the position and, in short order, discovered that his pregnant teens had at least one thing in common with these young heirs and heiresses: Society defined and stereotyped both groups by how much money they did or didn’t have. The foundations that funded adolescent pregnancy care assumed the girls were getting knocked up because they were poor, “which was not necessarily true,” Kenny says, whereas the inheritors were pegged as “entitled and spoiled and lazy—and there’s no basis for that.” The anti-inheritor bias proved so toxic that some of Kenny’s former colleagues shunned him after he took the new job. “They’re like, ‘What a sellout! What a cop-out! Why would you do that?’ ” he recalls. “What does it say about our culture that everyone wants to win the lottery in some way, shape, or form, and there’s a whole segment of our culture that hates people who win the big payout.” This is indeed a paradox. Oscar Mayer heir Chuck Collins gave away his $500,000 inheritance in 1986, when he was a young man. (Invested in the S&P 500, it would be worth about $14 million today.) He has since dedicated himself, through the Institute for Policy Studies, to educating the American public about inequality. His memoir, Born on Third Base, includes the following scene: Speaking to a crowd of about 350 people, he asks who among them feels rage toward the wealthiest 1 percent. Almost everyone raises a hand. He then asks, “How many of you wish you were in the wealthiest 1 percent?” They laugh, but again, almost everyone. “People are envious,” Kenny says. “And what you end up doing with envy is demeaning whoever it is that you envy, because they have what we think we deserve.” During his time at More Than Money, Kenny grew friendly with Paul Schervish, then the director of the Center on Wealth and Philanthropy, and when Schervish offered him the associate director job, Kenny jumped. He’d seen how inheritors grappled with their unearned fortunes. Now he wanted to better understand their parents. Havens was the numbers guy “and I was in charge of: ‘I’d like to know what these people are thinking, and nobody ever asks them.’ ”
― Michael Mechanic, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All

“The center’s report, “The Joys and Dilemmas of Wealth,” was never released, in part because it was deemed insufficiently quantitative. But journalist Graeme Wood was given access to the five-hundred-plus pages of survey responses for a piece in The Atlantic”
― Michael Mechanic, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All

“The first hints of this emerged in the early and mid-1990s, at the tail end of the crack epidemic. Suniya Luthar is now sixty-two, with an infectious smile, bright brown eyes, and short snow-white hair. Back then, she was a fledgling psychologist working as an assistant professor and researcher in the department of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. She was studying resiliency among teenagers in low-income urban communities, and one of her early findings was that the most popular kids were also among the most destructive and aggressive at school. Was this a demographic phenomenon, she wondered, or merely an adolescent one, this tendency to look up to peers who acted out? To find out, she needed a comparison group. A research assistant suggested they recruit students from his former high school in an affluent suburb. Luthar’s team ultimately enlisted 488 tenth graders—about half from her assistant’s high school and half from a scruffy urban high school. The affluent community’s median household income was 80 percent higher than the national median, and more than twice that of the low-income community. The rich community also had far fewer families on food stamps (0.3 percent vs. 19 percent) and fewer kids getting free or reduced-price school lunches (1 percent vs. 86 percent). The suburban teens were 82 percent white, while the urban teens were 87 percent nonwhite. Luthar surveyed the kids, asking a series of questions related to depression and anxiety, drug use ranging from alcohol and nicotine to LSD and cocaine, and participation in delinquent acts at home, at school, and in the community. Also examined were grades, “social competence,” and teachers’ assessments of each student. After crunching the numbers, she was floored. The affluent teens fared poorly relative to the low-income teens on “all indicators of substance use, including hard drugs.” This flipped the conventional wisdom on its head. “I was quite taken aback,” Luthar recalls.”
― Michael Mechanic, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All

“The reason it never occurred to her is that, when she was starting out, few in her field were even considering wealthy families. This lack of attention amounted to “an interesting sort of reverse classism,” she says. Like Kenny, she took flak from colleagues when she switched from studying the problems of the poor to those of the privileged. “Why would you want to work with them?” people would ask. “Don’t they have everything going? Why are you wasting your time?” The notion seemed to be that the rich people’s problems were not as real, or that wealthy people were unworthy of empathy. “There is a lot of judgment,” Luthar says. “And now we have the whole thing where the parents are ‘helicopter’ and ‘snowplowing.’ It’s relatively rare that someone comes along and says, ‘Can we talk about this stuff with some kindness?’ ”
― Michael Mechanic, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All

“The Monopoly experiment wasn’t the most rigorous science ever, and Piff never published it—although the study was later replicated by others and used in his popular TED Talk, “Does Money Make You Mean?” But his observations were consistent with a large and growing body of work by Piff and various colleagues. Inside and outside the lab, in a host of experiments deploying a multitude of setups, these researchers have found that people of higher socioeconomic status, compared with those lower down the ladder, are more self-oriented and less attuned to the needs of others. They are more willing to behave unethically in their own self-interest: to lie during negotiations, misreport the results of a dice game that results in a prize, or express willingness to steal from an employer—pilfering food from a restaurant where they work, for instance, or taking a ream of office paper for home use. “Lower-class” participants proved equally willing to do such things only when the goal was to help someone else, such as swiping the restaurant food for a hungry friend.”
― Michael Mechanic, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All

“It follows from these results that wealthy people who are exposed to the suffering of others should exhibit less compassion than their poorer counterparts do, and this has been confirmed in the lab. When we experience compassion, though nobody knows why, our hearts slow down. Piff’s colleagues Michael Kraus and Jennifer Stellar hooked volunteers up to EKG devices and showed them two short videos, a “neutral” video of a woman explaining how to construct a patio wall and a “compassion” video of cancer-stricken children undergoing chemotherapy. Relative to the wealthier subjects, the poor ones not only reported higher levels of compassion for the children, they had a significantly larger slowdown in heart rate between the neutral video and the compassion video than their wealthy peers.”
― Michael Mechanic, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All

“Piff and his colleagues also have found that wealthier people are more prone to entitlement and narcissistic behavior than poorer ones are. Literally narcissistic! In the classic myth, Narcissus falls in love with his own reflection. In a study of 244 undergraduates, Piff observed that “upper-class” individuals were more likely than their “lower-class” counterparts to regard themselves in a mirror before posing for a photo they were assured nobody would ever see. This was the case even after researchers adjusted the results to account for differences in ethnicity, gender, and the participants’ previously reported levels of self-consciousness. In another memorable experiment, Piff’s team placed a pedestrian at the edge of a busy crosswalk near the Berkeley campus and watched to see which drivers would stop and let the person cross. They recorded vehicle makes and models and estimated ages and genders of the drivers. It was impossible, of course, to know anyone’s true economic circumstances and motivations, but suffice it to say that Fords and Subarus were far more likely to stop than Mercedes and BMWs were. In a related experiment, people driving higher-end cars were more likely to cut off other drivers at a busy intersection.”
― Michael Mechanic, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All

“Money changes everything. In Billionaires, a book by political scientist Darrell West, one member of the three-comma club brought up his “get-a-senator” strategy—a handy tactic, given that a lone senator can block objectionable legislation or pull strings on a favored donor’s behalf. West recalls how Senator Rand Paul held up Senate action for years on a treaty that would have forced Swiss banks to reveal the names of twenty-two thousand wealthy Americans who had assets stashed in overseas accounts, presumably to evade taxes. (An invasion of privacy, Paul insisted.) In another case, a billionaire hedge fund manager persuaded Democratic senator Edward Markey to write a letter to the SEC calling for an investigation of Herbalife, a multilevel marketing company the financier suspected of fraud, and whose stock he also happened to be short-selling. The effort paid off. After Markey’s letter was made public, Herbalife’s share price plummeted 14 percent.”
― Michael Mechanic, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All

“Wealth can be “created,” true enough, and new industries inevitably pop up that bring prosperity and opportunity to certain groups. But for the few to accumulate mind-boggling wealth and privilege, the many must have little.”
― Michael Mechanic, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All

“A magnet on his mini-fridge reads: “Falling down is part of life. Getting back up is living.”
― Michael Mechanic, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All

“Average wealth per adult (not household) within the wealthiest 10 percent of the population was about $2.8 million in 2019. Move down one decile and average wealth plummets to about $555,000—then $293,600, then $152,000. If you ranked in the twenty-fourth wealth percentile that year, you had $199 to your name—about enough to buy one of the cheaper propane grills at Home Depot. This is how depraved things have become in a republic whose founding document asserted that all people (okay, all white male landowners) were created equal.”
― Michael Mechanic, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All

“In 2018, the Boston asset management firm Cerulli Associates calculated that, within a quarter century, 45 million American families would pass along $68 trillion.”
― Michael Mechanic, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All

“Families haven’t always been pushing back against the kind of planning that’s been imposed on them, in part because they don’t understand the plans,” Patricia Angus, who works with some of the world’s most affluent families on wealth and philanthropy matters, commented during a Family Office Association panel discussion.”
― Michael Mechanic, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All

“Covey, who edits a U.S. Trust (now Bank of America) publication called Practical Drafting, realized that the changes would enable a new, more lucrative conduit for tax-avoidance: the GRAT. The cure was worse than the disease. “They completely blew it,” Covey recalls. “Instead of tightening up on the law, they loosened up on the law, and they didn’t know that!”
― Michael Mechanic, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All

“The median net worth of white U.S. households in 2016 was $171,000, according to one widely cited study—ten times the wealth of Black households and eight times that of Latino households. (The Institute for Policy Studies, using a different methodology, reports racial wealth disparities of 50x and 25x, respectively.) Such results cannot—though many a pseudo-scholar has tried—be attributed to differences in natural talent and work ethic and leadership ability. Rather, throughout our history, merchants and politicians, bankers and realtors, restaurants and social clubs, colleges and corporations, landlords and cops, have taken one look at people with darker skin, stood up from their stools, and said, “You’re at the wrong bar, n—.”
― Michael Mechanic, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All

“As it happens, he and Raphael are both very much focused on the future. Raphael recently created a nonprofit network of successful Black men and women—some white, too—that he named the Lantern Network, after the lanterns people once used to indicate safe houses along the Underground Railroad. His goal is to provide a resource for talented Black professionals who lack the high-powered social networks white men take for granted—the family friends and relatives and neighbors one can turn to for mentorship, financial counsel, introductions, and access to capital. As of summer 2020, the future looked more promising. The COVID crisis had left economic inequality nowhere to hide. Then came the police lynching that broke the camel’s back. An exceedingly bitter election season contributed a third element to what was shaping up to be a perfect storm. The pandemic and “the high-resolution video of the George Floyd murder by someone who was confident that he would NOT be brought to justice” were the catalysts we needed, Raphael said in an email. Overt racism has crawled out of its hole these past four years, but “there are even more nonracists and a growing number of anti-racists who will actively engage in the fight.”
― Michael Mechanic, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All

“At the height of the George Floyd protests, Omar Johnson, a former Apple marketing VP and chief marketing officer for Beats by Dr. Dre, took out a full-page ad in the New York Times. “Dear White corporate America,” he began,… I get it. I know you have the best intentions.… You want to do the right thing. But you just don’t know how. Is that about right? I know it is, because you’ve been calling me. For the past two weeks, several times a day. It’s been the same question: What can I do? He went on to upbraid corporate leaders for failing to nurture Black talent, for failing to include Black people in decision-making, for failing to listen, and ultimately, for failing as businesspeople: “This is a business problem, too. And you fix business problems all the time. So, you got this.” He laid out a game plan. Most notably, “You need to hire more Black people. Period.” Identify, recruit, develop, and elevate talented Black employees. Partner with Black-owned businesses. Believe in the people you hire. Mentor them. “No doubt, it’s daunting,” Johnson writes. “But lean into the discomfort.” And “before you call me again—before you ask me what you should say, or what you should change—I’ll tell you my answer right now: Absolutely everything… See you in the room.”
― Michael Mechanic, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All

“CrowdSmart, which Polese cofounded in 2015, uses “human-powered AI” to help investors choose which young companies to bankroll. In 2016, to test its platform, CrowdSmart raised a small fund and invested in nearly thirty start-ups that its algorithm had rated highly. Within eighteen months, 80 percent of the companies went on to attract outside follow-up funding at an increased valuation—a substantially better result than most venture funds achieve, Polese says—and 40 percent were founded or led by women. That’s what happens”
― Michael Mechanic, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All

“CrowdSmart, which Polese cofounded in 2015, uses “human-powered AI” to help investors choose which young companies to bankroll. In 2016, to test its platform, CrowdSmart raised a small fund and invested in nearly thirty start-ups that its algorithm had rated highly. Within eighteen months, 80 percent of the companies went on to attract outside follow-up funding at an increased valuation—a substantially better result than most venture funds achieve, Polese says—and 40 percent were founded or led by women. That’s what happens when you de-bias the process.”
― Michael Mechanic, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All

“As the cofounder and executive director, since 2003, of a nonprofit called Inspired Legacies, she has advised thousands of women, and hundreds of men and families and nonprofits, on philanthropic and financial matters. Her clients include several billionaires, and most have assets ranging from $10 million to $500 million. “Women are more intimidated by what they don’t know,” she says, “and doubt is cast on them: Are they crazy, or are they actually doing the right thing?”
― Michael Mechanic, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All

“In 1906, by Reich’s account, Rockefeller’s trusted advisor, Frederick Gates, delivered him a warning: “Your fortune is rolling up, rolling up like an avalanche! You must keep up with it! You must distribute it faster than it grows! If you do not, it will crush you, and your children, and your children’s children!”
― Michael Mechanic, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All

“You feel like you’re in a high-end furniture store, or even a spa, for that matter. Just very stately, appointed, everything is very intentional,” says forty-four-year-old Scott Pope. Pope is the CEO of ROAMD, a network of nearly one hundred membership-based concierge medical practices. He’s a pharmacist by training, and a concierge patient in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he lives. Joining ROAMD lets concierge doctors extend their wealthy clients the same level of attention while traveling that they enjoy at home. For annual fees typically ranging from $2,000 to $10,000 per head—some docs charge up to $40,000—a person can expect highly individualized, proactive, and unusually private primary care.”
― Michael Mechanic, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All