What Does Ultra Wealth Look Like?

New York Times

2 days ago

When Paul Eskenazi, the location manager for 'Mountainhead,' a new film from the 'Succession' showrunner Jesse Armstrong, set out to find a house to serve as the primary setting for this satire about a group of ultrarich tech bros, he needed a very specific kind of extravagance. In the same way that 'Succession,' which Eskenazi also worked on, reveled in 'quiet luxury,' 'Mountainhead' needed its moneyed protagonists to be living large but without flamboyance. Its characters are too wealthy for mere McMansions, and not any private residence would do.
Portraying how the ultrawealthy really live — with all their subtle signals and status cues — has become something of a specialty for Armstrong and Eskenazi. It's about not just private jets and sprawling homes, but the quiet hierarchies within the top 1 percent. There's a pecking order between the 0.01 percent and the 0.001 percent, the kind of distinction that insiders equate to owning a Gulfstream G450 versus a Gulfstream G700.
When Eskenazi found a lavish, 21,000-square-foot ski chalet built into a hill of Deer Valley in Utah, he knew it was the right fit — not because it was so large and impressive, though it's certainly both, but because its extravagance had a subtlety that made it almost understated.
'There's a kind of quiet wealthy embedded in that location that doesn't necessarily scream at you. It reveals itself slowly,' Eskenazi said, pointing out that it has a private gondola with direct access to a nearby ski resort. 'It's not flashy, but it's deeply exclusive — the kind of feature that signals a level of access and control money affords without ever needing to show off.'
'Mountainhead' is a tightly wound satirical chamber drama about four rich friends in tech who gather for a weekend of carousing while the world is plunged into chaos. There's Venis (Cory Michael Smith), the founder of a Twitter-like app whose new A.I. creator tools have triggered a tidal wave of online disinformation; Jeff (Ramy Youssef), whose content-moderation software holds the key to resolving global strife; Randall (Steve Carrell), an elder plutocrat with a philosophical bent; and Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), whose meager $500 million net worth has earned him the nickname 'Soups,' for 'soup kitchen.'
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