A Canonical List of Rich People Shit: February Edition

Plus: bonuses, bops, billionaires, and a very long driveway at Apogee

Good morning. If you’re reading this when it arrives, I’m on a flight from Palm Beach to Palm Springs, arriving just as Indian Wells starts to take over the desert. Free letter today. It felt like the right way to open the month.

It’s March 2nd. Consider this February’s installment of our monthly ongoing audit here at RPS.¹ February was short and expensive, the kind of month when people spend money and reposition themselves.

It’s the start of when faces get adjusted with lasers and tweakments before invitations start landing, and when finance bonuses clear and listings that were ‘waiting’ suddenly resurface. Love Story put Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy back at the center of the aesthetic conversation, and suddenly everyone “remembers” they’ve always preferred restraint. Mark Zuckerberg took the most photographed seat in Milan, front row at Prada, a billionaire narrating how he wants to be read. At Frieze Los Angeles, Art Production Fund’s Amanda Ross-Ho pushed a 16-foot inflatable Earth in looping circuits for seven hours a day, sending the art world’s tongues wagging. And Bohemian Grove’s alleged 2,200-name membership list leaked and America’s most secretive redwood retreat looked less mythic and more like a cross-index of senators, CEOs, and inherited last names. In Los Angeles, the Max & Helen’s eight-hour waffle line was outsourced by the wealthy to TaskRabbits. Palm Beach’s Vineta Hotel reopened under the Oetker Collection umbrella (the same orbit as Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc). And sauna culture kept drifting from wellness habit closer to social choreography.

Unlike January, February isn’t about beginnings. It’s about alignment. What were the things you kept hearing about all month, the ones that kept coming up again and again?

At Close Range…

I was the first non-golf writer welcomed onto the property at Apogee Golf Club in Hobe Sound, Florida on Friday. Apogee is not a “golf club” in the casual sense. Apogee is a 1,200-acre compound. It is owned by billionaire Stephen Ross and golf patron Michael Pascucci and operates with the kind of intentional discretion that makes something that large feel oddly invisible. Rumored initiation sits well into seven figures, typically cited around $1 million to $1.5 million before annual dues.

I was there for the Palm Beach Pro-Am, benefitting the Related Ross Foundation, and will get into the property and design itself in a future letter². For now: the scale is enormous, and the entrance is almost aggressively understated. The club is set far back from the road with little to no signage. My morning Uber struggled to locate it despite an exact address. I went in through the service gate. By the end of the day, three Ubers cancelled before I realized I was, more or less, stuck. I probably would have stood a better chance having a helicopter come get me from the club’s helipad.

My parents live about fifty minutes away and we had a dinner reservation. The Head of Membership, who had given me a tour earlier³, drove me home himself. The head valet also offered. I mention this because I have been to more than thirty clubs at this level globally. At a certain price point, certain things about these properties can feel a little predictable. What isn’t is how a place handles inconvenience. That, more than the initiation number, is what tells you what kind of place it is.

Our dinner reservation was at Emelina, the new 16-seat tasting-menu spot in West Palm Beach’s Flamingo Park by chefs Osmel González and Camila Salazar. The two of them came out of EntreNos, the now-closed Miami pop-up that earned a Michelin star and a Green Star. EntreNos is the only pop-up to ever do that in history. Emelina just opened this month, and it’s exactly the kind of thing that makes you rethink what “fine dining” can be: thirteen courses of re-imagined Cuban cuisine served around a counter where the chefs talk to you through the whole meal. My mom kept saying how rare it is to sit across from chefs of that caliber and actually talk to them while moving through thirteen completely different courses. If you’re anywhere near West Palm and curious, this is one to book.

My Air Mail story was published on Saturday. From the moment I became aware of the Upper East Side’s teenage obsession with “bops,” I couldn’t stop talking about it. One summer morning, mid–coffee conversation, as I was going on about it yet again, Ash Carter stopped me and said, ‘You should write that for us.’ I laughed it off. A week or two later, at a Ferragamo x Air Mail party in Bridgehampton, Alessandra Stanley, the then-editor, said the same thing. At that point, it stopped feeling like a passing idea. The Bops were clearly destined to live their glossy afterlife in Air Mail.

The reaction has been exactly what I expected: horror, fascination, and just the right amount of ‘I knew about this.’ If you haven’t read it yet, you can do so here. It was a pleasure to work with Ash again and with Julia Vitale, who has since taken the reins, both of them exactly the kind of editors who understand when a niche Manhattan psychodrama deserves a national stage.

In today’s letter: The Crown and ex-Prince Andrew’s palace scandal, Apogee Golf Club and the Palm Beach Pro-Am, the Shah’s original Audemars Piguet Royal Oak 5402, Emelina in West Palm Beach, longevity fixation syndrome at $120,000 a week, Bops, Andrew Zucker on the new Maga hats, Financial Times new column, a $250 JFK Jr. lookalike contest, polo pony cloning wars, Air Mail, and more…

• Netflix may revive The Crown as a limited series to dramatize the spectacular fall of ex-Prince Andrew after his arrest and the ensuing royal drama. Because nothing says prestige television quite like turning a real-life palace scandal into another season of scripted headlines.

• Speaking of the (con) artist formerly known as Prince Andrew, Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie are reportedly off the Royal Ascot⁴ guest list as the Epstein shadow over their father continues to play a part in palace optics. I get that even heritage events have a threshold for scandal, but this seems rather unfair, no?

• Ted Sarandos wearing jeans last night on the red carpet of the SAG Awards, days after Netflix lost out to Paramount in the WBD bidding drama, is either a flex or a shrug.

• As Iran returns to the headlines, reminders that the Shah⁵ wore the original Audemars Piguet Royal Oak 5402 (a steel sports watch that signaled power without needing gold) are circling on social media. A small group of early pieces slipped out between the A and B series⁶ without serial numbers on the caseback, making them some of the rarest Royal Oaks ever produced, the sort of detail serious collectors never overlook.

• The ultra-rich are reportedly developing something called “longevity fixation syndrome,” then paying $120,000 a week to treat their obsession with not dying…

• In the Financial Times new column “Wear in the World” this week, Andrew Zucker reports on how the Maga crowd has traded the shouty red hat for something far more discreet, because even political allegiance in Palm Beach now comes with better tailoring.

• There will be a JFK Jr. lookalike contest under the Washington Square arch on March 8 at 1 p.m. There’s a $250 cash prize for the “biggest hunk,” which feels both on brand for the 1990s and wildly insufficient if a man shows up actually sporting the same jawline.

• In Air Mail this weekend, alongside my own story, there was Mark Ellwood’s dispatch on the polo pony cloning wars, where even the sport’s most prized horses now come with a laboratory origin story.

1. If you missed last month’s, you can read it here

2. Let me know in the comments if you have any specific questions; I rounded up quite a few from you last week.

3. Including the brand-new North Course, which I know will make golf aficionados jealous of a girl who can barely hold a club correctly.

4. Britain’s most formal horse racing event which is a five-day June meet at Ascot Racecourse attended by the royal family and a range of spectators. The Royal Enclosure is the most exclusive area, by invitation-only.

5. The Shah refers to Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last monarch of Iran, who ruled from 1941 until the Iranian Revolution in 1979. He was one of the most powerful men in the Middle East during the Cold War. Along with positioning Iran as a Western-aligned oil superpower and spending heavily on modernization and military expansion, he also embodied extreme wealth and pageantry.

6. The A and B series refer to the earliest production batches of the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak 5402, the original “Jumbo” introduced in 1972.