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A bit different angle of culture (and maybe culture war?)
The new Bill Gates' house.
This guy has all the money. He could have built pretty much any house people can build. He chose to build that. Do you think it's beautiful? Would you dream, if you became wealthy beyond your wildest dreams, one day live in a house like that? If you don't think it's beautiful (I must admit I don't) - is this example for all of us that material possessions are not that important and you can spend a wild amount of money, get an ugly house and still be happy with it?
That's such an incredibly meh design. Not outright ugly, but I'd cry if I paid $48 mil for it and had that to show for it.
But at any rate, I doubt that house is the defining contributor to his sense of self-worth or happiness.
I think we have to consider other things about the house. The exterior visible design is pretty pedestrian I suppose. But it looks like a freakin' huge house, (six bedrooms, 3.5 baths, 5,800 square feet) and it's reportedly on a large beachfront property in Del Mar, San Diego. I expect real estate there is pretty pricey, especially with that large of a Pacific ocean beach. And we have no idea what he did to the inside. I would think with all those other factors, $48 mil doesn't go that far in the make it look super impressive from the outside department. I don't get the impression that Bill Gates is the kind of guy who wants to impress everyone else with how awesome and rich he is. Here's another article I found about how awesome this house supposedly is.
Yeah it's pretty nice on the inside but why build a beach house in San Diego (assuming you're super rich)?. San Diego is beautiful, but California makes it illegal to own the beach itself. If I had unlimited money I'd want to put my beachfront property in places where I can keep the riffraff off my sand. How am I supposed to enjoy the beach and the surf if the paparazzi (or just randos) can legally come onto my beach.
It's not his only place. Presumably he wants at least one big place in a swanky but accessible location to throw billionaire parties at. IDK if there's any paparazzi around, presumably nobody wants pics of pasty old dudes? Or maybe he has so much freakin' money he can destroy any publication that annoys him, like Thiel did?
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That looks like a very nice house, but apparently Gates tore it down to build the current house.
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$48 million probably for the location , not the design ...
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My feelings exactly. But why? I mean, it'd probably be the same price and effort to have a non-ugly house instead. Does he think it's beautiful? Does he just not care because he's way beyond it? I mean, I probably won't care if I went to McDonalds and got an ugly burger - it's a cheap burger, I eat it and forget it, who cares. Is that what's going on here?
Because you hear $48M and think of that as a capstone sort of representation of the culmination of your life. A $48M house on the beach in San Diego is a way of showing both to yourself and to your neighbors that you are somebody who can afford a $48M house.
It's something you'd want to be really proud of, since you probably imagine only buying a $48M once, probably near the end of your life.
Bill Gates is worth $100 BILLION dollars. For math, let's assume your net worth is $1M. A $1,000,000 net worth is not something to be ashamed of.
This would be like spending $500 on a house. Let's say even $10,000,000 - a level at which most people would consider you rich. That's $5000 on a house. My net worth is somewhere between those two numbers, and I have many $5000 "goofy" sorts of toys that I mistreat and don't really care about aside from the once or twice a year they get used.
Even at $100,000,000 net worth, this is still a $50,000 expenditure (proportionally).
Why is it ugly? Because why the hell would he even consider the aesthetics of this house? At that level of wealth, this is functionally no different than staying in a hotel. He might not even know that he owns it.
If I were to spend $500 on something, and I had a choice between an ugly thing and a beautiful thing - I'd definitely choose the latter. When I buy $500 things I definitely care for how they look. Thinking about what I could by for around $500, for me, that would be either an electronic gadget or some smaller piece of furniture, I guess, definitely aesthetics would matter.
I wouldn't. When I was a kid and my parents took me to buy school accessories, I always went out of my way to find the least colorful and most boring-looking stuff on the shelf to avoid attention from my classmates.
Still today, my smartphone case is transparent-gray, and my keyboard RGB is off at all times.
But isn't that either depression or anxiety induced behaviour? What would you get if you specifically wanted to demonstrate your good taste?
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Fair enough, and I'm in that same order of magnitude for wealth, and I still make fun of watches that look like shit for $5K. Yeah, you can just spend that and it's not a big deal, but why choose something shitty when you could choose something that looks nice? I don't think, "I don't even care lol" is compelling in any setting at all, to be honest.
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If I had to wild-ass guess, he just doesn't particularly care, has multiple better houses he prefers and just wanted a minimum viable product, or is just so inured to luxury it doesn't bother him.
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