A Million Reasons to Spend Money--or Is It a Billion?
The Electronic Putting Challenge machine shaves strokes off your handicap for “just $1,495!” A cool $7,620 will get you a 1,500-pound bronze Tyrannosaurus rex--”sure to keep stray dogs at bay.” And look what $2.2 million buys: Your own private Florida Key.
It goes on, page after thick, shiny page--a catalog of conspicuous consumption, a diary of decadent doings. Profiles of Rockefellers and Cartiers and sultans. Articles on “Rees Jones: Golf Architect to the Millionaires.” And so much to buy: ads for chandeliers, Rolls-Royces and Humvees. For yachts, Learjets and bronze statues of topless women carrying swords and shields. For $750 bottles of Gardenia Passion perfume and 180-acre Texas horse ranches.
Millionaires--those who are, those fixing to be and those who dream about it--are the stock in trade of this $7.95 periodical. And now, in the middle of the biggest boom of an American lifetime, the ultimate luxury publication has produced an unscientific but thought-provoking economic indicator:
As of August, Millionaire magazine has gone monthly.
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Obviously, the word “millionaire” means riches. But it comes laden with history too. Even though it was coined in France (in 1719), in America it has become nothing less than a repository of modern ambition.
It evokes Gilded Age images of financiers and robber barons and philanthropists, of top hats and walking sticks and railroads and oil wells and dimes tossed to urchins. Of Rockefeller and Carnegie and Hearst, Morgan and Mellon, Getty and Gould.
They were the heroes and antiheroes of industrial America, far above the rank and file. They didn’t stoop to conquer; they became, and fed, legend. They gave the word the cachet of prosperity; the culture gobbled it up.
Marilyn Monroe and Lauren Bacall starred in “How to Marry a Millionaire.” In the 1950s, CBS aired a popular show called “The Millionaire,” in which a shadowy philanthropist handed out money. In Williamsport, Pa., where the lumber boom once produced more millionaires per capita than any other town, the scholastic sports teams are still called the Millionaires.
More Millionaires Than Ever Before
The millionaire’s playground was always considered an exclusive one, coveted by workaday America. But now it contains multitudes.
That’s partially because of inflation. A million dollars in pre-Depression 1920 was worth the equivalent of $8.3 million today; $1 million during the postwar boom in 1950 was worth $6.9 million in 1999 dollars; and even in 1970, $1 million was worth 4.3 times what it is now.
“Being a millionaire isn’t what it used to be. It’s not going to make you an envy of the city,” says Dwight R. Lee, author of “Getting Rich in America.” “A lot more people feel it’s within the realm of possibility.”
Telecommunications--the Internet, especially--is making money flow faster than ever before. Trading, purchasing, banking, selling--all are done at breakneck speed everywhere from trading pit to kitchen table. State lotteries and casino gambling have appealed to millionaire dreams and asked people to take chances. Says the New York State Lottery: “Hey--you never know.”
“This is the motivation for education for most people today: ‘I’m going to be a millionaire, come hell or high water,’ ” says Gerald Celente, director of the Trends Research Institute in Rhinebeck, N.Y.
It’s hard to say how many millionaires exist these days; no government statistic tracks net worth in exactly that manner. The Internal Revenue Service says it handled 110,912 tax returns from people who made more than $1 million in 1996, but that’s annual, not accumulated, wealth. In “The Millionaire Next Door,” authors Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko estimate America has more than 3.5 million millionaires--most worth between $1 million and $10 million.
Whatever the figure, everyone agrees there are more than ever before. Some seem a bit like the magnates of old--Ross Perot, Ted Turner, Warren Buffett--but many are young, cultivated in their informality, comfortable in jeans and scuffed Nikes and baseball caps. These aren’t folks who are booking passage for cruises on the QE2, but they are charting new courses toward the good life.
The faces of the new American millionaires are the faces of Todd Krizelman and Stephan Paternot, both 25 and co-CEOs of theglobe.com, worth $10.7 million and $11.4 million respectively. Of Jerry Yang, 30, head of Yahoo!, worth about $3.07 billion. Of Seth Warshavsky, 26, the cybersex entrepreneur who turned his corner of the Internet into a latter-day Standard Oil of carnality. Of David Samuel, 27, who sold his music-streaming start-up company, spinner.com, to America Online for $320 million in stock earlier this year. His recent assessment of success: “Things worked out, which is cool.”
More young people making more money and demanding more luxurious lifestyles. More buyers for that Lamborghini or Learjet. More super-deluxe vacation packages to Martinique or Monaco. More people who want to know how to be a millionaire--or just act like one.
And more people to read Millionaire magazine.
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“Computers, sports, old blueblood, nouveaux riches sticking their toe in the water for the first time--we have ‘em all,” Robert White tells a visitor perched on the body-swallowing sofa opposite his sprawling desk.
White, Millionaire’s publisher and CEO of its parent company, millionaire.com, is sitting in his well-heeled office off Hilton Head Island, discussing The List. It’s a commodity he guards zealously--one any ambitious advertiser might consider assassination to obtain.
He’s been building it for 30 years, since before he launched Robb Report magazine. It contains the names and addresses of 457,000 millionaires, 353 billionaires and 2,500 Europeans with noble titles. These are people who can buy--who will buy. They make up part of Millionaire’s circulation base.
Each month, 120,000 copies are printed, 60,000 of which go to a combination of subscribers and a perpetually changing circle of people that White draws from his list. Another 60,000 go to upper-end newsstands in airports and cities, and bookstore chains like Waldenbooks and Barnes & Noble. But still he gets calls from stores: “We’ve run out.”
The average net worth of a Millionaire subscriber: $9.9 million. Some even spend $100 extra to get the magazine by overnight express “so they can buy things in it before anybody else does.”
White, an easy-smiling auction-house entrepreneur who favors classic cars, sold the Robb Report in 1983 and moved to South Carolina. A year ago, Millionaire founder Doug Lambert, battling health problems, called White and asked if he’d be interested in the then-quarterly periodical. White bit. “I loved the name ‘Millionaire,’ ” he said. “It’s a name that you don’t forget.”
As the magazine flourished, advertisers soon began pushing. Do it monthly, they said; the market will bear it. He began to hear stories: brokerages handing out the magazine to ambitious employees; multilevel marketing operations--”the Amways of the world”--giving it to salespeople as a road map; rich people passing it along to rich friends who wanted to read success stories.
“We’re talking about people who have castles and who have breweries in their castles. It’s outrageous, but it’s so interesting,” says Vanessa Berkling, 28, White’s new editor in chief. She was editing a Canadian style magazine when Millionaire caught her eye on a newsstand.
Then there are the wannabes who, White surmises, use the magazine as a sourcebook--a guide to how to get there and how to act on the way.
“Half of them can’t afford what’s in the magazine. But they aspire and they dream,” says Edward M. Eglowsky, president of Genesis Gallery, a Stamford, Conn.-based business that has done $215,000 in business from Millionaire advertisements since January.
“And as long as people can aspire and dream,” he says, “they’re alive.”
Wealth Spun on the Web
As his shar-pei, Murray, dozes at his feet, Tyrus Christiana, in T-shirt and jeans, taps and clicks his way to success. On his desk, near a thicket of computer hardware, sits a Dilbert calendar that, on July 15, shows April 8. Atop a nearby shelf sits a tin of Copenhagen, some Visine and a Wendy’s takeout bag.
Christiana is millionaire.com’s director of computer technology--and, as a Web master, the face of much of the work force the Internet has begat. He’s making sure the company’s online presence--especially a set of auctions aimed at millionaires--measures up.
“This isn’t eBay,” he says. “You’re not going to have to dig through 50,000 Furbys to get to the Van Gogh. If you have junk on there, the Swiss watch guys won’t advertise with us.”
At 28, Christiana resembles those Internet millionaires you see interviewed on TV discussing newfound fortunes. He isn’t a millionaire--”yet,” he says. But the point is there: This is how a millionaire can look--and, nowadays, often does.
“I’m waiting for the day,” Christiana says, adding cryptically: “If things work out, I might be.”
Hey--you never know. Nowadays, millionaires are us--or, at least, we feel they could be. The dream seems within reach, and the Social Register’s increasing irrelevancy has made the nouveau riche as entitled to the perks as any Rockefeller or Carnegie.
These are the Jerry Yangs and Seth Warshavskys of the world, the dot-com generation of Americans who suddenly find that, when they turn to personal finances, they’re dealing with six zeros.
The cachet’s still there. And the dream still burns: You see the people who dream it.
You see them clogging I-95, streaming out of New York City and into Connecticut for preposterously swollen Powerball jackpots. You see them on the cracked hoop courts of any American city, trying to be the next Penny Hardaway with the accompanying multimillion-dollar contracts and endorsements.
You see them at day-trading desks in edge-city office parks, trading feverishly and seeking quick paths to fortune. You see them, somber-faced and determined at 3 a.m., crowding the rows of slots at Atlantic City casinos. You see them on the Net, parlaying virtual frontiers into success stories--stories that might well eventually be chronicled in the pages of Millionaire.
And starting this month, you’ll see them on TV again, competing on ABC before host Regis Philbin in a new show called “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” “Nail-biting drama,” the network calls it.
But ultimately there is a catch: Beyond riches, people like exclusivity. If too many millionaires exist, the prestige decays. And there’ll just have to be a new club to join, a topmost tier for the hardest-working and the luckiest.
White doesn’t expect that for quite a while. But he’s a careful man; he does, he allows, have the contingency covered. Just to be safe, he has trademarked another title: “Billionaire.”
Hey--you never know.
