The Billionaires Social Calendar: April Edition

Plus: inside the Oscars swag-bags, a new Off-Broadway play about billionaires chasing youth, Kanye West’s gutted Malibu mansion, a Hamptons fight over a horse complex, and much more...

It’s Monday but it already feels like I’ve put in a full week. Last night I spent six hours with the fashion desk of the Financial Times doing live Oscars coverage, which was surprisingly fun for me. I haven’t done that kind of minute-by-minute reporting in years, and it reminded me of my earliest newspaper days, when big events meant bad pizza and everyone staying up together filing copy.

This time, things looked a little different. I was texting back and forth with the FT’s fashion editor (someone I first met at a polo event in Greenwich when we were both in our mid-20s) while she was four hours ahead in London and we were both in pajamas. The other difference: I had far more control over the page than I ever did back then. I got to shape the structure, decide who made the cut, and generally say what I thought. The only time they intervened was when I got perhaps a little too pointed about one actress’s dress. I also think some of my dry humor may have required a slight softening for a British audience. But you can’t win them all.

If you’re a FT subscriber, here’s the story. And I’ve included a couple award-show reads down below as well.

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We all know I love a good graphic here at RPS. So what better excuse for one than a new reoccurring monthly series. Every industry likes to pretend it has its own calendar, but if you follow the travel patterns of the high-net-worth long enough you begin to notice there is really just one. The events themselves are difficult to access, with boxes allocated years in advance and invitation lists that move slowly, but once you are inside that world a pattern becomes obvious. The same people start to appear again and again, sometimes a week apart and sometimes on different continents, because the circle that actually moves between these things is much smaller than anyone admits. Which is why we’re starting a monthly Billionaires Social Calendar, so readers can see what’s happening and instruct their assistants with their own schedules accordingly. Here’s a couple weeks advance notice for April.

The month starts at the Rolex Monte-Carlo Masters in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, where Riviera tennis becomes a hospitality sport, unfolding right around the same time as The Masters Tournament in Augusta, GA, the most controlled and coveted sporting ticket in America, a place where access matters just as much as the leaderboard. That same week, Liverpool hosts the Grand National, Britain’s famous betting spectacle and a social ritual for anyone with a taste for horses and risk. Then the watch world convenes in Switzerland for Watches and Wonders Geneva, where timepiece-fanatics gather to debut the year’s most complicated and expensive little machines. Three thousand miles away the art market migrates to Art Dubai, now firmly on the collector circuit. On the Fiera Milano Rho fairgrounds in Milan everyone heads to Salone del Mobile, the global furniture fair where next year’s luxury interiors will be decided. By the end of the month, it’s off to Washington, D.C. for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner weekend, the capital’s one annual brush with the social calendar. And if all this sounds exhausting, you’re not alone. I’ve reached the stage where I’m cancelling May before the invitations even arrive.

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In today’s letter: Oscars swag worth $346,000, Plum Sykes and Kelly Rutherford, Warren Buffett, the evacuation of multimillion-dollar show horses, a new Off-Broadway play about billionaires chasing youth, Palm Beach and the Bahamas, Kanye West’s gutted Malibu mansion, Ashley Baker, a Hamptons fight over a horse complex and much more…

• The Oscars swag bags for acting and directing nominees were worth about $346,000 and included crypto cards, facial plastic surgery vouchers, a pre-nup package, and a trip to Ibiza (Hollywood planning ahead, apparently).

• If you missed the Oscars but want dish on the designers, Plum Sykes is hosting a Substack Live Monday at 1pm EST with Kelly Rutherford to dissect the Oscars red carpet, which will be a thrill to see the legendary British society writer and the woman who spent years ruling the Upper East Side on television together.

• Every CEO now wants to be Warren Buffett, including the part where people actually read the shareholder letter. What was once a formality is now treated like a literary event.

• When war disrupted the Longines Global Champions Tour in Doha, nearly 150 elite show-jumping horses were suddenly stranded in Qatar. This is the story of the frantic evacuation effort that followed, with organizers scrambling cargo flights to airlift the multimillion-dollar animals to safety in Belgium.

• Has anyone seen Spare Parts yet? It’s a new off-broadway play about billionaires chasing youth. It follows a wealthy older woman who seeks rejuvenation through increasingly extreme medical interventions (sounds like…half the shows and movies that have come out in the past two years, no?). It’s a dark comedy that explores the moral and emotional cost of chasing youth in a culture obsessed with staying young.

• The developer who bought and promised to restore Kanye West’s gutted Malibu mansion is now facing foreclosure after defaulting on an $18.5 million loan. Hundreds of small investors who backed the project could lose their money if the property goes to auction this week.

• Here’s a story by Ashley Baker in Air Mail to get you ready for Hamptons season: In Bridgehampton, a proposal by equestrienne Gabi Morris to build a large horse-riding complex (including a sizable manure pit) has sparked a backlash from wealthy neighbors near the Channing Daughters vineyard. Silly me. I thought horses were the one thing rich people could agree on.

• Palm Beach is starting to feel a little too hectic in the winter, even for the people who have houses there. They’re escaping the peak snowbird frenzy in their own paradise by slipping off to the Bahamas more and more often. (I’ll be joining that migration on Tuesday, first to one island with a friend, then on to another to visit someone else, so perhaps there’s something to the idea after all?) Palmer suggests it’s the Palm Beach equivalent of how New Yorkers retreat to the Hamptons.

This one’s free. Most of them aren’t. If you’ve been thinking about upgrading, now would be a good time—paid subscribers get about 66% more RPS, plus exclusives and first access to merch drops and events.