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    What Does Ultra Wealth Look Like?

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    In HBO’s “Mountainhead,” the “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong uses subtle status symbols — and a secluded $65 million ski chalet — to convey hierarchy among the 0.001 percent.When Paul Eskenazi, the location manager for “Mountainhead,” a new film from the “Succession” showrunner Jesse Armstrong, set out to find a house to serve as the primary setting for this satire about a group of ultrarich tech bros, he needed a very specific kind of extravagance. In the same way that “Succession,” which Eskenazi also worked on, reveled in “quiet luxury,” “Mountainhead” needed its moneyed protagonists to be living large but without flamboyance. Its characters are too wealthy for mere McMansions, and not any private residence would do.Portraying how the ultrawealthy really live — with all their subtle signals and status cues — has become something of a specialty for Armstrong and Eskenazi. It’s about not just private jets and sprawling homes, but the quiet hierarchies within the top 1 percent. There’s a pecking order between the 0.01 percent and the 0.001 percent, the kind of distinction that insiders equate to owning a Gulfstream G450 versus a Gulfstream G700.From left, Cory Michael Smith, Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman and Ramy Youssef in “Mountainhead.”Courtesy of HBOWhen Eskenazi found a lavish, 21,000-square-foot ski chalet built into a hill of Deer Valley in Utah, he knew it was the right fit — not because it was so large and impressive, though it’s certainly both, but because its extravagance had a subtlety that made it almost understated.“There’s a kind of quiet wealthy embedded in that location that doesn’t necessarily scream at you. It reveals itself slowly,” Eskenazi said, pointing out that it has a private gondola with direct access to a nearby ski resort. “It’s not flashy, but it’s deeply exclusive — the kind of feature that signals a level of access and control money affords without ever needing to show off.”“Mountainhead” is a tightly wound satirical chamber drama about four rich friends in tech who gather for a weekend of carousing while the world is plunged into chaos. There’s Venis (Cory Michael Smith), the founder of a Twitter-like app whose new A.I. creator tools have triggered a tidal wave of online disinformation; Jeff (Ramy Youssef), whose content-moderation software holds the key to resolving global strife; Randall (Steve Carrell), an elder plutocrat with a philosophical bent; and Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), whose meager $500 million net worth has earned him the nickname “Soups,” for “soup kitchen.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Elon Musk, Distanced From Trump, Says He’s Exiting Washington and DOGE

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      Elon Musk took a swipe at President Trump’s signature domestic policy legislation, saying it would add to the national deficit. He complained to administration officials about a lucrative deal that went to a rival company to build an artificial-intelligence data center in the Middle East. And he has yet to make good on a $100 million pledge to Trump’s political operation.Mr. Musk, who once called himself the president’s “first buddy,” is now operating with some distance from Mr. Trump as he says he is ending his government work to spend more time on his companies. Mr. Musk remains on good terms with Mr. Trump, according to White House officials. But he has also made it clear that he is disillusioned with Washington and frustrated with the obstacles he encountered as he upended the federal bureaucracy, raising questions about the strength of the alliance between the president and the world’s richest man.Mr. Musk was the biggest known political spender in the 2024 election, and he told Mr. Trump’s advisers this year that he would give $100 million to groups controlled by the president’s team before the 2026 midterms. As of this week, the money hasn’t come in yet, according to multiple people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the behind-the-scenes dynamic.Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment. In a post on X, his social media site, on Wednesday night, he officially confirmed for the first time that his stint as a government employee was coming to an end and thanked Mr. Trump “for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending.”“The @DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government,” he added, referring to his Department of Government Efficiency team.The billionaire’s imprint is still firmly felt in official Washington through that effort, an initiative to drastically cut spending that has deployed staff across the government. But Mr. Musk has said in recent days that he spent too much time focused on politics and has lamented the reputational damage he and his companies have suffered because of his work in the Trump administration.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Another Suspect Is Arrested in Bitcoin Kidnapping and Torture Case

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      The man, William Duplessie, surrendered to the police Tuesday morning. Authorities have said the victim was an Italian man who was tormented in a luxury Manhattan townhouse for weeks.A third person accused of kidnapping a man and torturing him for nearly three weeks to steal his Bitcoin fortune surrendered to the police on Tuesday morning, said Police Commissioner Jessica S. Tisch.The police identified the man, who has connections to Switzerland and Miami, as William Duplessie. He had spent days negotiating his surrender with the Police Department after the arrest on Friday of two others, John Woeltz, a cryptocurrency investor, and Beatrice Folchi, according to two law enforcement officials briefed on the matter. Ms. Folchi was quickly released and her prosecution was deferred, one of the officials said.“We know he is going to be charged, with Mr. Woeltz, with kidnapping and false imprisonment of an associate,” Commissioner Tisch said in an interview on Fox 5 of Mr. Duplessie, shortly after he turned himself in.The episode burst into public view on Friday morning when the victim, an Italian man, escaped from the lavish, 17-room townhouse in the NoLIta neighborhood of Manhattan where he had been held captive and flagged down a traffic agent.The victim, Michael Valentino Teofrasto Carturan, and Mr. Woeltz had ties to a crypto hedge fund in New York, according to an internal police report relayed by a third law enforcement official.But Mr. Carturan and Mr. Woeltz fell out over money and Mr. Carturan flew to Italy, according to the report. Soon after, Mr. Woeltz persuaded him to return to New York.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      New York’s Deepest Pockets Turn Out to Fight Poverty

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      Thousands of Wall Street big shots crowded into the Javits Center Monday night for the annual Robin Hood gala. Founded in 1988, Robin Hood is one of New York’s largest anti-poverty groups, and its yearly fund-raiser lures the city’s deepest pockets for a night that results in millions in grants.A sea of men in navy jackets and brown oxfords filed through metal detectors to enter the cavernous hall, which was decked out with sports-themed decorations that included a giant inflatable basketball and baseball mitt. Thirsty bankers and hedge fund managers ordered vodka tonics and pours of Johnnie Walker Black Label at a bar housed in a soccer net. Boxers standing on small podiums jabbed at bright green punching bags that read “#fightpoverty.”After a marching band and a cheerleading squad performed, some 3,500 guests filed into an arena-like dining hall filled with hundreds of tables populated with sports, politics and finance figures. They included the National Football League’s commissioner Roger Goodell, the former N.F.L. quarterback Colin Kaepernick, the philanthropist Laurie M. Tisch and former Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Serena Williams sat beside her husband, Alexis Ohanian, one of the founders of Reddit and a Robin Hood board member.As the former New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning tucked into a plate of fried chicken, he considered the importance of giving back.“This city is filled with the people who root for me and who have rooted for me,” Mr. Manning said, “and I think all New York athletes and sports teams have a responsibility to give back.”Gov. Kathy HochulDolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Elon Musk Leaves Washington Less Than Legendary

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      The partnership between the president and the richest man in the world is coming to an end. There is one clear loser in the breakup of this affair, and it is Elon Musk.He fell from grace as effortlessly as he had risen. Like a dime-store Icarus, he took too many chances, never understood the risks and flew too close to the sun. Wrapped in the halo of his social-media superstardom, he was blinded to the reality of his circumstances until it was too late.Mr. Musk has already inked several lucrative federal contracts and could get far more, but he leaves Washington with his reputation as a genius jack-of-all-trades — a reputation he relied on to boost his company’s stock prices and win investors for his ambitious adventures — severely damaged. Once likened to the Marvel superhero Tony Stark, he is becoming increasingly unpopular. Many formerly proud owners of his Tesla electric cars are trading them in or pasting apologies on their bumpers. Sales have plummeted.Mr. Musk is hardly the first wealthy businessman to decamp to Washington: The Gilded Age millionaires, top hats in hand, focused on currying favor with the Senate, where laws were made and tariffs determined. With the collapse of the economy, the New Deal and the coming of a world war, the White House began to play a significantly larger role in directing the economy, and the businessmen paid it more attention. Dozens of them descended on the capital; others joined the cabinet. No matter when or in what position they served, however, they played by Washington’s rules, taking on well-defined, limited responsibilities and, for the most part, staying out of public view.Mr. Musk broke with that tradition. Nobody was going to shut him up or rein him in. He was in the White House with his 4-year old son on his shoulders, on the stage of a Conservative Political Action Conference rally, promoting his cost-cutting crusade by waving a chain saw. He and his Department of Government Efficiency deputies spread chaos through Washington, locking staffers out of computer systems, gaining access to personal data on private citizens and identifying government employees they deemed expendable.At first, President Trump appeared to endorse every cost-cutting move by his unorthodox adviser, declaring on social media that he and his cabinet were “EXTREMELY HAPPY WITH ELON.” But Mr. Musk then violated the cardinal rule of Trumpland by daring to criticize the president’s policies and appointees — not just once or twice, but with remarkable consistency.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Softens on Raising Taxes on the Rich, Saying G.O.P. Probably Shouldn’t

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      Days after he privately encouraged Speaker Mike Johnson to increase tax for the wealthy in a bill to fulfill his agenda, he publicly said it could be a bad idea, one that was ‘OK’ with him.President Trump on Friday publicly softened his private push on House Republicans to raise taxes on wealthy people and scrap a tax break that benefits private equity executives as part of a megabill to carry out his agenda.“The problem with even a ‘TINY’ tax increase for the RICH, which I and all others would graciously accept in order to help the lower and middle income workers, is that the Radical Left Democrat Lunatics would go around screaming, ‘Read my lips,’ the fabled Quote by George Bush the Elder that is said to have cost him the Election,” Mr. Trump wrote on his social media website, Truth Social. “Republicans should probably not do it, but I’m OK if they do!!!”Mr. Trump on Wednesday had privately urged Speaker Mike Johnson to create a higher tax bracket for those making more than $2.5 million a year. He also said he supported closing what is known as the carried interest loophole, which allows hedge fund, private equity and venture capital executives to pay taxes of only about 20 percent on their profits, which is about half the top income tax rate.The request further complicated Republicans’ job as they toil to put together a domestic policy bill they hope to push through Congress this year. Divisions within the party over potential cuts to Medicaid and other popular social programs to pay for it, and which tax reductions to include, have delayed the drafting of the package and threaten to sap support for it. And Mr. Trump’s abrupt and sometimes fleeting demands for the bill have hung over the talks, with G.O.P. lawmakers reluctant to cross him but uncertain of where he will ultimately stand.Mr. Trump is not constitutionally eligible to run for another election, unlike President George H.W. Bush, who was famously accused of breaking his campaign pledge not to impose new taxes.But Republicans are already facing blowback over Mr. Trump’s first four months in office, well ahead of the midterm congressional elections. And many do not want to take a vote that would be used by Democrats as a weapon against them.Mr. Trump did not entirely walk away from his tax demand in the social media post. But he left himself an out should Republicans balk. More

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      The Caretaker of Muncy Farms

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      In November 1940, four children showed up after dark at a stone farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania. They arrived by car down a long dirt driveway. The headlights illuminated the tall elm trees surrounding the manor house, and the rooms inside were lit up brightly.Brian, Susan, Sheila and Malcolm Barlow, ages 12 to 5, had just endured the blackout of the London Blitz, the German bombing during World War II.To protect her children, Violet Barlow, their mother, had placed them on a boat from England to Canada, a 3,000-mile journey. The children then took a train to New York City, where they spent several weeks in immigration limbo, and then got on another train to the small town of Muncy, Pa.Awaiting them was Margaret Brock, who owned the farmhouse and country estate called Muncy Farms, dating to 1769 and set on more than 800 acres of fields and woods along the Susquehanna River. Muncy Farms was once part of a 7,000-acre estate. The original stone farmhouse dates to 1769. Some 85 years later, Malcolm Barlow, the youngest sibling, still remembered the menu that first night. “It was leg of lamb, brussels sprouts, roasted potatoes and apple pie à la Mode,” he said. “A very British dinner.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Musk’s Tweet-Fueled Bubble May Be About to Burst

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      Elon Musk’s business empire may be starting to wobble.Over the past six weeks, the value of Tesla’s shares has plunged about 40 percent, wiping out virtually all they had gained after the 2024 election. This reversal reveals Mr. Musk’s soft underbelly: His fortune depends heavily on the inflated expectations of his rabid following. As those expectations deflate so will his power, demonstrating that financial markets are an underappreciated guardrail against both Mr. Musk’s and President Trump’s agendas.It is tempting to compare Mr. Musk to the true business titans of the past quarter century such as Apple’s Steve Jobs, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin. But those individuals created genuinely huge businesses that eclipse anything Mr. Musk has built by any possible metric. While Mr. Musk has built a car company from the ground up — no easy feat — his wealth is largely thanks to a financial cult, one in which legions of dazzled investor-followers have enabled him to launch an ever-growing list of disparate initiatives and provided immunity from critics who question his operational decision-making, his corporate governance, his obscene pay packages, and now his migration into the political sphere.The high-wire act goes something like this: Dream up a business so ambitious that any setback is trivial and every accomplishment heroic. Identify yourself as the manic genius behind this ambitious business in order to personally capitalize on outsize returns from excited investors. Enlist social media to cement your iconic status, keeping your believers so enthusiastic that their fervor beats back any skeptics who dare to bet against your ventures, even as you pitch more and more fantastical ideas. At this point you hit the flywheel: Other investors, searching for outsize returns, flock to the shares of your other companies, pushing their valuations ever higher, thus fortifying your wealth and burnishing your reputation as a business mastermind.If you’re lucky, this happens when investors are dreaming of alternatives to the poor returns available when interest rates are ridiculously low; magical thinking about the power of technology suppresses any worry about the risks of problems down the line; and retail markets are turning stock trading into something more akin to online gambling.Understanding this cult requires one to rethink what one knows about finance. Financial purists like to think of financial markets as neutral arbiters that merely record the value-creating activities of entrepreneurs. Financial pragmatists understand that prices need not always reflect value, as behavioral finance has demonstrated. But what if entrepreneurs can capitalize on these dynamics to manufacture fortunes and political power?This trick is precisely what Mr. Musk has mastered. His messianic status, which was birthed in the explosion of social media, created a powerful cycle of outsize returns on ventures that lead to investors providing him with more and cheaper capital to diversify his empire that, in turn, attracts yet more investors fearful of missing out. Skyrocketing Tesla shares have made fans and investors so devoted that all he has to do is mention a new ambition to goad them into buying even more. And the larger the stated ambition, the more wealth and power they hand him. So why not try for Mars? The final step in this process is to consolidate power in the political sphere to ensure that the outsize ambitions can be nourished forever. If Mr. Musk had played it well, his empire may have been impregnable.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Nicole Shanahan Puts Money Into Effort to Recall Karen Bass

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      Nicole Shanahan, who pumped millions into Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign last year and joined him on the ticket, is now backing an effort to remove Mayor Bass of Los Angeles.The first serious effort to recall Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles after the city’s devastating fires is taking shape, with financial backing from Nicole Shanahan, who was Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate in last year’s presidential election.Ms. Shanahan’s involvement in the push to remove the mayor was disclosed on the bottom of a website for the Recall Karen Bass Committee, which listed her as the sole donor providing “major funding.” Ms. Shanahan did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Ms. Shanahan, a onetime Silicon Valley lawyer, could bring financial firepower to the effort: She has a fortune in the realm of $1 billion that stems largely from her divorce settlement with Sergey Brin, the Google co-founder. She has also demonstrated a willingness to pour her wealth into politics, spending more than $15 million to support Mr. Kennedy’s campaign.Ms. Bass has come under pressure for her handling of the enormous wildfires that struck Southern California in January, destroying thousands of homes as fire hydrants ran out of water. She has also faced criticism for being out of the country when the fires hit.Those hoping to recall Ms. Bass must first clear several hurdles, however. Once their campaign is approved, they must gather 330,282 valid signatures of Los Angeles voters to qualify the question for the ballot. Ms. Shanahan said last month that she believed it would cost $4 million to collect 400,000 signatures.And in recent years, several attempts to remove officials in Los Angeles have failed to gather enough signatures to make the ballot. In 2022, a high-profile effort to recall George Gascón, the district attorney at the time, did not collect enough valid signatures. Attempts to recall Los Angeles City Council members have also failed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More