(A version of this piece first appeared in The Mint newspaper.)

Jeffrey Epstein thought that if he could be the pimp for wealthy and influential men, he could also become their friend. His emails show that the best thing he could get them was sex with beautiful women, a commercial system that is accessible even to the merely upper-middle class. To some influential women he sent expensive gifts that thrilled them even though they could have easily procured the same items in a duller way, with their own money. What he actually sold them all was the idea that they were a club of exceptional people, a club no one can apply to but only be invited. His success in becoming their friend show the limits of super-richness, that there are no meaningful products for the superrich, and that, oddly, capitalism struggles to make real luxury products for capitalists.

In 2023 Virgin Galactic launched private paying customers into “outer space” and brought them back, too. The company said it sold seats to about 800 people, with ticket prices ranging from $250,000 to $400,000 for the experience of flying 50 miles above Earth, an act that qualifies as leaving Earth. The second launch came just weeks after a commercial submersible imploded, killing five people, some of whom had paid about $250,000 per seat. These prices were low compared to the $55 million three rich men paid to stay on the International Space Station for a few days. It appears that some experiences only the super-rich can afford are also highly risky and, intuitively, far from enjoyable. You can argue that enjoyment is not all there is to a paid experience, or, as every family knows, a vacation. Still, the fact that billionaires must shoot themselves into space or sink to ocean depths to see and feel something the rest of us haven’t, or attend the parties of pimps, points to an oddly satisfying state of the world: a lot of what only the super-rich can get is disappointing.

Overpriced bags, isolated giant-silo homes and 100-metre-long yachts, too, are just outlandish expressions of the fact that even though money can buy happiness, there is no kind of happiness in the market that only a lot of money buys. Most luxuries that are enjoyable and safe are affordable to mere millionaires or even the upper middle-class. The super-rich are left with plainly ridiculous things. Like cars with crystals, handbags you cannot choose but which choose you, fish that can poison you, secluded mansions that go against the human instinct for community, and weddings that might cost more than Bollywood films and are just as comical. That the world’s best mobile phone is not exclusive even to millionaires suggests that beyond a price point, products are only expensive; they do not improve the quality of life.

People who try to sell something to extravagant billionaires have to believe in a fallacy, for their own relevance. That things are always related in a direct proportion, that more money seeks greater exclusivity. It is a level of thinking that makes some naïve people believe that because men like breasts, they would like them the size of footballs (a poor analysis that has sadly made some porn stars make such ridiculous augmentations).

The way of the new world is such that the modern poor have comforts that medieval emperors did not enjoy. This also means that the super-rich of another time enjoyed a degree of exclusivity that is not available to modern billionaires. For instance, when commercial air travel began, only the rich flew. The experience of flying was not only immensely useful, it was also exclusive to the rich. In 1929, in the US, a coast-to-coast return air ticket cost half the annual per capita income of the nation. As recently as 1996, according to the encyclopaedia site Britannica, a one-way London-to-Washington ticket on the Concorde, which flew faster than the speed of sound, or faster than the Earth’s spin for that matter, cost about ₹10 lakh in today’s money. Today, for half that amount, you can get a first-class return ticket on a Mumbai–New York flight.

Billionaires who undertake outlandish space and marine missions are pioneers who pave the way for the same adventures to become mass market. Some early aviators were rich people who contributed to the evolution of commercial aviation, sacrificing their lives at times in the process. I do not dispute the value of such pioneers, even if they are paid customers. But I suspect it is not their intention to put their lives on the line so that one day I will get to go to space or the ocean floor at reasonable cost. And that makes the lemons that are sold to them even more ridiculous.

There is one fascinating product, though, that is sold to the super-rich. The perception that they are politicians. Once, the rich were financiers of politicians and often remained in the shadows. This financing was primarily a business expense. But today, many wealthy people are politicians themselves who have bought their way into positions of social influence. America has had a very famous example. Back home, we have legislators with declared assets worth hundreds of crores, with ₹1,413 crore the top score among members of legislative assemblies. Some politicians may privately laugh at the modesty of these declarations; their big triumph is that they have bought the social masquerade of activism without being identified publicly as rich people.

There is another useful luxury product for the superrich, but one the modern superrich have not entirely grasped—artistic acclaim.

Since my teens, I have had a nagging doubt when I read some western literary classics. What if all this, all of literature, was just the expression of the rich from a time when only the rich could do some things? Am I just reading the naïve, mediocre observations of the affluent? What if most of the vaunted Western literature is merely the outpouring of a highly networked club? Many acclaimed European writers were indeed rich, or were promoted by the rich.

With the economic democratization of a whole new class of luxury products, including doctorates and literary efforts, apart from philosophical and artistic pursuits, it is easy to forget their social origins. Even today, many writers and artists from wealthy homes purchase their fame through their social equity. It is a fair generalization that science and sports too emerged from elite society, but as they are objective fields, the mediocre rich could not compete once these became widely accessible. But the arts are a different matter. Yet, this is an arena that the modern super-rich have abandoned, as most of them seem to have moved far away from intellectual pursuits. But then, the rich who have managed to pass themselves off as writers and ‘thinkers’ probably know the joys of abstract fame, probably one of the best things money can buy.

Without an intellectual pursuit, wealth searches desperately to entertain itself with material things, to somehow buy fun that is unattainable for others. You sit with some of India’s wealthy, and all you hear is what money has bought and will buy next. What they have taken from the world, what they will take next. A new generation has been raised listening to this talk and might believe that this is the way to be, this is how the rich should enjoy their luck.

In response to this demand, capitalism keeps inventing fake products for the super-rich. But the fun just does not come, and they have to keep doing more desperate things. They have to buy more and more, consume more and more, and veer towards the dangerous side. Like pushing a Porsche’s pedal to 200 kmph on an Indian road, as an imbecile did in 2024, and will do so again, killing and maiming people, and quickly securing another luxury product called bail.

(Manu Joseph is a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. His latest book is ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us’)