Store Adds Donald Trump's Picture To $150,000 Gold-Encased iPhones (cnn.com)

An anonymous reader quotes CNN's report about an iPhone 7 "encased in solid gold, encrusted with diamonds and bearing the face of Donald Trump." Priced around $151,000, it's just one example of the mind-blowing bling sold by Goldgenie, a store in the United Arab Emirates where the super rich do their shopping. "There are very wealthy, high-net-worth individuals all over the world and sometimes its very difficult to buy gifts for them because they have everything," said Frank Fernando, Goldgenie's managing director... But the phones are far from the most expensive item on sale. A gold-plated racing bike will set you back about $350,000. If you're thinking no one would buy a $150,000 Trump phone, think again. In the last month, they've sold ten of them.

Comments

Re:Just so everyone knows

[hey!]

When I worked in the non-profit sector I had some old-money (literally came over on the Mayflower types) trust fund kids working for me. I visited their parents' houses and they were full of treasures, but not bling. You had to stop and look to realize that the table you were sitting at was 250 years old or the portrait of great-grandpa hanging int he stairway was painted by John Singer Sergeant. I noticed in one dining room that the side board had a massive cast iron base; when I asked about it, I was told it was the 12.7 liter inline eight cylinder engine from a 1931 Bugatti Royale. When I expressed interest in that I was then shown what looked like a child's toy ride-in car under the piano in the living room, and was told was a tiny but fully functional automobile that had been hand built by Ettore Bugatti himself.

I mean, geez, it's not something anyone actually would have a use for, but as pointless things go it was literally a wonder.

After seeing the ancestral houses I can kind of understand the contempt people like the Boston Brahmins and Philadelphia Main Liners have for the nouveau riche; it's like these people were brought up in a museum full of exquisite and historically significant things. A lot like it in fact; in a way they're more like caretakers than owners, handing stuff they got from their distant ancestors down to their descendants.

Re: The most primitive of the rich

[dgatwood]

For the most part, that's true, but there are actually two different groups of people who might buy this. The first are, as you mention, the sorts of people who get rich quickly and get poor again just as quickly. We'll call those "lottery winners" even though some of them get rich through other means, because it is still basically the same sorts of folks who come into a lot of money through some sort of luck and then don't know how to do anything with that money other than spend it.

But you're forgetting another group—people who are so enormously wealthy (the top 1% of the top 1%) that hundreds of thousands of dollars is pocket change. Obviously those folks are not likely to throw their money away on these sorts of things frequently. These are the same sorts of folks who could afford to use hundred dollar bills in the washroom if they so desired, but they don't, because as you say, they didn't get that wealthy by wasting money frivolously. But even wealthy people like to waste money on a lark every once in a while. And given enough wealthy people, even if just a fraction of a percent of the über-wealthy decide to buy one as a joke to get a laugh in the boardroom and then give it away as a Christmas gift to their nanny, or decide to give them as family gag gifts for Christmas, they'd still sell a few.