So important in fact that some of them are now spending millions of dollars every year for PR agencies to spread the message that they are just regular people that drive regular cars,

eat at regular restaurants and live in regular homes.

But in the age of flex culture, why the fuck are these people trying so hard to look normal?

Why didn't you buy a Lamborghini, man? - I didn't have any particular need for one.

I only say that because I've got a follow-up question. - Okay.

What's with the Honda? - This is a perfectly good car.

You bought a house for 45k? - Yeah.

What, is it, like big or is it? - No, it's small.

Is a tiny house, right? - No, it's a tiny house. It's a small, small house.

I could buy any house in the world and I don't want any other house than the one I'm in.

And that house is in a middle class neighborhood.

I'm happy in a pair of khakis and a sweater so I don't need fancy clothes. I don't need fancy food.

Do you have an iPad? - I do not have an iPad.

iPhone? - No.

Now convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried once had billions of dollars of customer funds at his disposal to live a lavish life in the Bahamas

In the early days of FTX, Fried and his co-conspirators reportedly drove around in the expensive sports cars typical of Crypt Bros.

According to evidence presented during his trial,

SPF would later sell the cars and advise other executives at FTX and Alameda to do the same because it didn't fit with the image of the company that they were trying to present to customers and investors.

SPF's shitty Toyota Corolla that paid influencers made such a big deal of was about as authentic as the company's internal accounting department.

The car, the haircut, the wrinkled haircut were more carefully managed than customer funds.

The group did this because they knew that the image of a boy genius that didn't care about luxuries or power would be appealing to people looking for an honest place  to keep their funds.

SBF and the rest of the gang were all frauds, but putting a lot of effort into crafting a folksy image is done by most prominent business leaders for three simple reasons that are mostly bullshit.

If you know these strategies, you will be able to see through what is little more than personal marketing.

The first reason that they do this is because even if they aren't running a fraud, acting like an every man still gets people to give them what they want.

Stealth wealth is when rich people buy products that are of high quality but does not flaunt their wealth.

They do this because they don't want the attention and problems that come along with people knowing that they are rich.

Billionaires doing a Bloomberg or Nass Daily interviews featuring their basic car and geeky wardrobe is not the same thing as stealth wealth.

Instead of hiding their financial means, these people are just trying to show off as loudly as possible that they don't care about their money, or that their money hasn't changed them.

It's not stealth wealth, so let's call it poverty peacocking.

And it's a great move for their personal brand and any companies they represent.

Humble CEOs are the new fashion.

The world's biggest companies are run by men who are hoodies and turtlenecks instead of tailored suits and other business leaders are trying to emulate that trend because investors like it.

If business leaders very publicly give up flashy luxuries, it also sends the message that they will be frugal running their business and the data actually backs us up.

What role has luck played in your success?

Well, there's luck enters into everybody's life.

According to a study conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2012,

CEOs and CFOs who were not frugal in their own spending were more likely to have instances of insiders perpetuating fraud and were more likely to push equity based incentives to increase their own income.

The study separated personally frugal and flashy executives by looking for purchases like a personal car that was worth over $75,000 or a boat that was over 25 feet.

Billionaires and executives didn't actually want to give up their luxuries, so they just started lying about it

Buffett does own an old beat up car, but he is usually driven around in a fleet of suburbans with a security team.

Zuckerberg wears the same gray shirt every day but they are custom-made by Brunello Cucinelli.

Musk does rent a tiny home next to the SpaceX factory, but the Wall Street Journal pointed out that he spends most of his time in an 8,000 square foot, 12 million-dollar mansion.

And all of these men fly private.

They are welcome to these luxuries; it is their money.

But there are still two more reasons why they try so hard to pretend that they don't exist.

So it's time to learn how money works to find out why billionaires spend millions to try and convince us that they spend nothing.

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The second reason that really rich people go above and beyond to look normal is because it is an effective sales tactic.

If you make millions or even billions of dollars in your life, I have good news for you.

Unless you made your money as a founder and CEO of a household name company or you are a celebrity,

 it's really easy for you to live a life where nobody knows who you are apart from your family, close friends and the people that work for you.

According to Forbes, there are 2,640 billionaires on Earth in 2023. Down from 2,668 in 2022.

The publication also admits that many billionaires are not included in this number because they could not collect data to accurately report their private fortunes.

Even if you are really interested in personal wealth, you would probably know 50 of these people at most, and the rest just look like people in suits.

The point is that every other rich person you know about is only known about because they want to be.

And why would they give up an easy life to enjoy their wealth and peace?

It's because their own success is one of the best ways to sell stuff.

Whether it's Musk promising that full self-driving is just around the corner, Trump slapping his brand name on everything, or Kevin O'Leary playing as a businessman to pitch FTX, people buy success.

People also buy relatability, so the clever billionaires that want to use their image to boost their own company will make sure that people can see them living lives that people can relate to,

and aspire to at the same time.

The New York Post recently ran an article about Warren Buffett's wife who was supposedly overheard complaining about how expensive a $4 cup of coffee was at the annual Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference,

which is nicknamed the summer camp for billionaires.

This story is also picked up by publications like Business Insider that ran it with the title: Warren Buffet just became even more relatable (for a billionaire).

If it wasn't obvious, let me ruin the fun for you.

Nobody at this conference would have passed along this kind of personal conversation to the press.

You are reading about it because they want you to read about it.

Buffett's frugality is credited in his Investment company success, so he is selling an image just as much as Trump is with his stakes and O'Leary is with his wacky pants.

For Buffett, this is a better story than a bunch of billionaires getting together to talk in private about, well, who the knows.

The only information that seems to leak from these events is how expensive the coffee is.

Being relatable is an equally important sales tactic to people who want to sell a get-rich quick course.

An important element of any grift like this is that people need to believe that someone has become wealthy, and that they can do it too.

So grifters will often talk about their humble beginnings while standing in front of a rented Lamborghini.

This creates a situation where a lot of the people you see promoting their courses on YouTube will be poor people pretending to be rich people pretending to be poor people.

Billionaires and get-rich quick core salesmen presenting a different image of themselves to the world than who they really are behind closed doors probably won't surprise most of you.

But there are two ways this lie's hurting the personal finances of regular people.

The first way is simply the financial harm that buying into the trope of the relatable millionaire or billionaire can do to people who follow them blindly.  

Successful people telling regular people to cut down on luxuries to improve their financial situation is fine.

But if they are telling them to cut down on luxuries to take on a side hustle so they can spend their money on a course instead, that's obviously bad.

And it tragically happens all the time.

It's easier for people with something to sell to ask people to cut down on discretionary spending if they have already built up a personal brand around driving a cheap car and living in a tiny house even after they become a millionaire.

Being a Frugal millionaire is also easier to fake if the supposed millionaires ever get questioned about the legitimacy of their own success.

Obviously, grifter building an image so that they can sell a bad investment or overpriced course are going to do serious financial damage to the people they rope into their schemes.

But even the billionaires paying their PR teams to get them positive media coverage about how relatable they are are still doing damage to a lot of people's personal finances

Because they are reinforcing a common trope in personal finance that everybody's financial problems are caused by them spending too much.

The lies that very wealthy people tell about their humble cars, basic homes and average lifestyle makes it easy to guilt people for enjoying little luxuries,

because if Warren Buffett drives an old car, why do you need a new one?

This does not excuse the reckless spending that a lot of Americans are guilty of, but it does take the attention away from their income.

After a certain point, people can't improve their personal financial situation by being more frugal; they need to increase their income.

And that's the third reason that billionaires spend too much money on looking poor.

It helps them keep their workers in line.

The accounting firm Ernst & Young in a report estimated that the number of family offices in the world had doubled between 2001 and 2016.

Family offices are investment firms dedicated exclusively to to managing the wealth of a single family.

When you and I have some shares on Robin Hood or Schwab, the ultra rich keep their money in family offices.

An article by Barron's reported that one of the fastest growing expenses for these firms was public relations

Many of these family offices are so big that they now have as much influence as private equity firms.

And with influence comes scrutiny.

Private equity firms are some of the most hated financial institutions because they have a long history of bankrupting beloved companies and laying off thousands of workers all to try and turn a slight better profit.

Right. That's exactly right. What we've seen you know in industry after industry where private equity buys up uh businesses is that they're really responsible for some of the worst most abusive business practices in the country.

The scrutiny has been very bad for private equity but the anger is only directed towards the managing partners of these companies.

When a family office does the same thing, public outrage over job cuts would be blamed on the family , nd that's where a good PR team is employed.

It's easy for workers to demand better wages from a company owner who is photographed lounging on a super yacht.

It's easier for a company owner to push back against worker demands when all of their public profile is about how they try to save every scent they can in the name of their business.

The author of the article concluded that "Cporations became people, as people, too, became corporations. And every corporation needs a media relations department."

Now, billionaires have been getting very good at this but there is one that stands out above all the rest.

Go and watch my latest video over on How History Works to find out how Rupert Murdoch went from card carrying socialist to a billionaire by turning conservative news into entertainment.

And don't forget for more hard-hitting reports that can't be made into YouTube videos written by some of the best finance creators out there and myself,

subscribe to the totally free email newsletter compounded daily in the video description to keep on learning how money works.