Words of compassionate admonishment from this author’s great-grandfather John Caldwell. Caldwell was a Protestant Irishman who arrived here penniless, served all four years in The Civil War and went on to earn great wealth and success at Westinghouse. He was being ironic, I’m told, but he might have been chiding these people:
Billionaires invade rural Wyoming, find that they’re just the same as the Little People
John Truett made millions as an oil and gas CEO, but since moving to Teton County, Wyoming — a town inhabited by an increasing number of wealthy transplants like himself — his biggest passion has been becoming a “normal person.”
When he visits the downtown bars, “I don’t tell people that I live in a gated community. They accept me as a local,” he tells author Justin Farrell in his new book, “Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West” (Princeton University Press), out now.
Money, he insisted, hasn’t changed him.
“Yeah, I’ve got the airplanes, a motorcycle, and I love driving my Beemer through the mountains . . . [but] I go down and drink beer with the guys that run the lifts, and I’m as much as a ‘lifty’ as they are.”
Truett is just one of the hundreds of CEOs, investors and moguls — some of the “most powerful and well-known figures in business and politics” — who have made Teton County their home. Some live here permanently, commuting to major cities for work, and some only visit during the summer or winter months. Everyone interviewed by Farrell for the book did so on the condition of anonymity (all names are pseudonyms).
Teton, once known as a “little quaint cow town” by locals, has transformed over the last decade into a haven for the ultra-wealthy, with full-time residents like former Vice President Dick Cheney, Wal-Mart heiress Christy Walton and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
“Our friends are everything from ski-bums to people who are very successful with immense wealth, and you would never know it because we’re all just in our jeans and flannel shirts,” she told Farrell. “It’s very casual, and money just doesn’t matter to people like it does other
They also feel accepted by the locals. “Many of them assume that the poor ranchers see the world the same way they do,” Farrell says. “That mentality of, ‘We’re all out here trying to make a living without government interference!’ ”
Colin Stewart, a Yellowstone Club member and hedge-fund investor from Connecticut, insisted to Farrell that he was “very close with all sorts of people in town.” Asked for an example, he mentioned an employee at the local fish market who always gave him “the inside track to the best cuts of halibut.”
Stewart considered this relationship, and others he had with lower-income locals, to be authentic and equitable, but as Farrell points out, “his friendships are often based on economic exchange and uneven power dynamics.”
Many of the wealthy Teton residents Farrell spoke to have romanticized ideas of what life is like for the poor. “Poverty to them is either the ski bum or the hard-working rancher,” he writes, “not the reality of the immigrant family from New Mexico working two to three jobs just trying to stay afloat.”
Julie Williams and her husband, Craig — who made well over a hundred million dollars with hedge-fund investments during the 1990s and 2000s — are adamant that nobody in their community “gives a hoot” about personal finances.
“Our friends are everything from ski-bums to people who are very successful with immense wealth, and you would never know it because we’re all just in our jeans and flannel shirts,” she told Farrell. “It’s very casual, and money just doesn’t matter to people like it does other places.”
“Other members simply aren’t impressed by what you’ve accomplished outside the club,” Tom explained to Farrell. “People don’t need to put on airs.”
The author clearly has an ax to grind: poor Mexicanos vs the rich, injustice, and the nobility of the poor, and it’s easy to make people look ridiculous by taking quotes out of context. Further, many of his targets are self-made, like my own ancestor, and are fully-familiar with what being poor entails, but this is still funny:
He recounted seeing a nationally famous club member tying his own kid’s shoe. “There he was, bent over on one knee,” he told Farrell. “Not his nanny nearby, but himself. It was unbelievable to see.”
