Category Archives: The super-rich

Star buys: celebrities send meteorite prices into orbit

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Elon Musk, Steven Spielberg and Nicolas Cage among those who collect rocks that can cost millions

They really are from out of this world, and the prices are astronomical. For those who have everything they need on Earth, what they now want is a little bit of space. Meteorites are attracting the attention of celebrity collectors who have pushed the price of the rocks – which have hurtled through space for hundreds or even thousands of year before crashing into this planet – tenfold over the past decade.

More than 70 of the most spectacular meteorites ever found will go under the hammer at Christie’s auction house next week in a sale that is expected to generate millions of pounds. Included in the Deep Impact auction are meteorites embedded with gem stones and others have suffered such an impact from blasting through the atmosphere at up to 160,000mph that they resemble sculptures by Alberto Giacometti or Henry Moore.

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Super-rich buying up ‘Downton Abbey estates’ to escape pandemic

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Sales of £15m-plus English country homes breaking records as wealthy families ‘recalibrate their priorities’

The world’s super-rich are seeking to escape from coronavirus lockdowns in cities by buying multimillion-pound English country estates to create Downton Abbey lifestyles, complete with butlers, cooks, housekeepers and armies of gardeners.

Estate agents are reporting a surge in sales of vast country estates and former castle properties, which until Covid-19 struck had become increasingly hard to shift as the richest of the rich instead opted to live in luxurious skyscraper penthouses, on tropical islands or superyachts.

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Revealed: Sheikh Khalifa’s £5bn London property empire

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Documents reveal UAE president owns multibillion-pound property portfolio spanning London’s most expensive neighbourhoods

The row of 1960s-built houses with untidy gardens on a quiet cul-de-sac near Richmond upon Thames appears to have little in common with Ecuador’s red-brick embassy in Knightsbridge, where Julian Assange spent seven years in hiding, just across the road from Harrods.

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House for sale in London, good location, overlooks park, a bargain at £185m

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Developer seeks to cash out of investment in John Nash-designed terrace with views of Regent’s Park

Developers have stuck an asking price of £185m on a house overlooking Regent’s Park in central London in what would be the UK’s second most-expensive home purchase.

The property firm Zenprop is targeting foreign billionaires as potential buyers of 1-18 York Terrace East as it seeks to cash out of a 2016 investment.

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Super-rich call for higher taxes on wealthy to pay for Covid-19 recovery

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Exclusive: Group of 83 wealthy individuals demands ‘immediate, substantial and permanent’ higher taxes ‘on people like us’

A group of 83 of the world’s richest people have called on governments to permanently increase taxes on them and other members of the wealthy elite to help pay for the economic recovery from the Covid-19 crisis.

The super-rich members, including Ben and Jerry’s ice cream co-founder Jerry Greenfield and Disney heir Abigail Disney, called on “our governments to raise taxes on people like us. Immediately. Substantially. Permanently”.

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Donald Trump ‘lost $1bn in a month’ from coronavirus lockdown

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Stock market crash strips billionaire status from 267 of world’s richest people in the annual list

Donald Trump lost an estimated $1bn of his paper fortune in the past month as the coronavirus lockdown forced the closure of offices, shopping centres, hotels and golf courses he owns.

The US president’s fortune has fallen from an estimated $3.1bn (£2.5bn) on 1 March to $2.1bn on 18 March (at the height of stock market panic caused by the coronavirus pandemic) according to Forbes magazine’s annual billionaires list.

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Bill Gates orders £500m hydrogen-powered superyacht

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Microsoft billionaire’s innovative and eco-fuelled 112m Aqua vessel to launch after 2024

Bill Gates has ordered the world’s first hydrogen-powered superyacht, worth an estimated £500m ($644m) and featuring an infinity pool, helipad, spa and gym.

The billionaire co-founder of Microsoft has commissioned the Aqua ship – a 112-metre (370ft) luxury vessel completely powered by liquid hydrogen – which was publicised last year at the Monaco yacht show by the Dutch design firm Sinot.

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London ballroom hosts showcase event for ‘golden passports’

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Three PMs attend marketing sales event on how wealthy can snap up citizenship from $100,000

Three prime ministers took to a stage in the ballroom of a five-star London hotel this week offering the world’s wealthiest people “golden passports” and citizenship of their countries in return for hundreds of thousands of pounds of investment or flat “contributions”.

Allen Chastanet, the prime minister of the Caribbean island of St Lucia, told about 300 members of the super-rich elite and their advisers gathered at the Rosewood hotel for “global citizenship conference” that his country’s economic mission was “going after high net-worth individuals and giving them a comfortable place to live”.

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Super-rich prepare to leave UK ‘within minutes’ if Labour wins election

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Wealthy see potential taxes imposed by Jeremy Corbyn as bigger threat than Brexit

The super-rich are preparing to immediately leave the UK if Jeremy Corbyn becomes prime minister, fearing they will lose billions of pounds if the Labour leader does “go after” the wealthy elite with new taxes, possible capital controls and a clampdown on private schools.

Lawyers and accountants for the UK’s richest families said they had been deluged with calls from millionaire and billionaire clients asking for help and advice on moving countries, shifting their fortunes offshore and making early gifts to their children to avoid the Labour leader’s threat to tax all inheritances above £125,000.

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Rise in number of world’s rich buying UK ‘golden visas’

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Increase comes despite clampdown on scheme after Skripal novichok poisoning

The number of wealthy foreigners investing at least £2m in the UK in exchange for a “golden visa” has risen to a five-year high, despite a clampdown on the scheme in the aftermath of the Skripal novichok poisoning attack.

The Home Office granted 255 people tier-1 investor visas in the first half of 2019, allowing them to live and work in the UK for five years. This was the most in a six-month period since 2014, according to the department’s data.

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World’s 26 richest people own as much as poorest 50%, says Oxfam

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Charity calls for 1% wealth tax, saying it would raise enough to educate every child not in school

The growing concentration of the world’s wealth has been highlighted by a report showing that the 26 richest billionaires own as many assets as the 3.8 billion people who make up the poorest half of the planet’s population.

In an annual wealth check released to mark the start of the World Economic Forum in Davos, the development charity Oxfam said 2018 had been a year in which the rich had grown richer and the poor poorer.

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What the chauffeur saw: what is it really like driving the rich and famous?

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From princesses on shopping sprees to celebrities having sex in the back of the car, the men and women at the wheel have seen it all. And, just occasionally, the secrets spill out …

In the early hours of one morning, nearly a decade ago, chauffeur Jayne Amelia Larson found herself trying to extricate the son of one of the wealthiest men in Los Angeles from the back of her car. The then-chauffeur had been driving the twentysomething party boy up and down Santa Monica Boulevard in her Lincoln Town car as he tried to procure a “transvestite prostitute” for his girlfriend who, he said, “wanted to convert a gay guy”. After several hours, he threw up on the back seat and fell into a drunken slumber, then woke up and tried to urinate in the car.

“He’d been in rehab again and again,” says Larson, recalling the incident that took place just weeks into her new career. “Another driver I later met had been his family’s driver, and said the kid repeatedly did stuff in the car you would not believe, like he went to the bathroom there because he was just so wasted. And I don’t mean in a clean way; I mean in an awful way.”

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Super-rich sabbatical: the boom in luxury long breaks for the 1%

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From shark swims to snow leopard treks, a tailored trip of up to a year is now a must-have

The super-rich are going on sabbatical. It turns out having bucket-loads of money can be stressful, leading some of the world’s richest people to take a break for a month or so, or even a year, to escape the pressure of managing their businesses or personal fortunes.

Tom Barber, the founder of the London-based travel agency Original Travel, said so many super-rich customers had asked his firm to arrange bespoke trips ranging in duration from one to 12 months that his firm was launching a special division dedicated to sabbaticals for the 1%.

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