My Billionaire Life

Newsletter 2024-03-25

There’s no audio version this week because I’m on the road and away from my recording equipment. Never fear: You can use your app of choice to read it aloud to you in a mechanical voice. Everyone tells me I already sound like a robot when I narrate, so you probably won’t notice a difference. Also, because I’m not reading this out loud, I’ll likely fail to catch and correct more typos than usual. Treat them as fun little Easter Eggs rather than sure proof of my mental and moral decline. Enjoy!

I’m not good enough for this place. I’m not good enough for most places, really. There have been a few run down Taco Bells that should have thrown me out. I’m currently staying in a quasi-resort I’ve nicknamed Billionaire Peninsula, but at Holiday Inn prices. That’s not a humble brag, or even a regular one. It’s a statement of objective fact and also a heads up to the authorities that they should forcibly evict me before I stay here long enough to earn squatters rights. My family and I have had an amazing few days in a place I don’t deserve to be and will probably never be invited back to again. I’m making the most of it, and by “making the most of it,” I mean taking two hours out of my limited recreational time to write this newsletter. Communicating with strangers on the internet trumps hanging out with friends and family any day, especially when on vacation.

I can’t give you my exact location or the authorities won’t let me come back, but the compound is located on the shores of the Lake of the Ozarks. “Compound” is the right word. It consists of twelve townhouses split between four buildings plus a giant clubhouse with an indoor pool, all on a private drive protected by large metal gates. The facility belongs to my friend Susan’s employer. Her company, which I also don’t want to name since being associated with me would destroy their reputation and possibly prompt a congressional investigation, is family-owned. It was founded back in the days when people understood that the fastest and cheapest way to  build a workforce was to have more kids. The starting couple had thirteen. Their teenagers did manual labor, their middle schoolers handled basic administrative work, and their toddlers worked the phone lines. That would still be an improvement over most call centers I interact with today. Thanks to the effective exploitation of child labor, the company’s value soon climbed into the billions, making those kids, who are now adults, billionaires as well. What do you do when you have that much family money but also that much family? You buy a partially completed housing development that went bankrupt and finish it into the ultimate family reunion getaway destination. But there’s such a thing as too much family, so you only do that for one weekend a year. The rest of the time, you open it up to riffraff like me.

In the off season, the company rents out units in the compound to employees as a job perk. The rate for a five-bedroom, four-bathroom lakefront townhouse with a balcony, covered patio, and two-car garage is three hundred dollars a night. If the same listing were on Airbnb, it would be two thousand dollars, and half of that would be the cleaning fee. Susan and her husband Patrick cut the already low rental cost by going halfsies with my family, which is the only reason we’re here. They certainly didn’t invite us for the peace and quiet. For the past few days, we’ve had a combined four adults and seven kids in a home that’s far too nice for all of us. So far, we haven’t broken anything, at least not that I’m willing to admit in writing. Talk to me in person if you want an explanation for that mysterious shattering sound in the middle of the night. We have to be on our best behavior so we don’t get Susan fired. That’s why I can’t be too specific with my description of her employer.  To throw you off the trail, let’s say they specialize in the related industries of tax preparation, nuclear weapons manufacturing, and rare animal poaching. Everyone knows nuking condors is tax deductible.

The most impressive part of Billionaire Peninsula is the docks. There are covered slips for more than thirty boats. I can’t give you an exact number because I haven’t walked down there yet. I’m afraid if I push my luck that far, the guards will finally find me. Their snipers can’t miss forever. There’s a huge corrugated metal roof like you might find in the middle of Indiana, except instead of covering a pole barn full of tractors, it protects a small country’s GDP worth of boats. That’s what it would cover during peak season, anyway. Right now, it’s mostly empty except for a handful of jet skis. Someone probably forgot them here after the family reunion last summer. You can’t be expected to keep track of all your watercraft when you buy them by the dozen. There are a few kayaks on hand that we could have used if we were feeling ambitious, but none of us is in the mood to get hypothermia. The wimp gene is strong in my family. Instead, we chose to stay inside and enjoy views we couldn’t afford on a permanent basis. In that respect, having a window overlooking the water and watching the water on TV aren’t that different. One is simply a much more expensive way to enjoy a Miller Lite. That’s what it all comes down to. “Luxury” is a fancy way of saying you found a pricier place to drink cheap beer.

The past few days have given me a chance to get to know my kids all over again. The biggest revelation was about my thirteen-year-old, Betsy. She’s growing up, which shouldn’t have been a surprise but still somehow caught me off guard. It’s ridiculous that she’s been getting older one day at a time 1.3 decades in a row. We’ve spent most of our time at the indoor pool. The other adults and I play board games on a towel-covered table to the side while the kids frolic in the water. All the kids minus Betsy, that is. She’s old enough that being cold and wet all day no longer appeals to her, yet she’s young enough that she’s not interested in joining our five-hour session of Battlestar Galactica. Okay, that last part isn’t really an age thing. She has good taste. Either way, she found herself stranded between the two groups. She’s not quite a kid but definitely not an uber nerd grown-up. She’s spent much of her time back at the townhouse by herself playing Xbox in the basement. Maybe that’s what she really wanted. Her perfect vacation might be enjoying a few days away from her siblings. It’s every big sister’s dream.

One solution for future trips could be to let her bring a friend her own age. That seems like opening Pandora’s Box. If we let Betsy do it, the other girls will want to do the same when they’re her age, too. Worse, they might expect to do it now. Instead of taking four kids on vacation, we’d be saddled with eight. We’d no longer be able to travel around in a minivan. We’d have to buy a bus. An easier solution would be to convince Betsy to hang out with the adults. We’re not as lame as she thinks. Just kidding. We’re exactly that lame, but that’s not a bad thing. Lame people are some of the best people to hang out with. We’re funny, we don’t judge anyone, and we don’t require you to engage in any activities that involve exercise. If you want to sit in one spot while having the time of your life, we’re the crew for you. Betsy doesn’t recognize that yet, but she will—or not. It’s possible she’s far too wise to fall for my uninteresting interests. If so, more power to her. I just hope she lets me teach her a few board games before I lose her for good.

Outside of keeping a teenager entertained, the biggest struggle over this vacation has been the food. The kids insist on eating everyday. It’s like they don’t know we’re on vacation. For each meal, we have to cook, eat, and then clean up, cutting into critical game time. Apparently the mere fact that we’re in a place owned by rich people doesn’t grant us access to the rich people’s staff. I should have read the fine print. Instead, we have to wash our own dishes like feudal peasants. Well, we have to rinse off our dishes like feudal peasants before a magical dishwashing machine does the rest of the process for us, but it’s still too much labor. I might as well have stayed at work.

We don’t actually have to cook for every meal. We could go out, but oddly enough that’s sometimes more work. To eat at a restaurant, we have to refrain from our precious light beer for hours, load everyone into vehicles, and relocate to another location. The roads around here are less than intuitive. The Lake of the Ozarks was made by damming up several rivers, with most of the highways sticking to the winding contours of the high ground above. You might be able to see a restaurant on the other side of a narrow finger of water, but it could take twenty minutes to drive there. Thanks to asymmetrical on ramps and off ramps, the way out is never the same as the way back. If Google Maps stopped working, I would never find my way back to the compound. Then there’s the deer. I’ve never seen so many in my life. On the way to a restaurant Saturday night, we counted nearly eighty. That’s not hyperbole. There were eleven standing by the automatic gates when we left the townhouse. They completely ignored us as the hinges swung open. When I gently pressed the gas pedal, they still didn’t move. This was their land and they knew it. As we continued the ten minute drive, more and more deer appeared out of nowhere, unhurried and unafraid. It could have been the start of a Hitchcock movie. In the right (or wrong) circumstances, those hooves could do some damage. On our way back from the restaurant, we saw “only” twelve deer. That didn’t mean they went away. I imagine they were still out there, watching—and waiting. We’ve been locking the door of a rental house ever since.

We could avoid both going out to restaurants and cooking if we simply lowered our standards. From day one, I argued that we should eat dry cereal for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but no one else was convinced. The problem might be the dry part. Everyone else ruins their cereal by turning it into soggy mush with milk. There’s no other food that people insist on flooding with cow juice on purpose. You wouldn’t eat chocolate cake and milk soup. The two should be consumed beside each other, not blended together in a dessert slurry. It’s the same story for cookies. Anyone who suggests otherwise is part of an orchestrated propaganda campaign to steal your joy. Instead of eating delicious, crunchy cereal for breakfast, my kids have been treated to luxuries like chocolate chip pancakes almost every day. My kids are becoming accustomed to a way of life I can’t sustain and definitely don’t endorse. They’re going to be in for some culture shock when we go back home and they’re left to their own devices to fend for breakfast. Then again, maybe they prefer it that way. In a low supervision environment, there’s no reason gummy worms can’t be the first meal of the day. We might take for granted how good our regular lives are when we’re not on vacation. That doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy things while we’re here. Staying on Billionaire Peninsula has been a blast for what will almost certainly be our one and only visit. If you work for the company that owns this place, please don’t fire my friend. I’m going to change my name and face and try to mooch my way back here again next year.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James