Evan Osnos

In other words, if you keep yourself out of sight, then you stand less chance of attracting public outrage or attracting the taxman.

But these days, the style has changed.

The mores have changed.

You see the kind of wedding that Jeff Bezos is having in Venice, which is kind of visible for the whole world to see.

Or take, for example, the world of the superyacht.

These are machines that are, in a sense, the most expensive objects that humans have ever figured out how to own.

These are the giant super yachts that cost about a half a billion dollars in some cases.

And I think there are also ways that people are figuring out how to spend their money that simply were not possible a generation ago.

It used to be if you had a huge amount of money and you wanted to see your favorite artist, you might –

buy a front row ticket at the arena or maybe a skybox.

Now people have so much money, as one musician put it to me, he said, now people can afford to have the Foo Fighters come to their backyard on a Thursday.

And you see pop stars are now available for hire, whether it's the biggest names in the world like Beyonce.

or just about anybody you want.

One thing that's very clear now is that the numbers have gotten so big that people are actually struggling to figure out how to spend it.

I spoke to a consultant who works in the yacht industry who caters to what he himself calls the bored billionaires.

And he said, look, I can come up with ways of people spending their money that they didn't know was possible.

So he'll build a restaurant, for instance, on a sandbar in the Maldives and it'll be made out of 3D printers and they'll have dinner together and then it'll be washed away and nobody will ever be able to eat in that particular place in that way again.

That, he said, is the kind of thing that you eventually end up spending your money on once you've bought everything else.

Well, historically, Americans have actually been more...

permissive, more accommodating of inequality than other countries.