ohRich personWhen you have a billion or more, you tend to lose your sense of humor and your tolerance for ordinary people. You can't spend money, but you think about it. Smart people don't fall into the mistaken idea that wealth is actually theirs. They sell off as much as they can and leave the problem where it belongs – with their children. Being very rich is not a burden, but it's not a blessing either, because unfortunately there is a big gap between what money can buy and what it can't buy. Rich people go round and round, flying, racing, shaving seconds off, because that's all they can do. They never forget that time is not a luxury, it's a killer.
The aliens in Smash's old TV ads are riveting at our stupidity. I imagine them confronting the story of tech billionaire Brian Johnson, who dreams of living forever, taking blood from his 17-year-old son, Talmage. Some truths are best expressed in headlines, so I recently picked one from one of my favorite online publications. The Edge: Your Longevity Magazine“Billionaire vampire trainee injects himself with teenager's blood to reverse biological age”. Johnson, 45, spends $2 million a year on his quest for immortality, a Wordsworth-esque exercise that would be a total hoot if it weren't for the fact that he's also investing heavily in “equipment that tracks erections overnight”. “Selective plasma transfusions from younger donors” corner“The latest craze in the biohacking community,” the procedure “hopes to regrow hair growth, enhance cognitive function, and stave off other markers of biological aging.”
Yes, this happens in Dallas. Yes, Brian looks like Hannibal Lecter (Talmage already looks like 105, btw). But we Brits have our own super-sized mindfuck when it comes to saving and spending cash. Believe it or not, with the cost-of-living crisis raging and the planet boiling over, London has just lost its status as Russia's favourite laundromat, but it's now the private jet capital of Europe. “The obvious reason why private aviation has been so successful in Britain,” says Times“Apart from the island's geography, it's the rise of the wealthy that's the problem.” A private jet takes off or lands at British airports every six minutes, and the chief executive of DiaMonte Jets believes in giving his clients the discretion and privacy they expect. In mid-May, he flew a small contingent to the Cannes Film Festival and the Monaco Grand Prix, and flew West Ham fans to Prague.
In the UK lottery, the story that is told forever – the story that never runs out – is that of the bricklayer who ends up with €90 million. It's funny that in a country that seems to have rejected Europe, the fantasy that really gets people hooked is that of winning the multiple rollover EuroMillions. In the national conversation (which nobody wants to think about) and even in local pub chat, the question “How will you spend the money?” far outweighs “Who will you vote for?”. Leading the charge is Viv Nicholson (later the cover star of The Smiths' single “Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now”), whose husband won the football pool in 1961 and told reporters, “Spend it, spend it, spend it.” Viv struggled, but the idea that ordinary people can be uplifted by wealth, transformed by holidays and furs, is more plausible to many than transformation by work and taxation. In Lotto Britain, the Good Life is Love Islandself-tanners and nail extensions, gym sessions and a never-ending parade of Prosecco.
Time The Sunday Times The first Rich List was published in 1989, and number one was the Queen. At the time, she was worth £5.2 billion, and in a farcical, doily-and-tea-cup kind of way, it seemed logical that the head of state should be the richest person in the country. The first list was full of landed gentry: the Duke of Westminster was second, followed by 11 dukes, six marquess, 14 earls, nine viscounts, and a whole host of ruby-faced swindlers in wax jackets and custard-coloured cords. Published a decade after Thatcher came to power, the list irritated her closest supporters, who thought there were still too many wealthy landowners but not enough self-made billionaires. It took Prime Minister Tony Blair to make it happen (deregulation, baby), and then Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2008 to introduce the “golden visa” to allow the wealthy to enjoy what modern Britain has to offer. By 2013, the rich list was topped by Russian metals tycoon Alisher Usmanov, with Roman Abramovich in fifth place.
In 2023, most of the oligarchs are gone. They still have their money, but they live in nice mountaintop villas in Uzbekistan or Turkey, and their UK assets are frozen. Meanwhile, British bricklayers and bungalow builders are ecstatic. Bob Bull, number two on the rich list with a fortune of £1.9 billion, has his fellow mothers and ex-wives in what he calls his “traveling brotherhood.” Bob is now engaged to Sarah, a blonde Norwegian who he describes as “a 10 or 11.” “The first time she held me in my arms, it was like coming home,” he adds. But which house? Bob still has enough money to buy a few small towns in the north of England and Zanzibar. And I'm not talking about a nightclub in Uxbridge. He's a winner in a year when many weren't winners. That's the big news in this year's rich list. For the first time since the 2008 financial crisis, the number of billionaires has fallen, but The Sunday Times The UK is eager to calm people's fears by reporting that “this is not a crash, it's a correction.” There were too many overvalued companies and too many evil people claiming to be British.
Glad to have it resolved. Meanwhile, my heart doesn't break when I hear that Richard Branson's fortune has fallen 42.6% to £2.4bn. Alex Chesterman, formerly of Planet Hollywood and now Planet Earth, has seen his online car dealership Kazoo plummet in value by 99%. Chancellor Rishi Sunak has been found to be losing capital almost as fast as he is losing political capital. The value of the assets owned by the Chancellor and his wife Akshata Murthy is falling by £500,000 a day. Financial analysts keep talking about the “end of the political party”. I thought they were still talking about Mr Sunak, but they're talking about the whole party. The backing of bad guys, bending the rules to oligarchs, address burglary, questioning and paying, horrible acts and honours fiasco, the multinational polluters, the addiction-creating pharmaceutical companies, the minimum wage flouters, the government-backed trade union bashing.
oh, that Is the party over? Don't worry. It's not over yet. There's still plenty of room on the dance floor. The Rich List shows that entrepreneurs who believe cheap is best, especially when it comes to people, can make billions even in a bad year. Home Bargains (“Top Brands, Lowest Prices”) saw sales increase by £3.4 billion. Home Bargains has around 600 stores across the UK, and the company's owner, Tom Morris, enjoys the nice title of the richest Liverpudlian of all time. For Paul McCartney fans, it's depressing that disposable toilet paper makes a lot more money than the song “Love Me Do”. Still, McCartney is 175th on the Rich List, with £950 million in reserve. Another £50 million (which for him would mean a short farewell concert and a vegetarian cookbook) would transform this man. big hit He called humourless billionaires “Wacky Sam's Aloft”. Among those under 35, singer Adele had £165 million and was said to be earning £500,000 a night while performing in Las Vegas – sums that would bring most prime ministers to tears.
Topping the list for the fifth time in a row are the Hindujas, who have £35 billion to share but are embroiled in bitter legal battles that make the Roys look like the Waltons. The Hindujas are not the only family in trouble: metals tycoon Lakshmi Mittal has £16 billion and comes sixth on the list, but his brother Pramod is said to be bankrupt. As far as we can tell, the Issa brothers, Mohsin and Zuber, from Blackburn, are doing better: they own Asda and 6,600 petrol stations. The accumulated wealth? £4.7 billion.
Further down, aspiring moguls seem to be wrestling with the darker side of financial fame. At 156th is Kristo Karman, an Estonian engineer once described by the UK tax authorities as a “willful tax defaulter”. At 158th is Henning Konle, owner of Liberty Building and several London properties, who has been accused of making illegal donations to the far-right German party AfD. At 160th is Gerald Ronson, worth £1.1 billion, who was jailed for stock-dealing fraud in the 1980s. At 161st is Eugene Shvidler, a British citizen and Russian energy investor who is currently facing sanctions. A little further down, at 199th, is Mike Lynch, a tech mogul “once hailed as the British Bill Gates” who has been extradited to the US on fraud charges (which he denies). Conservative donor Christopher Moran is 259 years old and although his net worth is only £620 million, £20 million more than King Charles, he is the owner of Chelsea Cloisters, better known as the “ten-storey whorehouse”.
Whether you’re a steel magnate or a lottery winner, you want to be bigger than the guy next to you. And while that culture is nothing new in Britain, it’s never been this close to being considered common sense. When this list began, Britain had nine billionaires; in 2022 there are 177. Peter Mandelson once suggested that as long as they paid tax, they should be encouraged. But they don’t. And can anyone say with a straight face now that people on low incomes are better off than they were 30 years ago? Behind the country’s backs, and with a collusion that may take a generation of reporters and novelists to expose, the interests of commercial corporations have undermined those of wage earners to such an extent that people’s demand for a decent wage seems almost greedy – a misclassification. The Sunday Times The rich list is filled with high-profile energy tycoons who are amassing money while millions of people in the UK suffer from fuel poverty or live in damp homes.
“The rise in the wealth of Britain's billionaires over the past 30 years is cause for celebration for some,” the Equality Trust said recently.
In fact, there is a cottage industry. The Sunday Times Billionaire lists and others are dedicated to celebrating billionaires' hard work, intelligence, and creativity, and thanking them for their greater economic gains for the rest of us. What this view fails to recognize is that the explosion in the number of billionaires over the past few decades and the accelerating rise in inequality and poverty are actually two sides of the same coin.
But the problem is that many people no longer believe this. They believe that wealth, like beauty, is an indisputable virtue and should not be restricted. In that sense, the Rich List is a manifesto for modern Britain. “I've got some nice watches, I love cars and I love travelling,” says Bob Bull, a billionaire who lives in a bungalow. “But I don't flaunt it.”
So morality is necessary, something even the pugnacious Hindujas are happy to agree on. Gopichand Hinduja, the eldest of the family, who is still working at 83, is renovating the former War Ministry in Whitehall into an ultra-luxury hotel with outrageous apartments and a penthouse said to be for sale for around £100 million. Some of the super-rich have recently been barred from buying apartments in the Hindujas' new buildings. “They're rumoured to be Russians.” The Sunday Times They were reportedly “turned out no matter how much they offered.”
