Do you know a really rich person?

[magical thyme]

40. I've known a number of very wealthy people

The horsewomen who inherited their wealth were down to earth. They'd be out in the cold, mucking out and breaking ice with the rest of us.

The billionaire who was rumored to be the wealthiest person in New England was a narcissistic, creepy asshole supreme. Every so often he would come to the barn with his mistress, walk into the tack room and crank the heat up to about 80 in the dead of winter (raising the bill for all of us) plunk himself down in a chair, look miserable and snarl when you greeted him.

His mistress was a former high-class prostitute from the backwoods of Vermont whom he'd gifted with an olympic prospect that she could barely sit on, a little red porsche and $1M (a few decades ago when that was serious money) so she wouldn't have to work (presumably to be at his beck and call). She was narcissistic, obnoxious and universally hated. She would hang around the barn all day with all of her stuff spread out over the aisle so you couldn't walk by. In summer, she would wait by her horse parked in the aisle while you rode and then, when she saw you enter the aisle with a hot, sweaty horse, she would run her horse to the wash stall and force you to wait for 20 minutes to rinse off your poor horse. I silently laughed when the real estate market crashed in the mid-90s, since her money was all invested in condos and she was at risk of losing it all. I think she lost a lot of it, but she convinced her "honey" to buy her a farm just outside of Boston. We celebrated when she moved out. Piece. Of. Work.

The formerly middle-class woman about my age who married money was pretty darned obnoxious. Their son was being raised by her, a fulltime nanny and a housekeeper, and destined to be a complete asshole. She was very passive aggressive toward me, but I silently felt avenged knowing that for all her bluster and claims, when push came to shove, she was owned by her husband. She's the one who told me that when they hosted parties for the elite, they got them whatever they wanted, "...and I mean, whatever." I envisioned whatever drugs, prostitutes, child prostitutes...who knows

The executives at DEC were a mix. Some were down to earth with high integrity. My favorite Marketing VP's wife had 30 cats. They had their own room in their house and he'd built them a wall of cubbies. He had decided to build them their own little house in their back yard when I was in his group Others were grifter assholes (the "yesmen" and professional "fall guys.&quot I will give one of the creepy grifters a bit of credit: when his dog fell through ice into a pond, he ran out onto the ice and rescued him. So he did have one major redeeming quality. Surprised me; I took him to be a coward. By the time I was at Digital, a significant chunk of them were the grifter/yes-men/fall-guy type, especially in the services and systems divisions. The storage division, where I landed in the mid-90s, lacked any kind of sex appeal and the majority there were very high integrity and down to earth.