What It’s Like to Have a Billionaire Brother
‘Are the rich really different from the rest of us?’ I ask myself while wrestling with my billionaire younger brother at 3 a.m.
For most of the last decade, my brother Mark and his family lived in a house with a moat.
The house — a four-bedroom French villa in Bel Air previously owned by Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony — is pretty impressive even without the moat, but that unnecessary protective trench gives the house a certain surreal charm. It’s nice to know that when you visit your family for the holidays, you don’t have to worry about Spanish conquistadors.
When I tell people about my brother’s moat house, they usually ask, “Is he rich or something?” When I admit that he is, their next question is, “So you guys probably don’t get along anymore, right?”
It’s a weird thing to assume, especially the “anymore” part. It’s as if the moment my brother’s bank account added a few extra zeros (okay, a lot of extra zeros), he morphed into Monty Burns from The Simpsons.
I can’t blame them. For most of my life, everything I believed about very rich people I learned from F. Scott Fitzgerald. “They are different from you and me,” he wrote in the 1925 short story “The Rich Boy.”
