15 Ridiculous Ways Rich People Flex

Before we discuss all the ridiculous ways rich people find to flex their wealth, we want to share some insight:

When you’ve been around rich people long enough, you realize some of them still need validation. But they have to disguise it – otherwise, they seem oblivious to just how good their lives are.

With that being said, get ready for a good one. Here are 15 Ridiculous Ways Rich People Flex.

Don’t worry if you don’t feel like reading, you can enjoy the video below or watch it on YouTube:

1

Complaining about how expensive things are in their rich reality

Recently, we’ve had a talk with an executive in the valley whose child is in their second year of kindergarten and getting ready to go to school next year. 

They casually complained about the $40,000 fee they pay PER YEAR to send the kid to kindergarten. 

$40,000. PER YEAR. 

And they’re going to do it every year until it’s time for high school. 2 years of kindergarten + 8 years of primary school and middle school—that’s $400,000 just in school fees alone.

Another complaint you’ll hear among the rich that is a subtle flex is the 3.25 property tax. 

In New York, this is called the Mansion Tax. 

You pay 3.25% property tax per year if your home is worth between $10 and $15 million.

 Above 15 million, you pay 3.5%, and it caps at 3.9% once it goes over 25 million.

Listen to how crazy this is. 

Right now, there’s a penthouse for sale in Manhattan for $250,000,000. The property taxes alone on it are almost 10 million dollars per year. 

Rich people flex when their taxes or fees are more than most people will earn in a lifetime, and it gets crazier from here.

2

Brag about how much money they lost or spent

The thing about telling others how much money you lost ticks off two boxes:

1. It’s supposed to make them more sympathetic to you because loss is difficult for everybody – but it really doesn’t work that way because nobody feels bad when people richer than them lose money.
2. They brag about how much money you had in the first place that you could afford to lose that much

We’re guilty of this as well. 

Last year, our personal portfolio dipped by over 1 million dollars, and we made a video documenting the lessons we’ve learned from that. But more importantly, how it felt, especially since we’re someone who came from poverty. 

By far the most underrated video we’ve posted on our channel. You’ll hear this backhanded flex across the wealth spectrum. 

From the richest people in the world losing over 50 billion dollars in a single year – Elon’s $200 Billion drop is the largest financial loss in human history –

 

To venture capitalists like James Altucher blowing through 30 million dollars in 45 days

 

Or Hollywood elites like Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler spending over 6 million dollars on blow alone.

3

Donating money so things get named after them

Streets, Roads, Museums, Hospital Wings, Airport lounges, and even desserts on a restaurant’s menu 

Rich people are vain, so charities use this to extract more money from them. It’s a win-win situation, as these rich people get to flex and charities get their funds.

In their pursuit of immortality or to feel like their legacy will outlive them, they’ll seek opportunities to have their name carved into stone. 

Truth be told, it would be fire to have a famous bar or hotel named after you.

4

Complain about how long they have to wait for their expensive orders

You might not know this, but a second-hand Ferrari or Lamborghini is actually more expensive than a brand-new one. 

Why? 

Because it takes 18 months for you to finally get delivery when you buy new. People who want to skip the wait time resort to resellers. 

It’s the same with luxury watches or luxury bags. 

The moment that Birkin or Patek leaves the showroom, you have made at least 10 grand in paper profits. 

If you order the latest Rolls Royce Spectre now, you should expect delivery in 2025. 

And don’t get us started on the Tesla Roadster.

5

Art

Historically, rich people have separated themselves from everyone else through different behaviors and appetites. 

They invented specific ways and utensils to eat food just so they could show they were in the KNOW.

It’s the same with art. The weirder the art, the better. They get it. You don’t. Then money came in.

Turns out, the weird art you see on their walls is not only a pretty good store of value that they get to flex with, but it’s actually a great investment vehicle, crushing gold, real estate, and even the S&P 500.

To ultra-rich people, it doesn’t matter that they don’t understand what the artist wanted to say as long as the returns are great, so the super-rich allocate 5% of their portfolios to art.

But art has been virtually inaccessible to those without connections or generational wealth. Until now.

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6

Rare animal breeds

Scarcity is status. 

I have something ridiculous that you don’t have, so I’m better than you. 

Exotic animals have been just that flex for rich people for a while. 

From MJ’s monkey Bubbles, Tyson’s tigers, Peterbald or Savanah cats, Blue French Bulldogs, or how we’ve meddled with breeding and changed the British Bull Terrier to a caricature of what the bread used to be.

 

 

 

The list goes on.

A notable mention here is made of aquariums and birds in cages. 

We feel like both of them really had a moment when we were growing up, but now almost nobody keeps birds in a cage anymore.

7

Extremely large doors

High ceilings are one thing that’s been taken to the extreme despite being incredibly inefficient when it comes to climate control, but the way rich people flex on everyone else is with the doors. 

If opening the entrance door to your house is a literal workout, you’ve gone beyond what is considered okay.

Oversized everything seems to be a trend here. In the words of modern poet 21 Savage: “Why you got a 12-car garage when you only got 6 cars…” Why indeed…

8

Over-the-top weddings or parties

If there’s one event where rich people don’t care about the budget, it’s their wedding. 

The poorer the country you’re in, the more expensive the wedding has to be. 

We’re looking at you, Lakshmi Mittal, spending 66 million on your daughter’s wedding.

You’ll find similar but not extreme versions in every country. People wear the bill as a badge of honor. 

Speaking of bills

9

Overpriced restaurants just because they’re overpriced

Don’t get us wrong; we love exquisite food and great dining experiences, but it’s gotten to a point where things are ridiculous.

They throw gold leaf on anything these days just so they can charge you in the hundreds. Salt Bae is a great example of this.

This is a bill for $250,000 in American dollars. A quarter million dollars for one meal and seven bottles of wine:

 

You’d think it’s a Middle East thing, but you see it happen in London as well.

 

And if we opened the box, here’s Lionel Messi’s bill from when he went out to eat in Ibiza with Suarez and Fabregas

 

At this point, you’re doing it just for the thrill of spending money, because there’s no additional return in quality or experience you get for the extra buck.  It becomes a rich people flex.

For example, the highest quality meat there is, the Grade A5 Wagyu beef coming straight from Japan, air-flown costs $250 per pound. 

That’s the ceiling. 

Restaurants like SaltBae charge $1000 for a $50 tomahawk and then add $5 worth of edible gold leaf to justify it:

10

Celebrity coaches

It’s not enough to have a good coach; you need a professional to teach you.

That’s how you end up paying $210,000 to have Tiger teach you golf.

 

Money buys you access, but just as with the steak example: there’s a ceiling to raw quality, and then it bleeds into just status signaling.

People pay 19 million dollars to have dinner with Warren Buffett just for him to tell them to “invest long term”.

The most effective coaches are those who are just a handful of steps ahead of where you are. 

If you were to have dinner with Elon or Jeff and ask them to tell you about what they’re learning in their day-to-day lives, it’s unlikely you’d get anything actionable to apply yourself. 

Why? 

Their reality is so different from yours that the gap in the kind of challenges they have to solve compared to what you’re dealing with is just too big.

This is the foundation on which we built the Alux app. 

The goal is to take you from $1,000 a month to $10,000 a month to $100,000 a month, and forward in incremental jumps through education. 

Although our app centers on money, health, relationships, intellect, and emotions, they also evolve and change as you make progress, so they all need to go up at the same time, otherwise, your mind will break. 

Alux is the only app out there designed to do just that for you. Download the app right now and start a free trial! You’ll be blown away.

11

Low license plate numbers

Take Dubai, for example: When everybody drives a Rolls-Royce or a supercar, there’s only one way to stand out. 

Have a lower license plate number than they do.

For real, this is how rich people flex in the Emirates. 

The sheik of Dubai has the #1 license plate on his G-wagon. The closer you are to his number, the higher your status.

To show you how crazy this craze is, a couple of months ago someone paid 15 million dollars for number 7, which makes the 9 million someone else paid for number 5 look like a steal.

 

12

Superyachts

Here’s how it goes among rich people:

• You have money. I have money.
• You have a supercar. I have a supercar.
• You have a vacation home. I have a vacation home.
• You have a jet. I have a jet.

But HOW BIG IS YOUR YACHT?

That’s literally what it boils down to. 

There are three levels to yachts:

1. Millionaire yachts… These are under 25 meters. The price point is between 1 and 15 million dollars.
2. Superyachts are between 25 and 60 meters, and price-wise, they go up from 15 to 50 million. 
3. Everything longer than 60 meters falls under the mega-yacht category. Mega yachts are in the ballpark of 100 million dollars.

These mega yachts are basically floating hotels.

The crazy thing about yachts is that maintenance and crew costs are around 10% of the yacht’s value on a YEARLY basis.

13

The table that you sit at

This might sound crazy to some of you, but high-end restaurants have a ranking system when it comes to what tables you’re seated at, depending on how high profile you are.

Here’s the inside scoop on how rich people flex in restaurants.

We had the privilege of being at one of these high-end restaurants in midtown Manhattan a couple of months ago with some of our friends in finance. 

Getting a table there is hard enough to begin with but if you do manage to get in, it goes like this:

Millionaires and other people in finance sit at the center of the room—think of your regular tables.

Executives from high-end firms get the window seats, and then there are specially reserved booths. They’re more private and usually elevated, for the big shots whose net worth starts with a B. 

When big deals are being made, they usually happen around food in these establishments: think mergers and acquisitions.

So yeah, not all restaurant tables are created equal.

14

Terraforming land

At this point, you enter a world of people who are actively shaping the world around them.

Billionaires flocked to Hawaii.

Larry Elison bought 98% of Lanai Island for $300 million.

 

Mark Zuckerberg is trying to do the same with Kauai

 

Among other ridiculous stories we’ve heard are people paying $250,000 to unroot an old tree and move it by the lake for their daughter’s wedding, only to pay another $50,000 to move it back to its original spot after the wedding.

These are the kinds of folks who stumbled upon the Maldives and decided to transform the wild islands into a tourist paradise.

 

They build beaches. They create islands. Some of them blow up parts of mountains to make room for their estate.

15

Humble-bragging

Humble bragging is when EGO meets FALSE MODESTY

Here are some examples:

 

F’s in the Chat for Kylie being teased by her family for being a billionaire, or Floyd giving his son the spotlight he deserves:

 

And as a thank you for sticking around this long, you get a bonus.

Bonus

Don’t flex your parents’ money

Here’s where it’s at:

The kid who bought his own Toyota is more successful than the one flexing in his dad’s Range Rover!

The problem is, until you get into your late 20s you don’t really have an idea of who you are, and you don’t have much to show for any of your efforts. 

In a superficial social media world, the culture wants you to flex.

Get your own success. 

“My dad can beat up your dad” type of thinking never works out in the real world. 

Make something of yourself. Build something of value. Don’t allow social media or culture to put pressure on you. 

Focus on yourself and you’ll find something real, you’ll become something real that you’re solely responsible for. 

When you look in the mirror you’ll be able to smile deeply, not just on the surface. 

And we’ll leave you with this: Flexing is a shortcut to poverty!

These have been 15 ridiculous ways rich people flex and they are wild. But it’s kind of entertaining to watch, right? See you next time!