The Rich really are Different….

Now that it seems you need a million dollars just to stay alive, the cultural imagination has been captured by a billion. “I’ve met six billionaires!” crowed a friend of mine, counting them on his hands, and then correcting himself—“Seven!” Our mayor, of course, is a billionaire five times over, with seven homes, a few worth $10 million, and a Florida estate he bought for his daughter to strengthen her equestrian training. Over brunch on a recent Sunday, my girlfriends and I chatted about their Saturday night out—this one talked to one of the Dells; that one sat next to Stewart Rahr, the pharmaceutical mogul and owner of the most expensive home in the Hamptons; and everyone saw Ian Schrager.

“He’s not a billionaire!” huffed one of my friends, outraged at our ignorance.

To be a billionaire is to be radically free. You are your own galaxy. You make your own rules, hang out with the former president, send tourists to space. Billionaire investor Jeffrey Epstein, who lives in the largest dwelling in Manhattan, a 51,000-square-foot palace on 71st Street—though his business, naturally, is located on a 70-acre private island in the Virgin Islands—was humiliated this summer when his lifestyle was made public. Epstein was known to be a womanizer: He usually travels with three women, who are “strictly not of our class, darling,” says a friend. They serve his guests dinner on his private 727, and are also there for touching.

But it seems that he was also interested in younger women: Over the past few years, a then-17-year-old Olive Garden waitress, Haley Robson, brought at least five high-school girls between the ages of 14 and 16 over to Epstein’s house in Palm Beach to “massage” him, which meant watching him masturbate and even allegedly having sex. Epstein’s defense seems to be that he didn’t know the girls were minors, and that he is “very passionate about massage,” as one of his lawyers says.

Those who know Epstein say he’s unfazed by his travails. “He’s totally open about his life: His life is about making money and living an erotic life, and his escape isn’t alcohol or drugs—it’s sex,” says a friend. “I was talking to him the other day, and he said to me that he was doing well and working steadily—between massages.”

But art falls short when describing the lives of billionaires. Steve Wynn is free enough to afford to buy a Picasso, even when his eyesight is famously challenged, and to rip a hole in that Picasso with his elbow while distractedly showing the painting before he closed the deal with hedge-fund billionaire Steve Cohen to buy it for $139 million, which would have been the highest price ever paid for a work of art. Convinced that the elbow gaffe was fate, Wynn decided to keep the picture—what’s $139 million, after all, to a man like him?

A billionaire has the wherewithal to match his moral vanity: While the rest of us struggle to keep our heads above water, billionaires are saving the world. There’s Branson’s pledge to invest the next ten years of profit from his Virgin Group’s airline and train businesses in renewable-energy initiatives, worth $3 billion. Bing, along with Burkle and others, has pledged $1 billion to do the same. In June, Warren Buffett, the thrifty bridge player with the five-bedroom house in Nebraska, donated $31 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for education and global development. Buffett plans to give away 70 percent of his fortune. “If I wanted to,” he has said, “I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but paint my picture every day for the rest of my life. And the gross national product would go up.” But “there’s no reason future generations of Buffetts should command society just because they came from the right womb. Where’s the justice in that?”

http://newyorkmetro.com/guides/money/2006/23463/index.html