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You don’t need a ‘conversation starter’ to hang out with rich people. This is something I find very interesting. People assume it’s a rarified world, but in reality most rich people (not Musk-tier, although you can ‘associate’ with billionaires if you’re merely upper middle class and put a decent amount of effort into NYC/London/etc social climbing) are just happy to have someone to talk to, and showing up to not-particularly-cool-or-popular gallery openings, arts and culture events, wherever models and rich kids are partying and drinking now in said major city or bottle service clubs or, if you have a little more money, places like Aspen and St Barths at the appropriate time of year as @FiveHourMarathon said about ski bums is all sufficient.
What people don’t seem to understand is that you can be casual buddies with multiple bona fide billionaires and it will (most likely) make absolutely zero difference to your own socioeconomic status. I call this the “handshake meme”. A certain kind of popular fiction (Hollywood but also ‘hustle’ / influencer culture) suggests that the key ingredient in success is ‘who you know’, which is banal but sometimes true. But the same message is often extrapolated as suggesting that all you need to do is personally make casual acquaintances with wealthy and powerful people and this will somehow lead to wealth and power.
There are these ‘handshake guys’ everywhere now. You’ll be at a bar or a conference or something and there he is, some random hustle bro, coming up to shake the hand of the CEO or whoever you’re talking to, introducing himself, making some small talk, plugging his startup or whatever bullshit he’s doing. And it doesn’t work. They might like you, they might even go out drinking with you, but they are not going to give you a job or a few million or whatever else, unless it’s Peter Thiel maybe (and even then, plenty of his DR associates are still poor and unemployable, and maybe he’ll ask for a favor too).
Being friends with the super rich, unless you’re their childhood best friend or best bro from college, or you already run a successful grift (in, say, a specific type of government contracting) and know exactly what you want from them and know it’s plausible enough to sell them on, very rarely leads to wealth itself. You could have a half dozen billionaires in your Rolodex [on Linkedin] who see you as a great guy to go drinking with in Vegas and the second you ask one of them for a couple mil for your new startup idea or a nice job at their family business they’re gonna ghost. Tons of normal PMC journalists, academics, bankers, lawyers, accountants and so on who went to elite private schools are on first name terms with a substantial number of super rich people and yet derive no financial benefit from those relationships (often not for lack of desire to…). And these are by and large people who did graduate from prestigious colleges, mix in the right circles and have ‘good’ jobs!
If being friendly with the rich was sufficient to become rich oneself, Miami and Ibiza club promoters would all be billionaires. Social climbing is best and traditionally approached after a fortune is made, not before. Doing it before turns you into a grifter, and behind the glamour, the vast, vast majority of grifters fail.
Well I might be grade A delusional here but my justification for wanting to add more rich people to my collection is.. unlike those hustle bros and club promoters, I'm actually smart.
I'm employed because I knew my CEO from a hobby and called him up begging for a job. So it's been useful at the start of my career.
Maybe I won't make millions through networking alone, but I do believe in my heart it can get me far as a wage slave.
That's the disconnect. 2rafa is looking at it as a rich kid knowing it won't make you rich to know rich people. They won't get you to the top. But if you're just an average wagie, rich friends get you a long way up.
My brother just received a 30k € interest-free loan from his rich friend for one of his job projects and he didn't even ask, the guy just wanted to help a friend in difficulty. It may seem cold and utilitarian but I must say that, anecdotally, having rich friends that actually care about you can be life changing.
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