Steve Gelsi, NYFWA president for 2008

July 18, 2008 - Robert Frank, author of Richistan, made a star appearance at the July Drinks Night at the Playwrights II bar on Eighth Ave. More than 40 people showed up so it was a great turnout. Thanks to all who attended for coming and making the night a success.

Frank, a star reporter at The Wall Street Journal who more than paid his dues as a foreign business correspondent, applied his reporting prowess in more than 100 interviews with people with $10 million or more in investable assets. He formed a composite profile of the ranks of the today's wealthy as the basis for Richistan.

The bottom line: the super rich regard themselves as very much unlike the classic image of the idle rich as portrayed by Thurston Howell in the TV show Gilligan's Island. In one telling statistic unearthed by Frank, about 85% of Rolls Royce owners now drive their own cars. The reverse was true a generation ago. Most of the rich folks that he met made their money themselves and still have many of the middle class working values that they had when they were schlumps like the rest of us.

They're usually entrepreneurs who are worried about how complicated their lives have become and whether they can still continue to make money and keep their lives relevant. Despite their wealth, they're actually miserable most of the time  -- just like us. And worst of all, their kids appear to be totally incapable  of grasping the challenges of surviving outside of their bubble world and will likely let all the family money run through their hands like sand.

So in the long run, big collections of personal wealth don't often last more than a generation or two and then the rest of us get it all back. 

As I said in my introduction, Frank is definitely one of the best journalists out there and it's good to see that his huge talent was recognized by the marketplace through healthy sales of Richistan, which is now out in paperback and sold in countries all over the world. It seems to have become a staple of the wealth management biz where everyone is trying to figure out what makes the rich tick.

Frank isn't sure what his next book project will be. Maybe he should do a book about super yachts, along the lines of his last front page story in The Wall Street Journal this week. That would be cool.