What It’s Like to Have a Billionaire Brother

What It’s Like to Have a Billionaire Brother

‘Are the rich really different from the rest of us?’ I ask myself while wrestling with my billionaire younger brother at 3 a.m.

Eric Spitznagel  Oct 5 · 10 min read

For most of the last decade, my brother Mark and his family lived in a house with a moat.

The house — a four-bedroom French villa in Bel Air previously owned by Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony — is pretty impressive even without the moat, but that unnecessary protective trench gives the house a certain surreal charm. It’s nice to know that when you visit your family for the holidays, you don’t have to worry about Spanish conquistadors.

When I tell people about my brother’s moat house, they usually ask, “Is he rich or something?” When I admit that he is, their next question is, “So you guys probably don’t get along anymore, right?”

It’s a weird thing to assume, especially the “anymore” part. It’s as if the moment my brother’s bank account added a few extra zeros (okay, a lot of extra zeros), he morphed into Monty Burns from The Simpsons.

I can’t blame them. For most of my life, everything I believed about very rich people I learned from F. Scott Fitzgerald. “They are different from you and me,” he wrote in the 1925 short story “The Rich Boy.”

Despite not knowing any rich people personally, that seemed about right to me.

My family, on both my mother’s and father’s sides, has historically been middle class, usually on the lower end. We buy our cars used, find our clothes at outlet malls, and aren’t afraid of eating meat “priced for quick sale.”

I grew up with birthday parties at Burger King and the knowledge at eight that I’d be paying off college loans till I was 40. How could I disagree with Fitzgerald that rich people, with their lack of any discernible struggling, really did believe “deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are?”

The wealthy aren’t helping their own case. Tom Perkins complained to the Wall Street Journal about the “rising tide of hatred” against the super-rich, comparing his supposed oppression to the Kristallnacht.

If you consumed enough media as a child and ever saw your parents get stressed out by bills, you hated the rich out of instinct.

N. Gregory Mankiw, a former economic adviser to President George W. Bush, wrote a New York Times op-ed in which he suggested that chief executives deserve to be paid more than the rest of us because they take bigger risks.

But for me, the real influence was pop culture, which I grew up consuming ravenously. It was filled with reminders that the super-wealthy are unfailingly villains — Lex Luthor, Jabba the Hutt, the rich kids’ camp in Meatballs.

For every Richie Rich fantasy or pleasantly paternal Daddy Warbucks, there was a sneering J. R. Ewing or Smaug the Unassessably Wealthy, hoarding his stolen jewels and fending off hobbits. If you consumed enough media as a child and ever saw your parents get stressed out by bills, you hated the rich out of instinct.

Even science seems to agree that the rich are probably arrogant jerks. A study published in 2012 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences summed up our collective suspicions with its title alone: “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior.”

Mark wasn’t born rich. If he were, I would be rich, too.

My younger brother (two years my junior) got that way because he’s very good at making bad bets. He’s what some people have called a “doomsday investor.” He bets on market calamity, the financial disasters that nobody expects to happen. Every time you turn on the news and the stock market has taken another hit and the federal debt ceiling is on the verge of caving in, Mark just made another million.

He published a book about his investing philosophy, The Dao of Capital: Austrian Investing in a Distorted World, which I’m told is very good. I own a copy, and I’ve tried to read it several times. But given my limited grasp of all things financial, it might as well be written in Sumerian.

I asked him once what he does, and here’s how he explained it: “I exploit the distortions of our interventionist monetary policy as they manifest themselves in the financial markets. I do this specifically using very asymmetric payoffs of derivatives.”

Make sense? If it does, then you’re probably rich, too. I have no idea what any of that means. It might as well be the muted trombone “mwa mwa” of a Peanuts parent.

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