Billionaires, amirite? They didn’t get to where they are by wasting money on frivolous things, which means the task of buying a present for one can feel especially fraught.
Luckily we’ve spent the past year covering the cream of the luxury crop in food, travel, real estate, art, style, and sports and came up with the following 12 gifts any megawealthy macher would appreciate. Because when money is no object, true titillation is more about the exclusivity, experience, and return on investment—and yes, sometimes a really, really big beach.
Their Own Chance at the Kentucky Derby
Although gifting etiquette says you should never buy somebody an animal, breeding a winning thoroughbred is no small endeavor, leaving your billionaire ample opportunity to make sure they’re committed—especially if you’re taking them direct to the top of the heap with Justify, winner of the 150th Belmont Stakes and 13th Triple Crown, the first champion to retire unbeaten and warrant $75 million for breeding rights.
But akin to that traditional pilgrimage to Papa before marriage, to woo Justify you’ll have to court the sire’s gatekeeper, Coolmore Stud. You can’t show up with just any ol’ filly, though. Enter horse whisperer Sean Tugel, director of bloodstock at WinStar Farm. He knows what kind of mare to pair with this stallion, he says, “because we raced and sold Justify to Coolmore.” Expect to pay $1 million to $2 million for a properly pedigreed horse, plus a 5 percent agency fee and another 5 percent upon booking the breeding nomination. And then there’s Justify’s $150,000 seed fee.
“Get going by January,” says Tugel. “Breeding season only lasts February to June.” While queued up at Coolmore, seduce its other elite stud, American Pharoah, and jockey into position for the Daily Double. “Buy two mares,” recommends Tugel, “and breed each one with a Triple Crown winner.”
Cost: $2 million to $3 million
Their Life Story
When you’re living the 11-figure life, your legacy is surely on your mind: Is it just a bunch of imposing zeros, or could it be something more? Help your billionaire through this ennui by engaging the researchers, writers, and filmmakers at the Narrative Trust, and it will be so much more. They’ll interview her, her family, her colleagues and friends (hey, you may even have a starring role!) and transform those “curated conversations,” as founder Melanie Shorin puts it, into a deeply researched oral history, printed as a book and illustrated with historical photographs. The stories, she says, “unfold like a novel.”
Packaged alongside is a hard drive loaded with not only archives of photos and transcripts, but also a video documentary interweaving the interviews with oft-forgotten home movies. “We’ve found wedding films that people haven’t seen in 50 years,” Shorin says. The intense, often joyful experience of being documented—multiple interview sessions, months of research and editing—is as important to clients as the final, legacy-securing product, she says: “It’s not like buying a drone!”
Cost: $25,000 for three interviews plus transcripts; $200,000 for the works—multiple interviews, the book, digitized archives, even a website (password-protected, presumably)
A Fantasia of Hermès
Think of the mission of Hermès’s Sur-Mésure atelier as beyond made to measure: Every item it painstakingly produces is imagined to order. Among the army of artisans at the French fashion house, Sur-Mésure is the SEAL team working on one-off projects that make monogramming seem as gauche as flying commercial.