In my upper-middle-class life, I’ve been an invited guest in some pretty mind-boggling old-money spaces a handful of times. Lots of kids growing up had stories from a week on their crazy rich family friend’s palatial vacation property or mega-yacht. At a highly selective university, the son of a teacher or an accountant might be dating the daughter of a household name CEO.

Those people do sometimes have friends like us & a desire to entertain.

> Do non-billionaire people (active academics at that) really lead lives like this?

If a billionaire calls you up and tells you they're sending their plane to pick you up if you're interested in going, then yes. That's fairly common, in terms of billionaires sending their planes to pick folks up they want to meet with, or letting others hitch a ride.

It is typical for academics to visit both potential and current sponsors to discuss research funding and collaborations. It is not typical for sponsors to own private islands, and I think visiting for a day is common but a few hours sounds short (but for a one-day visit, the discussions themselves would only be a few hours). These visits are generally paid for by the sponsor (flights, hotels).

That's pretty interesting, my only experience of the sort was the sponsor (DARPA) visiting the academic's ocean-overlooking mansion (with two teslas in the garage) with very nice hors d'ouvres. Of course this academic was very well known for owning a yacht and doing "experiments" on the yacht (to be fair the project I was on used the results of one of those experiments).

To be fair, my entire life story has been rather topsy turvy in many ways (went to an undergrad with more grad students, went to a grad school with no undergrads).

“If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets”

For a random visualization attempt:

"Everyone in this room, stand up. Every second we're going to count a million dollars. If your net worth is less than that amount, sit down."

Most people will sit down in a second or two. Some might last ten seconds.

A billionaire will still be standing 16 minutes later. Every second, a million dollars ticking away.

TWO DAYS later, you're getting to the richest people in the world. Remember, one million dollars a second.

One day, in your setup, is 86bn (plus change). By Wikipedia data, the richest person is Jeff Bezos with 113bn. So who are the two-day-ers? Poorest of them must have almost 173bn, who are those?

That’s on me - I forgot about Bezos divorce. Before that he was pushing 160B.

> Putin and Gaddafi (before his death) have both been estimated to have 200 Billion in wealth.

This seems pretty unlikely. Putin has certainly done well being a corrupt leader, and probably has control over $200B, but I doubt he has holdings that reach anywhere near that level.

Gaddafi having that much money is a bit of a joke. It would require him having many multiples of the entire country's GDP in his own personal account. Perhaps theoretically possible, but hard to believe without better proof.

I think it's impossible to properly evaluate Putin's assets as they are not economical property in classical sense of the word. If Putin loses his power, his assets could very well be $0. If he doesn't, he probably could control a lot more than he nominally owns, and a lot of stuff he controls is owned by all kinds of figureheads. So we'd have to exclude autocrats and such from the equation - what they have isn't really what we mean as property, at least in Western world.

"Hobnob with the billionaire global elite" was a core part of Epstein's pitch to academics to launder his reputation.

https://newrepublic.com/article/154826/jeffrey-epsteins-inte...

The friends of billionaires do, I would argue. Why would Epstein leave his private island to go to lunch in a public location in Boston when he can entertain his guest at his home?

From my experience, Academics do get around. I know a lot (mostly humanities) that are social butterflies and travel to a lot of exotic locations thanks to wealthier friends and benefactors.

I think there's this view that academics are quiet home body book worms, but that's flawed. Adjuntcs maybe, but definitely not tenured professors.

When I worked as a freelancer, in the dotcom era, I've participated in a number of projects led by some rich people. That included having meetings in their personal homes (some of them conduct a lot of business from their home office, apparently). For most of them, I had very vague idea who they are outside of the project I was in (some of them were rich enough so I tangentially heard about them before, some weren't) and if they conducted some nefarious crap in secret, I would never know. There weren't private islands involved, but I don't think it's too far out necessarily if you upgrade from a nobody IT freelancer to the leading MIT researcher.

So, if that lunch happened _before_ Epstein conviction, I'd give some benefit of the doubt. After, "not with a ten mile pole" is the appropriate policy and any other conduct is on him.

I imagine he was on St. Thomas, and took a small boat over.