Is Everyone Gambling Without Me? That Depends on Your Income Bracket.
Plus: the best collective of Epstein's "stuff," Elon Musk and Shivon Zilis in Palm Beach, and now apres-skin is a trend we have to worry about, too.
What did everyone do for Super Bowl last night? I went to the Whitby Hotel for a party hosted by Puck and Oscar de la Renta. I didn’t watch a single minute of football, but there were tubs of caviar, perfectly aproned staff dishing it out onto chips and mini potatoes, cheerleaders, and branded merch that read Fashion Person, with Fashion crossed out and Sports written in its place.
Needless to say, I did not bet on either team. Despite being related to several football players, including the professional variety, the sport itself has never really held my interest. But plenty of people did. If you somehow missed the stat that Americans wagered roughly $2 billion on the Super Bowl last night, you must have been living under a rock. Every newsletter has repeated it all week. At this point, the number is basically wallpaper.
What no one has really explained is what that money actually tells us. Not just that gambling is up, but who is actually placing the bets and who is actually winning.
Start with participation. Gambling has exploded over the past five years as sports betting apps and online sportsbooks have become routine parts of adult life. Platforms like DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, Caesars Sportsbook, and Fanatics have made betting frictionless and constantly available. Surveys now suggest that roughly 60 percent of U.S. adults gamble at least once a year. And the most frequent gamblers are not the wealthy. They are middle- and lower-income households, especially those earning under $75,000. This is the group that places the most bets and generates the most overall gambling activity.
Winning is a different question.
When you look specifically at winning gamblers, the income profile shifts upward. The largest share of winners comes from households earning $100,000 to $200,000, at about 20.76 percent. The next biggest group is $50,000 to $75,000 at 17.51 percent, which makes sense because it is also one of the largest and most active gambling brackets overall. The $75,000 to $100,000 range follows at 13.61 percent.
Below $30,000, winning rates mostly stay under 5 percent. Above $500,000, they barely register. Even million-dollar households show up only as a rounding error among winners, not because they never gamble, but because they gamble less often, place fewer bets, and tend to treat it as entertainment rather than a habit.
This is the distinction most coverage skips. The middle class and lower-income households gamble the most. They also lose the most. Ultra-high earners gamble the least. The consistent winners tend to sit in the upper-middle, where disposable income, time, and restraint overlap.
In other words, the house doesn’t just know the odds. It knows the demographics.
In honor of International Epilepsy Day, all new paid subscriptions today (both monthly and annual) will be donated to The Epilepsy Foundation and NYU FACES. If you’ve been considering becoming a paid subscriber, or upgrading your subscription, now is the time.
Today’s letter includes: Elon Musk and Shivon Zilis, Jamie Dimon, Palm Beach, JPMorgan, the apres-skin trend, Puck, Bettina Anderson, Oscar de la Renta, more on the Epstein files, Molly Jong-Fast, Jacob Gallagher, David Lynch’s estate, Kaitlin Phillips, Laura Reilly, and more…
Maybe this finally puts the Elon-Musk-and-Sydney-Sweeney dating theories to rest. Bettina Anderson, the fiancée of Donald Trump Jr. and a Palm Beach socialite if there ever was one, posted a photo roundup of the newly engaged couple making the rounds on the Palm Beach social circuit. Most of the carousel is exactly what you’d expect. Then there’s the last photo. It appears to be a casual capture of Musk that comes with the side profile of Shivon Zilis, the Neuralink executive who shares multiple children with Musk. It’s not exactly shocking to see them together. Zilis, a former employee of Musk’s at Neuralink, welcomed another child with him last year. What is surprising is how unmistakably couple-y they look, especially given how loudly and wildly Musk’s dating life has been speculated about in recent months.
I’ve long been fascinated by the intersection of Mormonism and money. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is quietly one of the wealthiest religious institutions in the world, with estimated assets between $200 and $300 billion. Which is why Bridget Read’s new cover story Do You Have a Moment to Talk About How Mormons Conquered Pop Culture? for New York immediately caught my attention.
Everyone is talking about all the stuff that Epstein bought for people. But Molly Jong-Fast and Jacob Gallagher have separately done the best job of showing how the Epstein files document status and social ambition. In her opinion piece for The New York Times, Jong-Fast describes Jeffrey Epstein as someone who “will go down in history as perhaps this century’s most horrifically accomplished social climber,” a man who “knew pretty much everybody, name-dropping, favor-trading, sex-trafficking and possibly blackmailing his way all the way up, up, up.” What the files capture, she writes, is desire itself. “This is the nature of the Epstein files: It’s the record of what a global class of very privileged, accomplished and self-important people want to get gifted.” And the gifts are listed (in both pieces) with chilling specificity. “Mr. Epstein provided private plane trips, internships, Apple Watches, Hermès bags, extra-large zipper sweatshirts,” Jong-Fast writes. “Those went to Steve Bannon.” He also dispensed “nearly $10,000 worth of boxers and T-shirts (Woody Allen)” and “an XXL cashmere sweater (Noam Chomsky).” Gallagher, writing from Styles, traces the same pattern. “Contained within the millions of files that the Justice Department has released related to the wealthy sex offender Jeffrey Epstein are hundreds of references to luxury labels,” he notes, which shows Epstein “calibrating presentability within the codes of upper-class American society,” favoring “easy polish over flash.” This taste, he argues, was strategic. “This discernment was his way of showing that even though he was a son of Brooklyn who never graduated college, he had learned the proper codes and cues to ascend through this moneyed milieu.” And Molly (my dear, sweet friend, Molly!) is unsparing about the result. “There are many terrible secrets buried in the Epstein files, which mix the mundane and the horrific.” Being a convicted sex offender “did not make Mr. Epstein an outcast.” His “transactional amorality actually seemed to add to his appeal.” Boom.
JPMorgan employees now reportedly fear that ignoring Jamie Dimon’s return-to-office mandate is career suicide, which is one way to make a commute feel existential. As the FT notes, banks insist people show up in person because nothing sparks productivity quite like filling a very expensive building with people who are quietly furious they had to be there.
David Lynch’s estate is quietly offloading a few personal items, including speakers and watches, with a used Beats wireless speaker already bidding past $1,200, according to Emily Sundberg’s Substack Feed Me. The real tell is that local pickup in the Hollywood Hills is an option, which naturally raises the only question that matters: is it that Frank Lloyd Wright house?!
Après-skin is everywhere right now. It seems people aren’t just skiing anymore, they’re layering barrier creams like it’s PPE and treating the lodge mirror as a skincare checkpoint. The Wall Street Journal did a piece on how to ski without wrecking your skin, featuring Dr. Amanda Khan, who we quoted last week. That pretty much confirms this is no longer a niche obsession but a full alpine lifestyle adjustment.
Kaitlin Phillips has the daintiest, most elegant way of pointing something prickly out. Today in Gift Guide, it was that people were genuinely outraged by Laura Reilly’s newest project (or at least how she presented it), which, as Kaitlin notes, is called High Touch, not “Budget Wellness for the Masses” or “Accessible Health Hacks for Poor People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Go to the Gym.”
If you’re not already following @readrps on Instagram, you’re going to want that in your rotation. And if you reference or republish any original reporting from this letter, please credit Rich People Shit. You can always reach me directly at carson@readrps.com
My wife and I got a tour of the new JP Morgan building last week and were told there are 10,000 LED lightbulbs, matching, inadvertently, the 10,000 people who work in the building.
Inevitably, someone said, "Every time someone loses their job, a lightbulb goes out."
My parents own racehorses, I’ve been gambling since I’ve known about colours, so I could choose my horses by the colours of their silks. Wealthier people gamble for fun and for the sport of the odds, poor people gamble to actually make money that they don’t have. This is where things get dangerous for poor people.