April 10, 2025
by The Ghost of HST
The Death of Taste
Or: What You Learn from Watching Rich People Spend Money Until the World Ends
It always starts small. Not normal small — not outlet-mall small. But the kind of small that still requires a wire transfer. A $40,000 watch that’s tasteful, which is to say: invisible to anyone who doesn’t also have a $40,000 watch. A cashmere hoodie so soft it makes therapists cry. A ring worn to brunch that costs more than a Hyundai — but it’s vintage, darling, and she got it on The RealReal, so it’s practically a deal.
This is the polite end of the apocalypse. The soft power of wealth. It smells like Byredo and exits without tipping. And it’s having a moment.
In 2025, being rich doesn’t mean shouting. It means whispering. It means dressing like an heir to something vague and European — like olive oil money. And it means mastering the art of looking bored while bleeding money into things most people can’t even Google without shame. Luxury now is coded, layered, cryptic — a secret handshake made of Japanese denim, unfrosted diamonds, and passive-aggressive silence.
But underneath the quiet, the spending is still insane.
You can pick up a $5.4 million Patek Philippe Grandmaster Chime if you want to tell time like Stallone. You can get $3,500 Loro Piana sweatpants so your legs never feel consequence. You can drop $150,000 on a monochrome safari just to shoot photos of animals more emotionally stable than your investor friends.
And if you’re looking for the new status symbol? It’s resale. Rich people have convinced themselves that buying used is authentic. That a $14,000 Chanel jacket has soul because someone else wore it first — and also because it’s “sustainable,” which is the magic word you say now when you want to feel holy while hoarding. (Shoutout to The RealReal, where your salvation is only a Cartier cuff away.)
Watching this from a distance feels like tuning into Season 6 of The White Lotus. You already know how it ends: with someone dead in the pool and everyone else at brunch pretending not to notice.
Down in Barbuda, a Caribbean island that’s been communally owned by generations of descendants of the enslaved people who once worked its sugar plantations, the billionaire class has arrived with bulldozers and buzzwords. Robert De Niro and his crew of eco-luxury conquistadors are carving up coastline, building boutique resorts for rich people who want to cosplay as enlightened pirates. The locals call it theft. The investors call it “regenerative hospitality.”
Meanwhile, in Texas, Jeff Bezos is building a 10,000-year clock inside a mountain — a vanity project disguised as a monument to deep time. It ticks once a year. Like a doomsday metronome. Maybe he’s planning to outlive us. Maybe he already has.
Steve Cohen owns a shark in formaldehyde. Damien Hirst made it. Eight million dollars for a dead thing in a glass case. Art, they call it.
But none of this prepared us for Elon.
Elon Musk didn’t just buy Twitter. He bought the bloodstream of American discourse, then shredded it like a Banksy. He paid $44 billion — most of it borrowed — then slashed its value and sold it to himself through a shell game of AI mergers and valuation voodoo. All while keeping his followers drunk on sarcasm and simulated alpha.
And just when it started to cool down — just when we thought the man might finally shut up — he wrote another check.
That’s the price, reportedly, of what he’s funneled into the Second Coming of Trump. Infrastructure. Media. Influence. Access. Not officially, of course. Not directly. But the math doesn’t lie.
For most people, $270 million is the GDP of a small country.
For Elon? It’s tip money. It’s one Neuralink withdrawal.
And what he got in return isn’t just a front-row seat.
It’s a co-presidency.
The richest man in the world now has his fingers on the algorithm and the nuclear football — not because he earned it, but because he bought it. Because we live in a system where democracy has a price, and the checkout line is fast-tracked for billionaires with a God complex.
So yes, maybe the watch was mid. But the co-presidency? That one’s one-of-a-kind. No resale. No refunds.
And yet — we remain open for business.
COMING SOON
What You Can Buy When the World Ends™
A curated guide to late-capitalist survival essentials from BatShitCrazy.com.
- Bug-out bags that cost more than a used Tesla
- Designer iodine tablets
- Tactical bidets
- Personalized bunkers with mood lighting and buried WiFi routers
Because if the world’s going down, you might as well go out with taste.
Preferably quiet.
Filed from the Eden Rock hotel bar in St. Barts, where a young broligarch is slumming it with his crypto buddies over lukewarm Cristal, duck-fat sliders, and a shared AI mistress named Cleo who only compliments them in Latin.
