Robert L Frank: Richistan

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I would hope they would get a more realistic understanding of what today’s rich are really like. They’re not like Paris Hilton. They’re not like Donald Trump. Most of them did not inherit their money. Most of them made it themselves by starting their own companies and selling them. Their lives don’t just consist of shopping and being on camera.

Excerpt from "Richistan"

Chapter 7: Size Really Does Matter

In 2006 Eric Roth got an unusual request. The head of International Jet Interiors, a New Jersey-based company that outfits private-jet cabins, got a call from a client who had just purchased a Challenger 604. The client wanted something special. Especially for the toilet.

“He asked if I could make a potty seat from alligator skin,” Roth recalls. “I said, ‘You bet I can!’”

Roth bought two alligator skins from a dealer in Florida for $8,000 and carefully stitched them into toilet seats and trim for the cabin interior. He also installed a handwoven carpet from Thailand, made from wool and silk, with 14 colors, at $600 a yard. He used rose gold, with a “swirled funnel finish,” to make the cabin’s doorknobs, seat-belt buckles and other fixtures, and he dyed the leather seats the same pinkish hue to match. The cupboards were stocked with Versace china, Christofle silver and Lalique crystal.

“Now that was a nice plane,” he says.

For some private-jet owners, the world seems to rest on whether they have the proper wood grain on their cabin finish. One of Roth’s customers was a woman who owned a Gulfstream IV and insisted on picking out the exact log that would be used to make her interior moldings.

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