Transcript

The super rich are different from you and me. They are pettier and more self-centered than most of us can easily imagine.

Hi, Paul Krugman here. This video is partly me trying to show that yes indeed I am on vacation, sort of, although on my laptop too much of the time.

But anyway, I’m at least working on the laptop sitting in cafes. But I also wanted to do a follow-up on a post earlier this week in which I talked about Jeff Bezos feeling now that he needs to sell his ostentatious, bad taste yacht because people are paying attention to the ostentatiousness and the bad taste — which is, kind of, what did he expect. But it is news that rich people are feeling some of the heat, that some of the backlash is starting to get to them.

Today I want to talk about a story that’s a couple of days old but is more along the same lines and has some other resonance I think is worth talking about.

So, Ken Griffin is a hedge fund billionaire. was a big Trump supporter, although not a reliable one, and he happens to be the owner of the most expensive apartment ever purchased in America, at least as far as we know, a $200-something million place on Central Park South.

Zoran Mandani, New York’s very interesting mayor, has called for a pied-à-terre tax, a tax on luxury residences exceeding $5 million that are owned by people who are not residents of New York, who are therefore not paying New York City income taxes. It’s a wealth tax, but a limited one. It would definitely raise some money, but of course has got people irked. And he put out a video which featured a shot of the building in which Ken Griffin has his apartment.

Griffin went wild. He said this is a personal attack on me, it’s putting me at risk. He even compared himself to Donald Trump facing assassination attempts and just in general went wild, as if this was the most evil horrible thing ever.

First of all the sheer again self-centeredness and pettiness is kind of amazing. Griffin has also threatened — I’ve actually written about him before when he made a big splash of moving his firm from Chicago to Miami and then fairly soon started renting a lot of space in Manhattan because it turned out that New York was a better place to do the hedge fund business. Now he’s saying he’s going to pull out of or threatening to pull out of New York because of this.

You know, Griffin has investors. They should care about him locating his operations where it makes sense as a business proposition, not about where he feels like pulling them out of personal spite. His feeling that Mamdani dissed him is not a reason to to move his business to a place where it can’t be done as well. so that’s kind of a bad thing in and of itself, but also again the self-centeredness is quite amazing.

But this apparently is what great wealth does to people. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that they’re careless people, but there’s more than. They’re people who put their minor discomforts on a level with matters of life and death for normal human beings.

Let me also say something that is not terribly rigorous but still substantive. I do not understand why someone with that much money would want to have a residence in Manhattan. Certainly why they would want to live in Manhattan, which Griffin sort of presumably does only part-time.

New York City is not at this point a city for the working class or or the middle class. It’s expensive. Things cost a lot. Real estate costs an awful lot. I saw a an article in a local West Side publication saying that the Upper West Side is a haven for independent minds. My immediate thought was, yeah, independent minds who can afford to pay $1,700 a square foot.

But it is a paradise basically for the 5%. The city has never been safer. It has never offered a greater diversity of cuisine, of culture. It’s a great place. Not quite the same as places with cafes where you can sit for hours and no one will bother you; they’re kind of scarce in New York. But anyway but it’s great for the affluent.

But if you’re super rich, if you spend your time being driven around in a car with tinted windows, if you don’t go anywhere without an entourage and probably at the upper limits of wealth with bodyguards, then you lose the whole the life of the streets.

New York is a place to to wander around. It’s a place to try out an ethnic restaurant that you haven’t been in before. (Everything in New York is an ethnic restaurant.) Basically, the random happenstances of life are a big part of what makes the city worth living in.

I knew somebody who had an upper floor apartment on Central Park South. It wasn’t his. He had a position at an institution where the apartment came with the job. And his family actually hated it despite the vast panoramic view of Central Park because there was no neighborhood. Many of the apartments were vacant most of the time because they were owned by oligarchs, princelings, and sheikhs. People didn’t support local stores, didn’t support any of the things that make urban life worth living.

So I’m not even sure what the point is if all you’re going to do is be chauffeured around, if you’re going to eat only at see-and-be-seen high-profile restaurants. I used to say you might as well be living in Dubai. Well, New York has the advantage of not being hit by cruise missiles currently. But still, what is the point?

But anyway, there it is.

And the extent to which America’s oligarchs put their personal foibles, their pettiness, their small senses of discomfort or lack thereof on a par with major issues is a huge source of evil right now. Elon Musk, who doesn’t feel that people give him enough credit, got to take his personal obsessions to the Trump administration and played them out in DOGE cuts. Among other things, the current estimate is that his destruction of USAID has killed 600,000 people, mostly children, so far. This is awesome.

I have to say, if displaying Ken Griffin’s apartment building helps win support for a progressive agenda, fine. Griffin and people like him should look at themselves in the mirror and ask, who are we? What are we doing with our lives?

Take care.

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