I used to live in one of the cheapest apartments on the Newport Beach Peninsula. 450 square feet of beautiful shitty beach hut. My upstairs neighbor was a former rock star. The house behind me sold for $3.1M. Across the street was the Lovell Beach House ($6M). If we want to be generous, Kobe Bryant was one of my neighbors (~1 mile away). No clue who most of the people living there were but we were loaded to the brim with wealthy (some famous) people in the general vicinity.
Newport Beach however, was not "exclusive" - there were plenty of normal people (like myself) around too. There was a great basketball game weekdays @2pm at the 38th street park. Some people bought houses when Newport Beach got messed up by a storm in the 90s (supposedly there were houses going for $300K). And every weekend during the summer we filled up with every kind of person there was hitting the beach.
Despite the hodgepodge, its impossible to not notice this sort of a thing when you are walking down the street:
And if you are anything like me, you start to wonder:
These people have the kind of wealth that the rest of the country dreams of having... I wonder what they are doing in there?
Well it turns out that the open, modern, architecture in Newport Beach makes it easy to see stuff going on. Especially during my nightly jogs. I'm sure you'll be as surprised as I was to learn, that they mostly just sit on their asses watching Fox News (or CNN, or MSNBC).
What the hell?
They could be having huge raging parties with famous celebrities. Nope, parties were rare. Good parties didn't happen. They could be sitting around drinking Pappy 25, eating caviar, smoking Cohibas, riding ostriches and tigers while shooting skeet inside the house. They didn't. They could be playing strip poker with super models... yeah nope.
5 years of jogging, walking, biking around the Peninsula/ Balboa Island and I saw a couple of instances of domestic abuse, (1) Porn moving being filmed, and a whole lot of nothing from the Ultra wealthy. Most of the time they were just sitting on their asses watching TV, occasionally they were having family over.
In light of the "eat the rich" movement that is yet again going on in our country, I thought it might be useful to know who the ultra wealthy really are... and for the most part, they are boring old people (& families). They drive very nice cars. They buy expensive real estate... and they sit around watching Fox News. Pretty sad and definitely not a group to hate.
Note: I'm assuming the photo can be used under fair use since this is non-commercial and educational. If you are the owner of the photo and would like it removed, please contact me. the photo was found on zillow