Michael Milken , Mandarin Oriental Hotel - £42,000 a night

                          The Milken Global Conference

is the brainchild of Michael Milken, the junk-bond billionaire who, after serving two years in prison for securities fraud in the 1990s, rebranded himself as a respected financier, philanthropist and convenor of people.

Every year the confab of billionaires, politicians and Holywood A-listers has a different theme…

In fact, three themes emerged last week. One was concern about how technology, and artificial intelligence (AI) in particular, is upending the world as we know it. The second was the sharp societal divisions…The third was the next recession.

The Coming Storm, 

Archibald Knox (1864-1933)

Photo Credit: Manx National Heritage [CC BY-NC]

While stock markets hit new records, the Masters of the Universe are fretting that the storm clouds are gathering. Debt for companies, households and governments has reached levels not seen since 2008.

…Ken Griffin, the founder of hedge fund giant Citadel and one of the world’s richest people, voiced the concerns of many of the billionaires in attendance: that the masses would rise up and take his money. He said those calling for a dramatic redistribution of wealth “haven’t studied history”.

Scott Minerd of Guggenheim Partners warned that “the disparity in wealth is so extreme, it’s feeding populism”. His colleague Alan Schwartz was more blunt: “What’s really coming is class warfare”.

Layered on top of those worries is the rise of AI. Kai-Fu Lee, former head of Google China and founder of Sinovation Ventures, told The Sunday Times, that up to 40% of jobs, would in time be automated away by machines. The probable result will be an exacerbation of the wealth gap.

(The Sunday Times, 2019)

The masters of the universe will ony have themselves to blame if their pessimistic predictions come to fruition.

The Mandarin Oriental Hotel in London charges £42,000 a night for a penthouse suite. Lucy Kellaway, former journalist and now a trainee teacher, reviewed it.

…Up on the ninth floor, he [a maroon-coated man from reception] flung open the door, to the suite and I almost collided with a second red-suited man stationed on the threshold, beaming and declaring himself to be my butler. Behind him stretched the suite. Wow, I said.

The interior, designed by Joyce Wang, gives an instant feeling of sterility, drabness and vulgarity. Everything is textured. The doors are made of what appears to be a dark, corrugated melamine. The theme, I’d learnt, is meant to be Hyde Park. Brass statues of deer wander across the furniture. Ducks fly across textured walls. The metal chandeliers are like clumpy branches of a tree.

Towering flower arrangements and a Carmen-Miranda-style mountain of tropical fruit might have provided distraction from the ugliness, only their colours clashed with the television screen. The latter occupied a large proportion of a wall and was tuned to a lurid screensaver of the hotel façade.

…We examined an astonishingly horrid corrugated metallic drinks cabinet and wondered if there was anything in the suite that we would accept if it were given to us for nothing. Eventually we settled on the towelling robes, whose excessive thickness had a £42,000 bounce to them.

Our game was interrupted by the arrival of the photographer, who had taken pictures in many luxury hotels. He took one look at the suite, shrugged and said: “It’s oligarch taste.”

In that case, I retract everything I’ve written. Quite possibly there is nothing wrong with the most expensive suite in London: the fault instead lies with me. I simply don’t have the money to appreciate it.

…Oligarchs need a lot of space and so the three double bedrooms, two sitting rooms, a dining area for eight, three bathrooms, two further loos and two kitchens were just right.

…I don’t know if oligarchs love TVs, but if they do, they are in for a treat. There are eight of them all told, each one the size of a small cinema screen, except for the one built into the marble tiling around the bath.

They might be put out to find no TV in any of the five loos, but they could console themselves by playing with the 12-function toilet control system instead.

…So who actually stays in this splendour? …The only other guest to have occupied the suite since the re-opening 10 days earlier was a member of a royal family who had booked it for five nights – which would set them back £210,000 for the room alone. Everything else is extra.

…In the morning we went to the dining room to rough it with regular guests for breakfast. The view of the park from the ground floor is gorgeous. The trees dripped with the fresh green of spring and just outside the window people trotted by on horseback. The food was perfect, and the service was competent, energetic and kind.

The only bad thing was that if I had already paid £42,000, I might take offence at being charged a further £34 a head for continental breakfast. But then I was forgetting, if I were an oligarch I wouldn’t even notice.

(The i, 2019)

Why anyone would pay £42,000 for the use of a suite of rooms for a night is totally beyond me.