Tag: rich

eating like a millionaire

I don’t make it a habit to daydream about how I’d live if I won the lottery and had millions of dollars. It’s just not all that productive or fruitful, though I admit it has happened before. But I thought of it again recently due to a news story.

Mike Lindell (CEO of My Pillow) is back in the news because the FBI “raided” him at a Hardee’s drive-thru and took his phone (with a warrant). I won’t get into all the politics of that (except to remind you to get your news from multiple sources so you get the full story and not just what fits the narrative of “conservative news” or “liberal news”). (Also let me remind you to not get into a political rant in the comments or it may be deleted. If it’s a funny joke, that may be okay, though.)

Anyway, so Lindell is a multi-millionaire, at one point worth an estimated $500 million. He can afford to eat anything he wants. And of course, he is free to choose to eat anything he wants, so if Hardee’s is his preferred place for a burger, that’s fine. It just seems odd to me. I’m not trying to dis’ Hardee’s at all — they sell fast food at a certain price point, and there’s a market for that — but there are better burgers available, albeit for a higher price. It’s just that Lindell can afford any burger he wants.

I don’t know what restaurants are available in the town where he works, and I don’t care to research that. But here’s my idea. Since he’s the CEO of his own company, he could just hire someone to grill burgers for him with an actual charcoal grill and cook whatever else he wants whenever he wants, and clean it all up, and he could write the whole thing off as a business expense. Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Granted, it is somewhat extravagant to have your own personal chef, although he is a millionaire. But he could do even more with that idea — he could share that food with other people in the company, which would boost morale significantly. I used to work at a large corporation, and I still remember when they’d have free burgers. They weren’t great burgers, but they were good, and they were free. People get excited about free food. And even if the company didn’t want to add that expense, they could offer it to the employees at cost. They could even use high-quality ingredients, then. That would boost morale, and it would encourage employees to take a shorter lunch by staying on-campus. Then it becomes a win-win.

I do realize this whole discussion is based on the premise of grilling a great-tasting burger. I don’t know if most people feel this way or not. But I have researched the taste of my own grilled burgers against the burgers at various restaurants around town, and I prefer a freshly-grilled burger at home. If others don’t feel the same way, maybe that just means they’re not as good at grilling… 🙂 It is important to note that the quality of ingredients matters, too — not all beef patties are the same quality, as well as other ingredients, and technique matters.

Maybe Lindell is is penny-pinching because he’s concerned about that lawsuit over the voting machines where Dominion is suing him for all-the-money… Although one could argue that he should live it up while he can because he may soon be poor or middle-class like most of us.

Note-to-self: if any of us ever win the lottery and start a research company, we could do this food write-off proper. Well, not just proper (which is a saying), but next-level awesome. The concept could be applied to other foods, too. And while free food is great, the IRS now wants to tax employees for it when they receive free food at work, so selling it at cost might be the better option. Imagine if for your lunch break you had the option to get a steak grilled to your liking using high-quality ingredients, at cost. I figure most of us would like to eat more steak, but it’s quite expensive, especially if you want it done well. If it was at cost, it could be just a few dollars, which would greatly improve morale around the workplace…

slide from bedroom to swimming pool

The other day I was talking with someone who also would like to have a pool for exercise (as well as general enjoyment).  It’s no-impact and thus low-stress on your joints, so it’s great for exercise, especially when recovering from injury.

We talked about how great it would be to have an indoor pool, where you could open it up to the outside in good weather.  Then I remembered this picture of an indoor pool with a slide from an upstairs bedroom.  I had heard Mike Tyson had something like this in his house, but I haven’t found any evidence of that.  This is a 3D rendering from house plans other than his.

We discussed how awesome such a setup would be, and someone joked that Tyson had the slide from his bedroom to the pool so he could escape quickly from tax collectors.  (And here’s where the randomness begins, so hold on for the ride.)  The pool could’ve had a secret tunnel to the outside.  A neat way to quickly escape would be to have a giant pump to drain the pool to an outside location.

If you’ve got a giant pool that can be flushed, and there’s a slide from your bedroom to the pool, and you’ve got many millions of dollars to waste, you could have the pool be a giant toilet.  Just picture it — you crawl out of bed, have to go urinate, so you go down the slide, pee in the pool, and hit the big flush button.  This would be wasting thousands of gallons of water just to flush the toilet, but this is all about being over-the-top extravagant and wasteful.

This story is already kinda random, but this discussion was happening late at night, so it kept going.  If you’re using the pool as a giant toilet, you might poop in there sometimes.  Picture an Olympic-sized swimming pool, water swirling, with the poop being the last part to go down.  It would take several minutes.  If someone was coming over to visit and would be using the pool, you might have to distract them while it flushed.  Otherwise they might think you had squirrels or beavers in the pool.  It would also take a while to refill a big pool, so you might need your own water tower on your property.  (It’s just money, right?)

The story continued, involving squirrels eating corn, but it’s probably not as funny reading it as it was at the time, so I’ll stop there.  Feel free to continue the rambling if you think of something.

Oh, and there was also a comment that there might be protesters outside the premises because of the immense wastefulness.  (Of course you’d have a big fence and gate, as rich people do.)  Someone said when it was time to wash the protesters off the sidewalk, you could use the water from the pool to flush the sidewalks clean.  🙂  (How’s that for recycling?)

world’s biggest private residence

Here at Buffet o’ Blog, we know about being over-the-top — albeit mostly in imagination.  We can come up with some crazy-huge ideas.  Unfortunately, we usually don’t have the funding to follow through with all those awesome ideas.  But there are a few extremely rich people who will spare no expense when it comes to implementing their dreams.  (We need to find a few wealthy investors to fund some of our ideas.  So if you’ve got more money than you need, have your people contact our people…)

In the news today, India’s richest man (estimated at $27 billion) has moved into the world’s biggest private residence.   It’s a 27-story-building in Mumbai. It has three helipads and its own air-traffic control station on the roof.  The 570-foot-tall glass tower has a swimming pool, health club, salon, and a mini-theater.  The first six floors are a parking garage for more than 160 cars.  And it has 9 elevators.

The link above has a picture, and it doesn’t look like a private residence to me.  The “house” was initially to be built for $70 million, but a newspaper says it was closer to $1 billion.  I’m thinking if I was going to spend that much for my own custom house, it would look a lot different.   But to each their own.

But wait, there’s more.   The residence requires about 600 staffers to run it.  That’s what I really don’t get.  How much work is there to do for 600 staffers?   That’s a LOT of people!  At first thought, I’m not sure what that many people would do.  But I reckon if we all combine our imagination, we can come up with something.   So here’s your homework — if you had a huge mansion and 600 staffers, what would you have them do?  Remember, money is no object.  Post your ideas in a comment, so we can figure this out.