We’re on Manhattan’s Upper East Side today, where a med spa can be found every few blocks, and it takes quite a lot to stand out in that industry. But one East 78th Street beauty business has managed: its owner pleaded guilty in federal court in a case involving imported botulinum toxin and a client who was hospitalized with botulism. The kicker? The spa is still open, treatments are still being booked, and the woman behind it is due to be sentenced on December 9. More on this Botulism blow-up below.

We’ve also got some exclusive details for you Sotheby’s “Art of Divorce” panel in Geneva last night (you know I wouldn’t let you all down!), Amazon Prime Day stats, Sinclair launching a subscription news business on Substack, Elon Musk becoming a trillionaire again, Montana’s growing pull on the Aspen crowd and Kaitlin Phillips’s cowboy-hat rules for anyone heading west, the status symbol of a first-month reservation at Daniel Humm’s new HUMM, Thomas Straker bringing his badly behaved British-chef act to New York, Bond’s Instagram, and the Hamptons Film Festival board fight spilling into protests and bag checks. All of this and more, after the—well, you know.

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I spent this morning giving 21 vials of blood at a Quest in Chinatown, so you know I’m really getting a jump on Q4. Trying to end out this year as healthy as possible and that means sucking the life force out of me to make sure there is nothing wrong, apparently.

Here’s the monthly list for you of the things that got everyone’s traps yapping the most in September. My rule for this list was pretty crude: if I heard the same thing three times from people who do not know each other, it went on. Did the story start showing up in conversations with people who had no professional reason to care about it? Did it beat out all the other dumb stuff people normally talk about over steak frites at a martini lunch these days? Depends on your lunch companions, I suppose.

Today we will be talking about everything from Sotheby’s “Art of Divorce” panel in Geneva tomorrow (which you all had a lot of opinions about on the readrps Instagram account), to whether Maxime’s on the Upper East Side is bringing fun back to the private club scene (that one was unexpected). Also on the list is Vanity Fair’s Next Gen list, released today, Grindr’s very busy press tour, the meaning behind the saying on the matchboxes at People’s, whether Paris Fashion Week has gone plebeian, and more. We also have an exhaustive list of all 13 fashion moments Cait Bailey Carbone wore to both her Sicilian wedding and her New York reception—something you won’t find anywhere else. Plus an opportunity on October 15th for five paid RPS subscribers in the West Palm Beach/Palm Beach area. All of this and more, after the jump.

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Blade first launched its by-the-seat service between New York and South Florida in 2015, ran it for eight winter seasons, then discontinued it in 2023. BLADEone returns November 19 with Aero, which operates 16-seat jets from private terminals. Fares start at $2,450 each way between Westchester and either Miami or Palm Beach, so the service works just as easily for South Florida travelers heading north. There are no commercial terminals or TSA lines. If you start in Manhattan, you can helicopter to Westchester in about 10 minutes and land alongside the jet.

On board, things get even more elaborate. “I’m aware many BLADEone fliers know each other. That’s why the night before we plan the seating like a dinner party. If you’re sitting next to someone—or not next to someone—there is likely a reason,” BLADE founder Rob Wiesenthal tells RPS. The New York-to-South Florida migration for the verticoastal™ can also often include everyone in the family; because of this, Blade is also introducing a $3,500 flight pass for dogs. We’ll save the caviar, lie-flat dog bed, and more of Wiesenthal’s wisdom for after the jump.

We’ll also be talking about a Joby Aviation dinner that I attended (you know, like, the flying-taxi company), what they have in the works for New York and West Palm Beach, as well as a whole lot of other private-aviation news: Guy Oseary’s new invitation-only jet-sharing club, NetJets’ plans for its own terminal in Austin and the increasingly elaborate business of flying private with your dog.

And in case you are strictly a Delta girl or guy, so all of this is noise to you, we’ve got a few other things you won’t want to miss, including the latest letter Maison Estelle sent its London members explaining how they will be compensated while the club remains closed. All that and more after the jump.

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Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc dates to 1870, but much of its mythology was built in the 1920s, when Gerald and Sara Murphy—two of my favorite largely forgotten figures from that era (I used to live across from their former Greenwich Village townhouse)—helped turn the Riviera into a summer playground and drew a crowd that included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Cole Porter and Picasso. (If you know nothing about the Murphys, I would advise starting with this 1962 New Yorker article, Living Well Is The Best Revenge). Fitzgerald later immortalized the hotel as the Hôtel des Étrangers in Tender Is the Night. The Kennedys stayed there, Slim Aarons photographed there, and during the Cannes Film Festival it has long functioned as its own little center of gravity, and as the home of the annual amfAR gala. Cannes Lions has widened that guest list considerably, with brands and media companies hosting events at the hotel and bringing in a wave of influencers and advertising people who might never otherwise have made it past the gates. Its seawater pool and Grande Allée are almost as recognizable as the hotel itself.

Also in today’s letter: (contained) chaos at the Hamptons International Film Festival and a letter from the Jewish Center of the Hamptons, Australia’s yummy mummies discover cocaine, Larry Ellison buys eight Florida homes for his staff, Prada courts its biggest spenders in Milan, Neiman Marcus closes its downtown Dallas flagship, Shoreditch House faces a food-safety investigation, Oura postpones its IPO days after Scott Galloway talked it up, Kering’s new CEO tries to make luxury run a little more like Renault, and more…

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I know I am giving away the reveal in the headline. Normally I would make you wait until after the jump, but there is enough going on here that I figured I could afford to spoil it. There’s Maison Estelle’s own liquor-license lawyers confirming the location, the very interesting sequence of events that led them to this particular building, and a brand-new New York liquor-license category for for-profit private members’ clubs that only took effect in February 2026 (did you guys even know that existed? I didn’t until writing this letter). And then, of course, there is the drama currently unfolding at Maison Estelle in London. If you missed that, I would suggest reading Friday’s RPS letter here.

What is most surprising is that the New York location, in the legendary Limelight building, has not been reported before now. (As in, at this very moment.) I suspect it got buried in all the attention around Maison Estelle’s attempt to take over the Sistina townhouse on the Upper East Side, which RPS reported on earlier this year. As it turns out, while that was playing out uptown, Maison Estelle was already working on another plan downtown.

Also in today’s letter: Pace Gallery looks to sublet part of its Chelsea headquarters, Jane Street is hiring an unusual new role, Japan cracks down on knockoff luxury fruit, grandparents increasingly help cover family expenses, a Telegraph reader calls out the White House’s seating chart skills, Ken Griffin moves closer to getting a private helipad for his Miami megayacht marina, private equity loses some of its appeal as carry payouts take longer, China pushes further into high-end manufacturing, and more…. After the jump.

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If you are new here, welcome. We are not always talking about million-dollar lawsuits, but we do like to keep things interesting.

Let’s get to the drama happening across the pond at Maison Estelle. For those of you who have not been lucky enough to visit, Maison Estelle is an extremely exclusive private members’ club on Grafton Street in Mayfair. Hotelier Sharan Pasricha opened it in 2021 inside a Grade I-listed Georgian townhouse, with interiors by Roman and Williams (who are also responsible for Marcel in The Breuer Building). Across seven floors are four dining spaces, 11 bars and two levels devoted to nightlife. (RPS subscribers may remember my reporting on Estelle’s attempts to make it to New York: first considering a Flatiron location, then trying to take over the Sistina townhouse on the Upper East Side. Neither worked out—yet. Plus, RPS was also the first to report on their scouting in Hudson Valley.)

So you can imagine the reaction when members woke up Thursday morning to an email announcing that Maison Estelle was closing immediately for “a few weeks.” The explanation did not offer much: the club said the closure related to information received from the Metropolitan Police following a “serious public safety matter outside the premises,” and that it was working with Westminster City Council and police while reviewing its “licence conditions.”

At least six (yes, six) RPS subscribers forwarded me the email, all looking for answers. What happened? How long would Maison Estelle actually be closed? And where, more importantly, were they supposed to go in the meantime? Celeste, perhaps? (It’s Maison Estelle’s sister club which opened in Notting Hill this year, so at least there is somewhere to defect).

The answers, straight from the horse’s mouth. Or at least from inside the club. After the jump.

Plus: Café des Artistes returns, Le Rosey gets a superyacht classroom, Mark Zuckerberg talks fashion, Cashiers, North Carolina keeping getting richer (and filled with more old billionaires), Eugene Remm gets the Vanity Fair treatment, and more.

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In today’s letter, we’re getting into a lawsuit I’ve been sitting on for more than a month while I decided how I wanted to write about it. Aurora James, the founder of Brother Vellies and the Fifteen Percent Pledge, has been sued personally alongside 15PP and its fiscal sponsor PVF (Philanthropic Ventures Foundation) by The Gathery, the LGTBQ-owned Brooklyn creative agency that produced the nonprofit’s 2026 gala. The case centers on a very large unpaid bill, missed payments, work that continued anyway, and a seven-figure dispute that became much more complicated once the event had already been produced. I’m not going to give the whole thing away up here, but I would suggest reading it below. I’ve even linked to the court documents.

I hesitated because there are two things I think can be true at once. The Fifteen Percent Pledge has done important work, and there is a real conversation to be had about how much harder fundraising may have become for an organization like 15PP over the past year, given the political climate and the retreat from DEI initiatives across corporate America. At the same time, no company can reasonably be expected to act as another organization’s bank and carry its expenses indefinitely. That kind of arrangement can become financially destructive for both sides.

I also approach lawsuits a little differently because, during my very brief stint as a court reporter, I learned that court documents almost never tell the entire story. Lawsuits are human stories. They contain relationships, conversations and circumstances that do not always make it into a complaint or a filing. I try to speak to as many people involved as I can before writing about one, and I did that here. Not every conversation is on the record, and not everything I learn can appear in journalism, newsletters included. But all of it informs how I understand the story I ultimately put in front of you.

Lastly, please understand that, like much of my work, this story will probably be picked up by larger outlets, and some smaller ones too. A few will credit me. Most will not. Remember where you read it first. I appreciate how outspoken this community is about those things. The full story (plus even more) after the jump.

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Scammers and the wealthy go hand in hand. Where there is wealth, there is a scam to be had. After all, scamming the lower middle class isn’t really all that interesting. It’s more just pathetic (and pathetically cruel). There’s not even a chance of a moral debate in those situations. What people really want to hear about is the sheer nerve it takes to rip off the rich. We want to hear about the people who talked their way into places they had no business being and somehow convinced people who thought they knew better to hand over their money. Even better if it’s rich people scamming other rich people.

First, RPS takes a closer look at Gregg Starr, the 38-year-old male escort accused of scamming the 49-year-old “Roblox widow” out of millions of dollars, what he’s been up to lately, and how you, too, can get in touch with him, should you ever find yourself in the market for his, uh, particular set of services.

Then, we head over to Leon Black, who has been hard to avoid this month (and if you spend a lot of time in the Hamptons: all summer while we’re at it). On September 8, William D. Cohan published his 688-page Money to Burn: Leon Black, Apollo and the Remaking of Wall Street. On September 14, BBC One aired Epstein: Money, Power and Abuse, a new Panorama investigation into how Jeffrey Epstein made his money and became so close to some of the world’s richest people. Last week, on September 16th, the House voted to hold Black in contempt of Congress after he refused to comply with subpoenas related to its Epstein investigation (not the look of an innocent man, if you ask me…). Black had already sued the House Oversight Committee on September 3, arguing that it had overstepped its authority.

There is plenty about Epstein in Cohan’s book, including the $158 million Black paid him for tax and estate-planning work. But this is RPS, and by Chapter 34, appropriately titled “Getting Really Rich,” we had another question: What does being “Leon Black rich” actually look like? RPS tapped from The Appraisal to dig through the houses, art, boats, bills and billionaire spending habits buried in the book and find out.

We also rounded up a few other big-ticket scams making headlines, from a former Siemens CEO who says he was taken for $2.5 million in a Deepak Chopra-related deal to a Hermès heir who says roughly $10 billion of his fortune disappeared.

If scammers aren’t your thing (who are you?), Wednesday’s edition of RPS will have an exclusive you won’t want to miss, along with plenty of non-scammer stories. (Okay, and perhaps just one scammer story. I can’t help myself.)

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First, thank you to everyone who came to Café Commerce this morning to celebrate the launch of its breakfast service, which starts tomorrow. I moderated a conversation with Lila Raicek about her debut novel, The Plunge, a psychological thriller about a grieving young woman who gets pulled into a seductive and increasingly dangerous New York love triangle, with stops on the East End and in Lake Como. In other words: fairly obvious RPS reading. And in true RPS fashion, we really went there with the conversation. Lila was an open book in ways she hasn’t even been for interviews yet, which made for a very fun breakfast.

It was such an impressive room, with power players from real estate, hospitality, publishing and the arts, plus multiple authors and chefs. And if you haven’t read The Plunge yet, I suggest doing so now. An adaptation is already in the works.

Now, to today’s actual business: privacy. This is not a new prediction. The idea that privacy is becoming a luxury has been kicking around for years, and lately it seems to be everywhere. In May, Vogue Business asked whether privacy was becoming the new luxury, looking at wealthy consumers who are increasingly reluctant to hand over their personal data just because a brand asks for it. Last month, A Luxury Travel Blog made the same case from a different angle: wealthy travelers are choosing privacy over prestige, looking for smaller hotels and fewer people.

The point is the same. The more of our lives that can be tracked, photographed, posted or turned into someone else’s content, the more valuable it becomes to go somewhere and be left alone.

Meanwhile, we are building an entire economy around doing the opposite. Arizona State University now offers a B.A. in Content Creation, with electives including “How to Become an Influencer.” Morning Consult found that 44 percent of Gen Z adults said their ideal career includes being a professional content creator. For a generation that grew up watching people turn their closets, vacations and, yes, workouts into businesses, the old nine-to-five can look financially claustrophobic.

But the new cool, the new luxury may not be having a massive follower count. It may be not needing one at all. Content creation has become its own version of hustle culture, and for people who do not need to monetize every part of their lives, there is some status in not needing the attention

This applies to where we work-out more than ever. Some of New York’s most expensive and private gyms are drawing a much harder line around phones. If you have ever looked up mid-workout and realized someone’s iPhone is pointed vaguely in your direction, you understand why.

Today, we’re looking at a recent email from one of those gyms and the policies at several others. Maybe the hottest amenity is no longer another cold plunge, infrared sauna or eucalyptus towel (although honestly, I do love a eucalyptus towel). Maybe the amenity is the phone ban.

Also in today’s letter: there are now 590 American billionaires who are too broke to make the Forbes 400, Goldman Sachs is sending their clients’ kids to making-money boot camp, Loro Piana is deliberately selling fewer loafers to keep them exclusive, Café Charmant opens today on Bleecker Street, Switzy debuted at No. 9, Rolex did a surprise-drop today, and Mario and Cait Bailey Carbone threw the kind of wedding reception that made everything else happening in New York that night feel beside the point.

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I am as surprised as you are reading that sentence, but I wanted to mention it because it once again reinforces the community and power of RPS. I didn’t get as many invitations to the Open this year as I have in years past (I am looking at you, Grey Goose and Cadillac), but I’m also not someone who thinks any invitation is ever owed to me. So I carried on with my vacations, work, wedding attendances and life, and kept my eyes glued to the television. After all, I am a true tennis addict. My own serve may suck, but there is no sport I love watching more.

It turns out something better was waiting. Enough people at the USTA subscribe to this newsletter that an invitation arrived for today. Another case of everything working out the way it was supposed to. So I’m sitting in the most exclusive suite at the US Open, very gratefully pressing send on the newsletter that helped get me here.

Enough tennis, though, because today is strictly fashion. RPF: Rich People Fashion. A lot of it has to do with Fashion Week, and some of it just has to do with fashion in general because, while I may not work in the industry, I have plenty of opinions about it and—confession—spend plenty of money on it. From a Jacques Marie Mage exclusive to an unveiling of the Wendy Kelce-lookalike who walked down Tommy Hilfiger’s runway, we’re talking about all of it today. After the jump.

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I am far from a “tennis prude,” and the US Open has always had a livelier atmosphere than the other Grand Slams. (What do you expect when people are throwing back $23 Honey Deuce cocktails all day and all night?) But things are starting to get a little out of control in Arthur Ashe Stadium.

On top of all the influencer drama that has already happened, Meg Radice and Audrey Jongens, the women behind the food-and-lifestyle account The VIP List, had their access revoked after entering on credentials supplied through a food vendor that the USTA said was not authorized to credential creators. (The women have already spoken about it to TMZ and posted several videos about it.) Wimbledon saying it will not credential influencers in 2027 is also getting a lot of attention, but as Hard Court’s Jessica Schiffer points out, Wimbledon has never credentialed influencers.

And while the lobster roll has been the unofficial go-to at the US Open for years, this year it has been dethroned by a new, more social-media-savvy sandwich: TikTok chef Salt Hank’s $38 prime-rib French dip, with his West Village restaurant pausing normal service while he focused on the Open.

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Happy Labor Day Weekend. I thought this was the perfect thing to head into our weekend with: our monthly round-up of what everyone could not stop flapping their traps about throughout August. Here are some of the stories people kept sending around:

Bezos now owns three houses on Indian Creek, worth roughly $234 million combined, but The Wall Street Journal reported that he still hadn’t been admitted to the island’s famously private country club. In the Hamptons, John Mayer played a tiny SiriusXM show at the 250-person Stephen Talkhouse. The tickets weren’t sold publicly and became so hard to get that people were asking as much as $4,000 for them, RPS was told. Speaking of the Hamptons, Gwyneth Paltrow was also supposed to host an off-the-record dinner for Sam Altman at her home in Amagansett. The dinner attracted plenty of attention, then was indefinitely postponed. Emma Cline’s Switzy was definitely the galley brag of the month. (And if you haven’t been lucky enough to snag a copy yourself, the Booker-longlisted novel follows a wealthy former executive whose memory is failing as he travels by private plane to Zurich, where he plans to end his life while he can still make the decision himself.)

Then there was the Met’s John Galliano mess. The museum announced a major retrospective of the designer, only to face immediate criticism over Galliano’s 2011 antisemitic tirade. By the end of the month, Galliano had withdrawn and the exhibition was canceled.

There’s more, from helicopter parents bringing actual helicopters to sleepaway-camp these days, and Saint-Tropez on the brink of being declared persona non grata by those who have been going nowhere else for decades. What else do you think was big news in the RPS ecosystem in August?

Today, RPS also has an extra-special opportunity for ten of our New York-based paid subscribers who have read (or are currently reading) the book The Plunge, by friend of the letter Lila Raicek.

Also in today’s letter: a very special US Open section on private aviation costs, the great influencer debate, and private bathrooms; plus Stan Kroenke buys the Angels and now owns 2.7 million acres, L.A. County hits Jeff Bezos, Rihanna and other private-jet owners with unpaid tax bills, Libbie Mugrabi posts a “set the record straight” video, Sotheby’s starts building an events business, women are now driving most of golf’s growth, and New York City moves to restrict AI in public schools.

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Today, we have something special for you. Joe Hovde of Residual Thoughts made a chart exclusively for RPS, digging through posts and comments on Reddit forums r/ChubbyTravel and r/FATTravel to see which luxury destinations people are talking about more, and which may have already peaked.

I especially love this one because it brings together two things we’ve covered before. The first is our very popular Venn & Now on Obvious, Classic and Discreet vacation destinations. The second goes all the way back to January, when one of the first stories RPS ever published was about r/FATFire, the Reddit community for people trying to get very rich and retire very early. r/FATTravel grew out of that world. You can read our original story here, and if you really want to go down the rabbit hole, Vanity Fair wrote about the community in June too (you know how I feel—those mainstream outlets always one step behind RPS, but that’s why my paid subscribers are always in-the-know first).

RPS has wanted to do something with Joe and Residual Thoughts for a while. He makes some of the most interesting data-driven charts on Substack. Another favorite, which we featured last month, looked at the high schools sending the most athletes to Ivy League schools.

We’ll get into his RPS-exclusive after the jump. And if there’s something you’d like to see us work on with Joe next, send me your ideas.

Also in today’s newsletter: Becca Bloom responds to my last newsletter (so I respond to her, of course), why one of the Hamptons’ most exclusive yacht clubs suddenly stopped serving dinner, the anonymous attempt to resurrect Socialite Rank, the Raya screenshot complicating Olivia Jade and Taylor Fritz’s summer romance, where to get that impossible French tart without chartering a private jet, the billionaire fight that could change Duryea’s for good, what happened to the Gwyneth Paltrow–Sam Altman dinner everyone was talking about, the potential eight-figure tax perk hiding inside a $40 million Ferrari, the U.S. ambassador conducting diplomacy from a $450 million yacht, the $3,000 glasses that make Jacques Marie Mage look cheap, the Hamptons foreclosure auction that somehow involved a dog named Botox and the police, and the $2 billion Pierre deal that could force some of New York’s richest residents to move out. Could this be RPS’ best letter yet? You tell me!

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A year after The Wall Street Journal introduced Becca Bloom as the “Queen of RichTok” (the corner of TikTok devoted to conspicuous wealth) to the masses, another creator, the “de-influencer” @daadisnacks (real name: Jay), is asking whether the billionaire mythology adds up. The answer is more complicated than either side would probably like. Is Bloom fabulous or a fraud? She’s obviously rich, but is there a reason she may be trying to convince her followers she’s even richer than she may be? Since DaadiSnacks posted his Instagram video questioning her last week, the internet has been blowing up with questions.

Also in today’s letter: the seven custom $180,000+ OpenAI watches commissioned by Sam Altman, BLADE bundling a Sag Harbor flight with a guaranteed seat at Babe’s Diner, an 80-pound tarte tropézienne flown private to Nantucket in its own leather seat, private-school financial aid for families making up to $500,000, Monterey Car Week’s record $762 million haul, Eight Sleep trying to get its $2,999 Pod covered by insurance, the looming $1 trillion Boomer art transfer, and SMU’s 56 percent application jump. All this and more after the jump!

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“Did you see this?” one wrote. “Is this real? If anyone knows, it’s you.”

“Were you invited to this?” another asked.

X user , who works in tech and science policy, tweeted the invitation out with the caption: Gwyneth Paltrow is the apex predator of taste. You say taste is the new moat. Only she has the courage to host an al fresco dinner at the Hamptons home in honor of Sam Altman.

The responses to Kukoff’s tweet varied from angry to hilarious (my favorite: Those of the woo-woo persuasion will note that regardless of [whether the invitation is] AI generated or not, the alleged dinner takes place after an eclipse. Intriguing.)

By the time I got home from my own dinner last night, I had answers to all of my friends’ questions, plus plenty of details that had not yet made their way onto X. The dinner itself, meanwhile, has yet to be reported by the mainstream press, but has been verified to be happening. The details (and the invitation) after the jump.

Also in today’s letter: Sotheby’s eyes an entire luxury empire, John Mayer tickets hit the Hamptons black market, Julia Koch expands on Meadow Lane, Brian Moynihan plays word games with Wall Street, Eric Schmidt unloads a superyacht, patterned sheets make a comeback, billionaires build bunkers for their Ferraris and more…

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Vacation destinations have always carried a certain amount of social information and cultural capital, but in 2026, with social media turning every summer into content, the distinctions feel more pronounced than ever. Some places have become so universally recognizable and heavily trafficked by the same international summer crowd, that they now fall squarely into the Obvious category. Others have been popular for so long that they have achieved the safer status of Classic (here’s looking at you, Newport and Porto Cervo). And then there are the places that remain Discreet, which does not necessarily mean unknown so much as requiring a little more knowledge, effort or reason for being there (hat tip to Point O’Woods, Sylt and Sandhaam).

Plum Sykes recently got at the same phenomenon in her Substack piece, “Why the ‘Cool Rich’ Adore Antiparos,” in which she distinguishes between Rich People and Cool Rich People by, among other things, where they disappear to in the summer. Her basic argument is that inconvenience has become a luxury of its own. RPS will add to this by saying places like Saint-Tropez and Southampton are almost too easy, while Antiparos requires flights, ferries, and enough logistical friction to thin the herd. (Although that is the problem with Discreet places—eventually someone writes about them).

None of these categories are fixed, which is why this is very specifically the 2026 version. Comporta has been inching toward Classic for years, and Antiparos is getting more attention by the week. Mykonos, after all, did not start out as Mykonos.

That is usually how it happens. A place starts with the people who know, then comes the wave of people who heard about it from them, and eventually everyone is going. Give it enough time, though, and some destinations manage to come out the other side as Classics. And that’s about when the NO INFLUENCERS signs start going up.

So you tell me: what else belongs where on this Venn diagram of Obvious, Classic and Discreet summer vacation destinations in 2026? Paid subscribers, chime in.

Plus: Jeff Bezos can’t get into the Indian Creek Country Club, a new members club delayed until 2028, Bronson van Wyck’s 300-person Ibiza Pharaoh’s Ball, natural diamond prices collapse, a $100,000 US Open hotel package, boomers spending the kids’ inheritance on luxury travel, a $723 million divorce offer, Anthropic’s CEO’s wife and her very unexpected résumé, Penn cracks down on application shortcuts, the secret off-market superyacht boom, and more.

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All after the jump!

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She wasn’t wrong. Just a day after Phia—the AI shopping agent co-founded by Bill Gates’ daughter Phoebe—unveiled its new closet feature, Vêtir (French for “to dress”) posted a pointed message to Instagram: “Imitation may be the highest form of flattery...” with a reminder that it “invented the AI digital closet.” The company never mentioned Phia by name, but it was obvious it had raised a significant number of eyebrows. So, RPS decided to look into it a little more. After all, Phia has already had a busy summer. In July, Bloomberg reported that the startup had been taking credit—and affiliate commissions—for purchases it allegedly never influenced. Independent affiliate researcher Ben Edelman went further, publishing technical findings that he said showed Phia’s app had been overriding other creators’ affiliate links in the background, a practice commonly referred to as “cookie stuffing.” Within 48 hours of Bloomberg’s story, affiliate platform Impact suspended Phia’s account.

The company has also drawn criticism for its marketing rollout, including the use of AI-generated creator personas that many users initially believed were real people. Some users have also accused Phia of taking a little too much inspiration from the wishlist app Locker, described as the “Pinterest for online shopping.” Taken together, Phia has developed something of a reputation for…Let’s call it pushing boundaries in pursuit of growth. So this copycat-closet-app question is worth a discussion. More on that after the jump.

For those of you who couldn't care less about a nepo-baby's wardrobe app (fair enough, although Phia has now raised $43.5 million from what looks more like a Vanity Fair Oscar party guest list than a cap table), there are plenty of other things to talk about today: some interesting factoids about private clubs scouting Palm Beach real estate, Bank of America spending $250 million a year on GLP-1 drugs, Vogue World headed to San Francisco in 2027, star memoir editor Whitney Frick, a power couple separating but keeping their business empire intact, wealthy Californians are flocking to New Zealand's golden visa program, and more.

And I know the plan was to roll out a new section, The Ledger of Good Decisions, this week, but I’m still tinkering with the design. That will have to wait till next time. Keep sending suggestions!

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We’re already a few days into August, but I couldn’t let July disappear in the rearview mirror without doing the monthly roundup (it really is the perfect thing for cocktail fodder). So let’s dive in.

Serena Williams returned to Wimbledon at 44. The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post reported that The Polo Bar is moving by 2029, but those close to the situation have said “not so fast.” RPS reported Nantucket’s “NO INFLUENCERS” sign before the story ended up nearly everywhere else (with very, very little credit from others), and tickets to The Odyssey were listed for as much as $10,000 before the show had even opened. Mamdani put nearly one million potential pieds-à-terre into a searchable database, and SpaceX lost $1.2 trillion in value. Chanel bought Charvet, and auction sales at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips rose 70 percent. UBS also came out with a rather less celebratory statistic: global wealth was up 10.8 percent, while median wealth in the US has fallen 20 percent since 2020. So before we get any further into August, here’s a canonical list of what people were talking about in July.

In today’s letter, Paige Paul joins Substack, an A.I. wunderkind marries an Anthropic insider while his $45 billion fund implodes; Ferrari’s first “P” car heads to auction for as much as $20 million; Gen Z brings its parents to job interviews; and Sag Harbor gets The Corner back.

After the jump!

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Today, we’re going to talk about something near and dear to my heart: The Polo Bar. It is one of New York’s great institutions, not just because of its high-powered and well-curated clientele or the near-impossibility of securing a reservation, but because it has turned eating a hamburger in a windowless basement into one of the city’s most enduring status rituals. That’s the power of Ralph Lauren for you. It really is magic.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Ralph Lauren was in talks with Related Companies to move The Polo Bar four blocks north, from its current East 55th Street home to the ground floor of a new 53-story office tower at 625 Madison Avenue. A day or two later, the New York Post published what it labeled an “Exclusive,” claimingg to have confirmed that the deal was done. The Post added that Related had offered the restaurant at least two years of free rent and that its new location would be significantly larger when the tower opens, which is expected to happen in the summer of 2029.

Naturally, this produced a minor panic among the Polo Bar faithful. I received a flurry of phone calls from concerned regulars asking what I thought. I didn’t want to bother anyone at The Polo Bar (the entire staff there is amazing), and it had already been reported by the Wall Street Journal. Instead, I found the detail that paid subscribers may remember from the last newsletter: asking rents at the Polo Bar’s current property have doubled since 2019, reaching as much as $205 per square foot. This information is publicly available, if you have the time and inclination to go looking for it.

Things became even more interesting when I posted my little rent story on the RPS Instagram account. (If you’re not following it yet, you really should: @readrps. I mean, don’t I jam it down your throats enough every other letter, anyway?) First, people became extremely opinionated in the comments about The Polo Bar itself and what might happen to its particular magic if it traded its clubby basement on East 55th Street for the ground floor of a gleaming new office tower. But the most interesting part? People began claiming that, despite the Wall Street Journal story and all the coverage that followed, they knew for a fact (a fact!) that The Polo Bar was not moving. The comments section caught fire, particularly after one of the people disputing the reports identified himself as a Polo Bar employee. (And I confirmed, he is).

So today, we’ll examine the discrepancy between the published reports and current Polo Bar employees who maintain that the restaurant is not moving, including the one who described the story as “a rumor that has gotten out of hand.”

We also have a ton of interesting stuff to go over, because it has been quite a busy month hasn’t it? Aren’t things supposed to slow down in the summer? Today’s RPS also covers Nantucket camp counselors saving a woman and her cats from a house fire, Fellini Coffee opening a second Upper East Side location, Shopify’s CEO supporting more voting power for wealthy taxpayers, Mary’s Fish Camp returning to the West Village, Palantir spending $17.2 million on its CEO’s private flights, and the Waldorf Astoria turning its Grand Ballroom into a tennis court. All after the jump!

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