The Queer Behavior of the Ultra Rich
The ultra rich are not like you and me, and they're usually different in awful ways.
I met Josslyn at the start of the Transportation Alternatives century bike ride in early September, 2017. We were both doing the 15-mile route since we were there with our young children. I was there with my two sons, Finn and Ryder. She was there with her one son, also named Ryder. She was tall, lean, attractive, and riding a Soma bike, indicating some level of taste. I managed to chat with her at the beginning of the ride, indicating my amorous interest. At the ride’s end, I got Josslyn and another mom’s number to arrange a biking playdate for all of our children. That playdate turned into a quasi-date-date when the other mother left with her son and Josslyn and I were left alone while our kids played together. Another playdate and real date later, we rapidly moved towards boyfriend-girlfriend territory.
Josslyn embodied a lot that I wanted in a romantic partner. She was calm, classy, and smart. She held a PhD from Columbia in Environmental Science, had pulled ice cores in Alaska, and lived in one of the Biospheres. She was a big whig at NYC’s biggest environmental agency, but quit to care for her husband, a noted urban planner, during his losing battle with cancer. She wasn’t working when we met, explaining she wanted to focus on caring for her son and keeping life simple following the difficult years dealing with her husband’s ordeal. I didn’t ask how she got by financially, assuming life insurance paid the mortgage on her Park Slope, Brooklyn condo and her son’s $55K/year private school tuition.
She was my first committed romantic relationship after my separation, which began a year before. I was her first committed romantic relationship after her husband’s death a few years earlier. As a symbol of her commitment, Josslyn invited me to spend Thanksgiving with her family in 2017. We drove her BMW through the city’s sprawl, past Westchester County, and into the bucolic, mountainous part of southwestern Connecticut where her dad and stepmom lived.
After a couple hours of driving, we turned into an unmarked dirt road along a quiet mountain highway. After a mile, the tree-lined dirt road opened up to her dad’s home —or, more precisely, his “property.” I remarked to Josslyn, “I didn’t know your dad was Lord Grantham,” referring to the patriarch from the TV drama, Downton Abbey.
On the property, there was the requisite mansion, but there were also horse stables, a garage for classic cars, a pool, tennis court, a lake, a few guest homes (one for us), and a menagerie with decorative peacocks and other animals. I would get to know this house and the area quite well, as Josslyn and I frequently traveled there for weekend getaways. I also got to know her family quite well —or so I thought.
At one point, I asked Josslyn how her dad and stepmom made their money. She gave me a vague answer about being in the publishing industry before making some investments. Knowing what I know about stocks and real estate investments, and not being one to pry, her answer sufficed, and I never asked again. I was perhaps too happy enjoying the wealth to want to know where it came from.
I started running again not long before meeting Josslyn, and by the Spring of 2018, I decided to try racing again. My first race was a 5K in Red Hook, Brooklyn, which Josslyn accompanied me to. The race was predictably hard and slow, but I did it, and even got a cool t-shirt emblazoned with the Rockstar Games logo, the race’s marquee sponsor, which I wore often.
Josslyn and I broke up in the fall of 2019 while I was undergoing some major life changes. Put short, I was coming out of my shell as my divorce seemed to be coming to a close, and Josslyn seemed content to stay in hers. Despite our divergent paths and the breakup, I viewed our time together positively.
About 6 months after the breakup, I decided to snoop around the web to find the source of Josslyn’s dad’s wealth. It was the beginning of the lockdown and I had plenty of time for these types of inquiries. I found almost nothing, unsurprising since many rich folks like to enjoy their wealth without unwanted attention or scrutiny. While there was almost nothing, I found one lone article about her dad, Ira, in The Kent News, which said this:
Mr. Shapiro and Ms. Dedell [Josslyn’s dad and stepmom, respectively] are co-founders of Take Two Interactive, a publicly-traded video game holding company that owns two major gaming labels: Rockstar Games and 2K. The firm is best known for pioneering and owning the Grand Theft Auto video game franchise.
That’s strange, I thought, because Rockstar Games was the sponsor for that race. It’s strange no one in Josslyn’s family mentioned this connection since I frequently wore that t-shirt with the Rockstar logo during my weekends with them (full disclosure: I didn’t realize it was the logo until someone pointed it out much later. I just liked the graphic.). Did they sponsor the race for me? Is that why I got the 212 bib (212 being the NYC area code)? What the actual fuck?
The word “betrayal” doesn’t quite sum up how I felt about this situation. I’ll grant that neither Josslyn nor her family were obliged to tell me about their connection to Rockstar Games, but the fact that none of them mentioned it, despite me wearing the t-shirt, despite that connection being directly related to their wealth —it seemed like a big fucking deception, one made worse by my extreme distaste for video games, which I view as comparable to heroin in terms of their deleterious societal impacts. There was a ton of police-civilian hostility in late 2019 and early 2020 —hostility I believed was made worse by things like Grand Theft Auto, which gamified civilian-police violence. It disgusted me that the Shapiros were profiting from all this from their Connecticut safe haven.
It might be unfair to apply universal truisms about the behavior of the ultra-rich based on my experience with the Shapiros, but I’m going to do it anyway (they’re also not the only rich people I’ve been intimate with). Here are some takeaways:
Rich people play by their own rules. They want what they want and they will break and bend laws, profusely lie, and exploit and abuse the non-rich to get those things. Be very careful around them.
Rich people use their money for stuff the non-rich would never imagine. When you effectively have an unlimited amount of money, anything seems possible on the other side of payment. Millions of dollars to get my dumb kid into an Ivy League school? Sponsoring a race to impress my daughter’s boyfriend? Sure, why not.
Rich people usually get rich by being selfish and greedy, not intelligent or moral. The notion that rich people will save the world —through smarts, bold leadership, savvy investments, etc .—is a notion that’s only plausible to people who don’t know rich people, and the normal ways the rich get rich (jacking up rents, market manipulation, predatory products, etc.). As Jesus, Buddha, and others have shown, salvation is much more likely to come from a poor person than a rich one.
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