He got so desperate that he gave it to the … American Cancer Society. The idea is that they sell it and pocket the money – tens of millions, if there’s any justice in the world – for their good works.

But no one wants what is now the ACS’s house, a vast metastasized monument to greed and contempt.

No one has lived there for years.

And as the years go by, the ACS has attempted to solve its problem (taxes, upkeep, security?) through surgery. It has cut and cut and cut and cut the asking price for this diseased thing.

Today they did more cutting. It’s all the way down to $25 million.

People are overlooking a sad American retirement story that should by all rights dominate our headlines. But perhaps we just don’t care anymore.

There’s a growing trend of older homeowners unable to sell their investment properties as they attempt to downsize later in life. Dan Snyder, for example, lowered and lowered the price of his house along the Potomac River until he was forced to give up. He ultimately made it a charitable gift to the American Cancer Society, which was in turn for years unable to sell it, until in desperation they auctioned it off for 9 million (original price 50 million).

Now Bill Koch can’t unload his house in Aspen, which for over a decade, with multiple price reductions, has failed to sell. Koch started at 100 million, then 80. Then, regaining hope, he listed it for 125 million. Then, despairing again, he asked 99 million.

As Tuli Kupferberg would put it NOTHING. NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING! By way even of a nibble.

This home too will now go to the ignominy of auction.

… the grotesque Dan Snyder house undergoes more than a mere reduction; it thins all the way down to nothingness. For the price of a pre-war Manhattan studio with a Central Park view, you can now boast a home the size of Dulles Airport.

Will anyone bite? This will be fun to watch.

Auctioned off at a pathetic thirteen million from an original asking price of $50 million — if this doesn’t fit the definition of Aristotelian tragedy, I don’t know what does.

(My title comes from this 1963 essay.)

**************

Everyone’s laughing at Schultz’s request not to be called a billionaire; instead, he asks that we use the phrase ‘people of means.’ Some of the more amusing responses to his ‘billionaire’ problem:

I prefer ‘wealth extractors’

[how about] ‘money hoarders’

‘poverty profiteers’

Thank you Howard Schultz for calling out the dehumanising label ‘billionaire’ applied to people merely for causing vast swaths of the world to live in absolute, crushing misery. I vow to do better

***********************

Why would a billionaire not wish to be called a billionaire? I can’t think of instances where millionaires asked not to be called millionaires. Michael Hiltzik wrote a recent column titled America is Falling Out of Love with Billionaires, so there does seem to be a problem of some sort. (“The plus side of Howard running is he’s making more people hate billionaires.”) What could it be?

Let’s start with Matt Taibbi on Goldman Sachs:

The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth — pure profit for rich individuals.

Millionaires can be pointlessly and destructively greedy, but only to a certain, reasonably comprehensible, extent. Billionaires can – nay, many of them, it appears, must – really go to town, in a way that strikes the rest of us as simply mentally ill. There will always be no-limits wealth defenders to tell us we’re envious or we’re going to destroy personal enterprise; but it’s hard to know how to be envious of people who desperately unenterprisingly do things like this:

Last week it was reported that Daniel Snyder, the owner of the NFL’s Washington Redskins, was spending $100 million on a 305-foot super-yacht complete with an on-board IMAX screening room. It’s his second yacht, after a 220-foot version.

At the same moment, hedge fund owner Ken Griffin was disclosed as the buyer of the most expensive home in America, a $238-million Manhattan penthouse. According to Bloomberg, he already owns two floors of the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Chicago ($30 million), a Miami Beach penthouse ($60 million), another Chicago penthouse ($58.75 million) and another apartment in Manhattan ($40 million).

Titanic, duplicative, restless, vacuous greed unsettles us; it makes the ethical grotesquerie of one human being holding fourteen billion dollars extremely graphic. “Why,” asks Farhad Manjoo, ” should anyone have a billion dollars, why should anyone be proud to brandish their billions, when there is so much suffering in the world?” What sort of people has our, uh, country of means spawned? Consider the vast antiquity of Robert Hughes’ 2004 comment on the billionaire art buyers of his day:

[T]he present commercialisation of the art world, at its top end, is a cultural obscenity. When you have the super-rich paying $104m for an immature Rose Period Picasso – close to the GNP of some Caribbean or African states – something is very rotten. Such gestures do no honour to art: they debase it by making the desire for it pathological.

$104m? Try $450m.

Billionaires, notes Merryn Somerset Webb, typically exist

as a result of mismanaged monetary policy (free money can do a lot if you use it right); badly thought-out regulation; politically unacceptable rent-seeking; corruption; asset bubbles; a failure of anti-trust rules; or some miserable mixture of the lot.

Hiztlik quotes Keynes going deeper into the obscenity Hughes describes. Keynes found the emergent form of what he called “the money motive” repulsive, and hoped for an end to “many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues…. [T]he love of money as a possession [has become the goal] — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life. [This behavior] will [someday] be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.”

Billionaires represent the compulsive masturbators of their day, and more and more of them are doing it in public. Schultz knows this.

Oh Giunchigliani really. Go back to Italy or get with the program. You live in Las Vegas, not Parma, man. When your local university has a football program this successful, you spend hundreds of millions on a new stadium. Get it?

Of the panel’s 11 members, only Clark County Commissioner Chris Giunchigliani addressed whether there was a need for the stadium. Nearly everyone else in the room — from UNLV President Neal Smatresk to the stadium board chairman Don Snyder — appeared to be poised to build some type of venue… Stadium board member Cedric Crear, a Board of Regents appointee, even went as far to say that a new stadium would “revolutionize our football program. This city wants a winning, big-time football team. I don’t want to be shy about saying that.”

Don’t be shy, Cedric. Say it loud and say it proud.

Even though some Strip casino companies such as MGM Resorts International said the previous stadium proposal of $900 million was too much, Snyder told the Review-Journal after the two-hour meeting that there is no price ceiling.

“Why not?” Snyder said when asked if the new stadium proposal could match the price of the old one.

… “The temptation is to cut out the bells and whistles. When you start cutting costs, there’s a tendency to look like all the other stadiums across the country. Then you get mediocrity and I don’t think mediocrity is acceptable in Las Vegas,” [another booster] said.

The last thing I’d associate with the Las Vegas public education system is mediocrity. The Las Vegas public education system is way, way, below mediocre.