Reviews
The Billionaire Boys Club
In the old days, men of a certain net worth could join special clubs — the Skull and Bones club at Yale University, for example. They could reveal their wealth ineffably through secret handshakes or special rings that were signifiers of inclusion into that wonderful parallel universe where money flows lovingly like milk from a triple-“E”-cup mother’s teat. But with scholarship students now ensconced shoulder-to-shoulder with bona fide heirs-apparent, a cultivated accent, a well-tanned ankle or a certain nonchalant elegance is absolutely no assurance of bank-account solidity. Sadly, the secret handshake of today pales in comparison to the secret handshake of yesteryear as a gauge of true limitless checkbook depth.
The problem is, it is simply not fashionable to be ostentatious with your wealth anymore — least of all in Europe, where you have sky-high personal taxes, and female demonstrators who paint agonized paeans to social injustice across their bare breasts and, like Ritalin-addled rhesus monkeys, leap onto the cars of finance ministers.
So, how can we demonstrate our net worth in a decidedly under-the-radar way? Fortunately, in the last decade, one ultimate stealth signifier of extreme wealth has emerged to become the club pin, the friendship bracelet or the varsity blazer of the world’s financial elite: the Richard Mille watch. The Richard Mille watch is more than a timepiece; it is a sign of inclusion into a very special club. It has, in essence, become today’s equivalent of the billionaires’ Masonic handshake.
But ever since Richard Mille launched his eponymous brand in the beginning of the millennium, his watches have continuously found their way onto the wrists of the true horological devotees. King Juan Carlos I of Spain is one such devotee; in fact, it was he who urged Nadal to collaborate with Mille. Rap icon Jay-Z is one, along with Pharrell Williams and Kanye West, who rapped about his Richard Mille watch being far more expensive than a Franck Muller.
Why are Richard Mille watches so expensive? Mille explains, “It is because I am a victim of my own inability to compromise. Every time I get to a point where I need to decide [whether] to save cost or to push performance to the very extreme, I always choose the latter course.” Mille is the only man who makes sports watches that are actually worn by athletes in competition. He was the first to strap a watch to a Formula 1 driver, Felipe Massa, for a race; Massa then proceeded to crash rather spectacularly in the 2004 Hungarian Grand Prix. Thankfully, both the driver and the watch — the first of its kind with a carbon-fiber baseplate, named the RM 006 — survived with zero ill effects.
Among his achievements is the RM 009 tourbillon watch, launched in 2005, which utilized a virtually indestructible case made from ALUSIC, an aluminum-and-silicon compound that has to be spun in a centrifuge until it bonds at a molecular level. The RM 009 also boasted a movement made from aluminum-lithium that, when combined with the ALUSIC case, created the world’s lightest mechanical watch then, weighing in at 28g without the strap. In 2010, Mille beat this achievement by a considerable margin with the RM 027 tourbillon made for tennis star Rafael Nada — a watch that weighed just 20g, including the strap.
So, it seemed that project Pimp My Wrist was stillborn. But then it dawned on me that my old college roommate is an erstwhile publisher of a horological tome and a Mille owner. I immediately rang him up and he, too, suggested that I perform some physically impossible maneuvers upon myself. I then reminded him of some highly compromising images involving a midget transvestite that I have of him during our college years, and he almost instantly reconsidered after seeing the merits of my social experiment. He conceded to lend me his Richard Mille RM 021 on the condition that I record my results to be compiled into a story for his magazines.
It was only when I was getting up to go to the men’s room that one of them suddenly remarked, “Wow, I like your watch.” As I turned toward the man closest to me, he smiled as he raised his wrist and revealed the RM 003 GMT tourbillon sitting proudly on it. Amazingly enough, the other man at the sushi counter also laughed and raised his wrist to reveal that he, too, was wearing a Richard Mille tourbillon. We were soon congratulating each other on the fact that we’d all chosen the stealthy titanium-cased versions. Suffice it to say, the ice was not broken, but inexorably smashed: we were soon trading watches, pouring each other ludicrous amounts of sake, laughing as if we were long-lost friends and getting similarly smashed. What was even more incredible about this was that I’d always perceived the Japanese to be reserved and slightly standoffish. When I asked one of the men about this, he grinned and said, “This is what is nice about the Richard Mille customer: he is always a cool guy. Like Richard.”
The next thing I knew, I was chatting to several of the other Richard Mille-clad members of her entourage and we were whisked away in a series of black minivans to the famed restaurant Pierre Gagnaire. Each of them had subtly clocked my wrist before giving me an almost-imperceptible nod of approval and delving into conversation with me. The meal was sublime with endless courses and a river of Burgundies so opiatic that by three in the morning, with my ears somewhat deafened by the Usher concert I’d just attended, I was only partly aware that I was in an art gallery with JonOne, Paris’s hottest graffiti artist. JonOne and I were talking when I noticed that under the cuff of his battered leather jacket was a stunning Richard Mille RM 005 in black titanium. At the same time, he looked at the brushed-titanium masterpiece on my wrist. He nodded and said, “Follow me, I know another party with really cool people. People like us.”