People Who Have Worked For The 0.1% Are Sharing What They're Really Like, And The Answers Were Eye-Opening

8.

“I worked in a family-managed, private firm’s money management/payments department. We’d often have the billionaire and his son call us directly (bypassing the family office in case of emergencies). We were asked to draw up plans one evening to finance a new personal jet and a new yacht. The plans were drawn up overnight, and funds were made available within a week. We were once asked to draw out around $4 million in cash from banks within two hours (most banks have rules against such huge cash drawdowns) and just hand it over to the secretary of the billionaire, no questions asked. My American CFO got all red-faced and threw fits, but he had to do as told.”

“We’d regularly get calls from the son to arrange for the equivalent of $100k in cash in odd currencies. Sudden travel plans would develop, and he hated being without some petty cash.

Our billionaire told his Chief HR Officer to keep a list of 10 top/senior-level executives ready for him to fire every quarter. ‘Keeps everyone on their toes,’ he used to say.

The billionaire started living almost exclusively on his yacht, usually in international waters. The yacht was known to be a magnet for young people (the billionaire himself was rather old), and one can imagine why.

The billionaire usually usurped all the company’s profit as loans to related parties using some rather dodgy accounting. Auditors were given vague explanations and, to my utter surprise, were actually willing to buy them. 

They never seemed happy to me. They were always a bit hyper — always pushing, always mistrustful of everyone, always rushing off to vacations (from god knows what; the senior team/ C-suite guys managed everything for them).

One incident: while in NY, the billionaire all of a sudden ordered his pilot to start the chopper as he wanted to go somewhere. The pilot went into a tizzy (there are approvals, maintenance logs, etc., to be taken care of) but had the chopper started soon enough. Then the billionaire canceled the trip and told his friends (looking at the befuddled pilot from afar), ‘Good, that should help his blood circulation.’

Their lives seemed unnecessarily complicated. Though both father and son paid a lot to charity, the daily misery they tended to make their staff endure by being exacting and demanding was intense.”

—Anonymous, Quora