The economy is just a VIP list now
The economy increasingly rewards people who can afford to never wait, mix or be observed.
There were a few ways to get to the World Cup final.
One involved lots and lots of lines: for the subway to Penn Station, where you stood in the sun waiting for a yellow school bus to come pick you up to take you to the Meadowlands, where you waited in another long line to get in. There, you waited in even more lines, for the bathroom, for food, for drinks.
The other way involved meeting a group of men in matching suits in Midtown who whisked you to New Jersey in a guarded Mercedes-Benz Sprinter van, past all the checkpoints, where you entered the stadium from the basement level and walked directly into a private suite. Or maybe you didn’t even have to get in a car, opting for a helicopter instead.
Like most thing in life have become, the event itself was the same, but the entire experience surrounding it, everything from how you arrive, to where you wait, to who you sit beside, to what you eat, to which rules apply to you, was sorted by how much you could pay.
“It’s the Super Bowl for the ultraprivileged,” one investor told The New York Times. “Inequality is taking it right in the face right now.”
Having wealth is increasingly about the ability to control how exposed you are to the world around you. And many rich people are bypassing public life altogether.
Privacy, in this context, is beyond just solitude or secrecy. It’s selective accessibility, the power to decide who and what gets access to you.
Status used to mean being seen
Status spending, in the past, required visibility. But what happens when the performance of wealth is available to almost everyone? Thanks to social media, you can rent the fancy apartment, buy the fake designer bag, put the vacation on Afterpay and construct an online life that looks much more expensive than the one you actually live.
I wrote about this earlier this year in “New Status Symbols”: in our modern economy, looking rich has become easier, while actually feeling financially secure has become much harder.
The signals of wealth have shifted from what you can buy to what you can afford to opt out of. Privacy becomes a luxury good.
That doesn’t mean wealthy people don’t want attention. They just want control over the attention. They can (and often wish to) be photographed at the event but disappear after dinner. They can use their visibility when it creates influence, status or income, then retreat when being perceived becomes annoying or inconvenient for them. The inherent luxury is the ability to choose.
The rest of us have much less flexibility, as our world turns more and more into what feels like a surveillance state. In fact, most of us have to remain visible to make money at all. We build personal brands, submit to workplace monitoring, give up our data for free services and make ourselves “searchable”. We often don’t have the ability to opt out.
A private version of everything
I would definite privacy, in this context, in three interconnected ways:
Physical privacy: freedom from crowds, lines, shared entrances, public waiting rooms, and uncontrolled encounters.
Social privacy: access to rooms where the people around you have been financially or socially selected.
Informational privacy: control over who tracks, records, or sells information about you.
Rich people can increasingly buy all three.
At home, physical privacy may mean a gated community, private island, or private elevator that travels directly from a garage into an apartment.
Or it could be “landmaxxing,” where wealthy homeowners buy the surrounding properties to create a larger buffer between themselves and everyone else. Rich people are spending hundreds of thousands on turning their homes into private security states, with retina scanners, facial recognition, safe rooms, and drones.
The parallel infrastructure extends well beyond the home.
At the airport: There are private planes, of course, but there are also increasingly semi-private planes and concierge services for commercial flights. For roughly $1,300 per person, you drive into a gated facility away from the main airport, eat in a private lounge, clear TSA in a separate screening area and be driven across the tarmac directly to a commercial flight. The CEO of the company, PS, describes it as occupying the space between commercial and private air travel.1
At the doctor: Concierge practices charge an annual retainer for faster appointments, longer visits and more direct access to a physician. The market is now a multi-billion-dollar industry and may already account for 10 to 20 percent of primary-care physicians. Luxury hospital wings gives wealthy people separation from other patients.
At the club: More than 30 new private members’ clubs have opened in New York alone in the past few years, spanning bathing clubs, coworking spaces, wellness facilities, family clubs and ultra-luxury institutions with five- or six-figure fees.
At the park: The first “luxury theme park“ is opening in Mexico this fall, designed explicitly around exclusivity, with access limited to resort guests and an emphasis on fewer visitors and shorter wait times. Guests stay in five-star hotels, eat gourmet meals, and take private gondolas in and out of the park. Disney has also been increasing its premium offerings for years.
At the mall: Many brands have invitation-only shopping suites where clients enter separately and have merchandise brought to them.
On the go: If you’re wealthy enough, you can rent out an entire safari, an entire beach, an entire ski mountain. You can watch sports games in private sections and get exclusive access to restaurants.
Informational privacy, I think, is the lesser-discussed form of privacy, and is becoming even more relevant in our digital world.
The free version of digital life runs largely on surveillance: every click, location, purchase and search becomes information that can be analyzed and sold. You can reduce some of that exposure through paid, ad-free products, data-removal services, private cybersecurity and reputation management, though products are imperfect and this assumes you have the money and knowledge to do so.
In case anyone was curious (like I was) here are a couple ways in which wealthy people access and leverage informational privacy:
Using a family office as an intermediary to avoid giving personal details to companies (like addresses, banking information, etc).
Hiring private cybersecurity teams to do dark-web monitoring, improve home network security, and provide deepfake protection.
Can use an adviser to make pricing requests, arrange off-market rentals, negotiate on their behalf, etc. This helps rich people avoid things like surveillance pricing.
I was most shocked to discover that there are now private internet services that allow you to curate your own internet for a price.
As I wrote in “The Tierfication of Everything” that companies increasingly design around two consumers: the premium customer and the budget customer, with less and less in the middle. I was mostly writing about airline seats, groceries and streaming subscriptions, though this model being applied to public life itself.
At the highest levels of wealth, privacy stops being an amenity and becomes an entire way we move through the world. You no longer have to be in reality, if you don’t wish to.
So what happens to the rest of us?
Companies have become quite good at identifying which parts of an experience people hate and charging them to avoid those parts.
The classic example is airlines, which make the seats smaller, then sell legroom. Theme parks produce long lines, then sell expedited access. Concert venues create VIP sections with private entrances, bathrooms, and bars. The product at the top is often less about receiving more than being subjected to less.
This is the logic of tierification: the ordinary experience becomes difficult enough that relief starts to feel worth paying for.
Bloomberg recently described an American “fun shortage,” driven by the disappearance of affordable places to relax and socialize alongside rising prices for the remaining options. Rising inequality compounds the shortage because businesses naturally orient themselves toward the consumers who can pay more.
What replaces the third space isn’t nothing. It’s usually a membership, a premium tier or a private version of whatever’s disappeared.
Take a hometown example: Jacob Riis Park in Queens, also known as “the People’s Beach” and an important part of New York’s LGBTQ+ history. The beach houses an Art Deco bathhouse (stunning architecture IMO), which sat closed for more than five decades. This summer it is reopening after an $88 million renovation as the Rockaway Ocean Club.
The beach remains public, and the development says more than 60 percent of the building, including food vendors, shops, bars and a courtyard, will remain open to everyone. The pool, outdoor lobby and future second-floor lounge are reserved for members and hotel guests. Memberships currently range from $1,000 for Rockaway residents to several thousand dollars for families.
I use this example because I think it shows how public infrastructure is increasingly being redeveloped into private infrastructure, available to those who can afford the membership fee.2
Why do people spend so much money to avoid other people?
Private clubs and country clubs have existed for centuries, so none of this is entirely new. Wealth has always been able to provide a level of distance from things you didn’t want to do. But what feels new is how many ordinary experiences are now being rebuilt around the promise of escape.
Crowds are annoying and unpredictable, and uncertainty can be psychologically expensive. In a public space, you monitor your belongings, read social cues, search for a seat, wait your turn, tolerate noise and accept that another person’s behavior may change your experience. Money can reduce that range of possible inconveniences.
What the premium tier sells is (in part) an elimination of friction. And that transaction is increasingly the defining feature of the whole economy. Not just what you can afford to have, but what you can afford to never experience.
The world around us often feels very uncertain and precarious. A premium service offers predictability, a world less at the mercy of strangers or systems you cannot control.
Privacy also communicates exclusivity and scarcity, the key components of status. Rich people have social needs, too, and these spaces offer the ability to meet and interact with other people, narrowed through price, profession, taste, etc. Many of these clubs also prohibit photography and require NDAs, which has become especially appealing in a culture where nearly any dinner or conversation can be filmed and posted without your consent.
The membership buys both access to the people you want and protection from everyone else.
Friction is where public life happens
I don’t mean that in some romantic, “isn’t it beautiful to suffer together” kind of way. The airport terminal, the general-admission concert, even the crowded train to the stadium…these are places where you encounter people you didn’t filter for.
When you’re in public, you’re naturally going to come into contact with people who aren’t in your income bracket or your professional network or your algorithmically-curated social circle. While engaging with people who are different than you can sometimes be awkward or uncomfortable, it can also be enormously fruitful. You are exposed to new ideas, form new ways of thinking. Diversity is the connective tissue of living in a society.
Conversely, the more time you spend in homogeneous circles (and that goes for wealth and class circles), the more close-minded you become. This is happening at a moment when Americans are already spending less time together.
What happens when wealthy people no longer have to experience public infrastructure on the same terms as everyone else?
Rich people can skip the airport terminal, leave the public school system, avoid the crowded hospital, join a private park or pay for a separate space inside a public one. They still rely on roads, utilities, workers and public institutions, but increasingly encounter them through layers of insulation.
It becomes a feedback loop: public infrastructure deteriorates, private alternatives expand, and shared investment becomes harder to justify. What is public life when the people with the most power no longer need to participate in it?
A society becomes easier to neglect when these people no longer have to experience it. It also erodes our collective empathy and civic identity.
Wealth as reduced dependence (a caveat, if you will)
We tend to describe financial freedom as the ability to stop working, but the fantasy is often broader than that. It’s the ability to not need anyone or anything, to not be inconvenienced or delayed or controlled by something else.
We build “fuck-you funds.” We aspire to hire assistants and outsource chores. I’m personally a big fan of this way of thinking, as money can be a tool to help you make decisions without financial hindrance and live the life you want to live. Having money can do things like let you leave a bad relationship, say no to work that’s corrosive or survive an emergency.
But we shouldn’t confuse our desire for financial freedom with ultra-independence, where other people become sources of friction to manage away.
When privacy becomes a luxury good, we start ignoring the systemic problems that got us here. The train is unreliable, so we buy a car. The public school is underfunded, so we send our kids to private school. The neighborhood doesn’t have any third spaces, so we join a club.
The purchase solves our immediate, individual problem, but it reinforces the idea that security comes from earning enough to escape the system rather than trying to improve it.
It also changes our definition of success, where wealth becomes less about having enough and more about becoming untouchable. And for everyone who is below that level (which is pretty much everyone), the economy keeps dangling the possibility that one more raise or upgrade might finally place us on the other side of the velvet rope.
But the relief is temporary because privacy is positional. There’s always going to be something that seems to be better, just waiting around the corner. The access economy turns our human desire for safety and autonomy into an endless ladder of escape.
That phrasing is interesting to me, because what she’s actually describing is the construction of a middle tier (a premium layer that didn’t used to exist) between the experience everyone shares (regular commercial flight) and the experience very few people can regularly afford (private planes).
Many celebrities and rich people do not fly exclusively on private planes, contrary to what you may believe. For one, owning a private plane is extremely expensive, and chartering a private jet can cost anywhere from $3,000 to $15,000 an hour. (So a flight to LA would cost roughly $30,000-$95,000 one way). That’s pricey, even for a multi-millionaire. That’s where these other services come in: You get the taste of luxury without the full price.
To be fair … without the private club, the bathhouse might have remained abandoned. The renovation is happening through a long-term lease with a private operator, which is taking on the cost of restoring a building the government allowed to sit closed for decades.
But that raises the question: Why does investment in the public realm increasingly seem viable only when it can be attached to private infrastructure? Sure, the public gets some access, but the nicest parts are often reserved for people who can pay more.
This was so great. Part of the reason I decided to raise my kid in NYC was to expose them to all of the things - the people, the diversity, the friction - and it seems like so much of that is being stripped away with the introduction of so many private spaces, private cars, etc. Why live here if you don't want to be amongst it?!
I also wonder how much better off we'd be if those sending their kids to private school because they aren't happy with the quality of public school instead put that into their community, you know? Use your wealth to make things better for *everyone*!!!
I never "got" the appeal of private clubs or of sports luxury boxes. For clubs, if you want to meet someone just make a restaurant reservation. For sporting events, the boxes separate you from your fellow fans and to me cheering with like-minded fans is almost the entire reason to be at the game.