Originally published at: Inside the world of tutoring for the ultra-wealthy | Boing Boing
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I don’t have the stomach to read the finished work, but I have a strong suspicion that it could be used as definitive support for why nepotism and familial dynasties are terrible.
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Eat the rich.
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After a bookish childhood, I had followed an unremarkable middle-class trajectory: an English degree at a top university followed by an entry-level job in publishing. […] I registered with a tutoring agency. A few weeks later, I found myself in a speedboat cutting across the Indian Ocean towards a superyacht the size of a ferry.
Crikey, this is the part I want to know more about. You’d think the “ultra-wealthy” would demand wizened elders with decades of experience in delicately shaping young minds for a career in … sitting on piles of money, or something. But all you need is “an English degree at a top university”? Not even a teaching degree!? How does that work?
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Two things: the ultra wealthy don’t stay ultra-wealthy by paying more than they can get away with for things. A relatively young person with an English degree and an entry level publishing job probably doesn’t get paid as much as a “wizened expert”. Second, they likely view the job as much baby sitting as education, and that is widely viewed as “not real work”, and not just by the ultra-rich. Third (ok, I know I said two…) there is 100% selection bias here, any of the ultra-wealthy who demanded sensible or outrageous credentials for their private tutor wasn’t hiring the author via an agency that places people just out of college.
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Eating them directly, of course, is a vector for parasites. Instead I recommend eating them indirectly by using them as fertilizer to grow vegetables and other crops.
After suitable processing, of course …
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Reading about these kids, I’m reminded of the line from the TV show Poker Face:
I’ve been rich. Easier than being broke, harder than “I’m doing just fine.”
Especially when those “things” (and they regard them thus) are employees. They’ll spend $300k on a tennis bracelet but they’ll nickel-and-dime the maid when she asks for her salary to be raised to (barely) match an increase in the cost of living.
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This is how revolutions happen.
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This seems so foreign to me. If I was mega-yacht wealthy, I’d likely be paranoid about the people that worked close to me and my family. I’d certainly pay my help well enough they wouldn’t need for anything. Putting long term employee’s children through college, easy and done. All expense vacation, sure! But the expectation would be some loyalty to the family. I would want people I’m familiar with and trust.
Let’s be honest though…people who are mega rich don’t usually become that way by caring about other people.
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Nor are they necessarily smart or wise.
Sometimes they choose one or two employees to focus their largesse on in exchange for absolute loyalty. These are the employees who know where the figurative and sometime literal bodies are buried. A good example is Allen Weisselberg, the toady who managed von Clownstick’s financial affairs (although the feds eventually flipped him).
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Is that “Will It Blend?” Youtube channel still running?
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Waiting…
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….she’d flown him in from Zurich and that the electrodes would stimulate Cara’s ‘problem-solving brainwaves’ as she studied."
Apparently, I need to start grifting bigger. There’s a gold mine out there!
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… “merit”
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… permission to do her own laundry 
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I may have to disagree on this one. A multibillionaire isn’t going to burn through their fortune paying their personal staff a decent wage. Such fortunes are rarely built on frugality (sorry, “avocado toast” guy) and frittering them away almost requires a Herculean effort. On the rare occasions when such fortunes are lost it’s usually due to some egomaniac investing ridiculous sums of money on terrible business ventures.
Pretty much guaranteed that the “you can’t do your laundry here, that would cost us too much money” family has no real concept of what anything costs, where their money comes from or where most of it goes.
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Agreed, they’re either trying to put up some “oh we worry about money too, just like you” charade, or, more cynically, “oh, you’re poor, therefore, you’re dirty” is a given to them.
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Or sometimes just “having way too much money doesn’t equate being good with money or knowing how much anything actually costs.”
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Same here. 
It sounds like a mashup of The Nanny Diaries and a story about tutoring called Schooled by Anisha Lakhani, but with a wealthier family. Their treatment of those they consider to be “the help” is similar, though. 
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