Very rich people are very weird people. It makes sense. When money can inoculate you from the regular world filled with regular people doing regular things I imagine you can forget what it’s like to just be normal. I’ve written about memory before. It takes me precisely five days to forget what a hangover is. Last weekend I went to a bar for the first time in three months and forgot how to order a drink. I tried to get the bartender’s attention by standing at the bar and eye fucking him like I was the proper girl in the hat from Wedding Crashers. When that didn’t work I gave him a hair flip, undid a top button to show some cleavage, and raised my hand in the naughtiest way possible. Even that didn’t work. I guess my point is if you don’t use it you lose it when it comes to social interactions and the longer you are rich the easier it is to forget how to be a real human being.
Sean Combs (aka Puff Daddy, aka P Diddy, aka The Diddler) has been rich for a looooooooong time. The first Biggie album Ready To Die was released thirty years ago under Combs’s Bad Boy Records. By 1997 it was estimated that the label was worth 100 million dollars. For the past thirty years Diddy has been sitting on piles of money and coincidently piles of secrets. Imagine not doing normal things for thirty years? No grocery store, no laundry, no driving, no chores, no...okay, this all sounds great actually. I’ll take fame and fortune any day of the week if that’s the case. But it isn’t the case. Because as much as you don’t have to do the mundane things in life, you also get bored of the things that should be exciting.
Take grabbing a beer with friends for example. Instead of hitting your local bar for a couple pops to watch a game with the boys you have to get a team of security to rope off sections for you like an animal as people ogle that you are in their presence. Or what about going out to dinner. Imagine biting into a nice steak as paparazzi jump out of bushes with cameras trying to capture the spectacle of you getting steak sauce on your shirt (I assume Diddy uses steak sauce. He seems THAT freaky). The worst one of all has to be meeting a woman. The exhilaration of approaching a woman at the bar, flirting with her, and seeing if you might get lucky no longer puts lead in your pencil. When you’ve hit the uber rich point certain types of women begin to throw themselves at you. It’s natural and yet…not natural at all. I’m sure the synapses in your brain get rewired to the point that the simple yet glorious act of missionary no longer has the same meaning it does to us poors.
This is surely what happened to Puff. About fifteen years ago I was in a studio attempting a career at making music (hip-hop beats, that’s right) and I mentioned I liked the beat for the song Angels (which samples an old Jay Z song, which sampled an old Yvonne Flair song) sung and produced by none other than The Diddler. Kanye later sampled the song again. It’s fire. The producer just started laughing. In his thick southern accent he said, word for word, “The beats reeeyul good but Diddy a freak.”
“What do you mean a freak?” I asked.
“I mean he fuckin’ that guy from Die Hard,” he said.
“You mean Bruce Willis?”
“Yea man. I was at one of his pawrtys and he was sneakin upstairs with him. They was boff shirtless and one of em had a lil dildo,” he said without even cracking a smile.
It was a funny anecdote at the time but I shrugged it off as rumor and got back to making some of the worst music your ears will never hear. Looking back on it, that was only fifteen years into Diddy’s fame and freak levels. I can only imagine if women were no longer moving the needle for him then (and he needed Bruce Willis + a dildo to get off) what levels his freakiness could attain in the fifteen years after.
The worst part about this whole thing was watching Diddy’s own kids get arrested on camera as he fled. First, what a piece of shit father. Go down with the ship, you scum bag. If the captain of the Titanic can go down in the middle of the Atlantic in frigid temps you can at least get arrested in lieu of your own sons. But that’s the main problem with the rich. Money and power don’t just corrupt absolutely, they corrupt downstream. Hearing your own father saying ‘take dat’ to people who did not want to take that must have been a hell of a way to grow up. And, worst of fucking all, is the way those kids were probably babied by their very weird and very rich father. Take this story for example:
P. Diddler actually assaulted a UCLA football coach because he yelled at his son at practice. You know you are too rich when you think getting involved in your kid’s battles is a good idea. If my dad knew half the shit that was yelled at me at football practice he might have done the same but, on second thought, he would never because he’s not a weirdo.
If any rich person happens to trip, fall, and land on this blog here are five things you can stop doing for your kids. It will help them maintain sanity and it will help you not look like a nepotistic nutjob. Just because you no longer have to be normal doesn’t mean your kids have to follow suit. And when I am a rich and famous writer (81 subscribers bitch!) I will look back on this blog and make sure I do the same.
1 - Buy them nice cars
This is pretty standard among the rich. Buying a car is like going to the grocery store for us regular people in this economy (thanks Biden). It might dent the pocket a little but you’ll make it back by next week’s paycheck. The problem is it gives your kid a sense that they are cooler than they really are. It is the opposite of humbling. You can see a kid’s head grow like the Grinch’s heart as they get into their brand-new Mercedes they didn’t earn.
I went to a rich high school. Our parking lot looked like a car show floor. There were Mercedes, BMW’s, Hummers, and then my 1989 Volvo Station Wagon. You know what that taught me? To envy what other people have. That what you drive doesn’t make you any better or worse than the next person and that constantly having to pull over because the hood of your car is smoking builds character.
I know the rich people excuse too. “I want my kid to be safe, so I bought them a Cyber Truck.” Trust me, you’ve already taught your kids that there are no consequences in life and they will drive any car with this same attitude. I don’t care if you buy them a USA issued Armored Tank, they will find a way to put themselves in harms way with it. You taught them how.
2 – Throw them extravagant parties
We went BIG for my daughter’s first birthday. We had a ball pit, a bar tender, a bubble lady, and even bought her a $250 birthday cake (that hurt). It was an all time first birthday that my daughter will not remember. I watched her as she drooled on herself, gave every guest a dirty look, and smiled about five times. You know how she thanked us at the end of the night? By exploding her diaper and ruining her dress.
I don’t see much of a difference between a one-year-old and a 16-year-old. Sixteen-year-old girls hate all their “friends”, they hate their parents, and they’ll probably sneak some vodka into their Sweet Sixteen and end up shitting their pants too. So what’s the point of throwing your kids an extravagant party? It’s an exercise in vanity. Hooray, they graduated high school. They are supposed to graduate high school. How about this – if my daughters become Senators or Doctors or move out of the house before they are 25, then I will throw them (and me) a party.
3 - Credit them on albums
This is a sure-fire way to fuck up your kids. When your five-year-old is yelling incoherent babble on an album and is getting paid royalties for such babble they are bound to have an inflated view of themselves. I guarantee that any child that has a feature on a major album will be protesting something they know nothing about when they inevitably get into an Ivy League school in eighteen years. Blu Ivy Carter, Asahd Khaled, and North West will be among the college elite that are out there with picket signs complaining about how unfair life is, yelling that we need to tear down the patriarchy, and stomping their feet about how terrible this country is for people of color. They will not see the irony that the same world they are complaining about allowed their parents to be rich, famous, and awesome.
If you think about it, the most privileged kids in the world have caused it the most harm. Fidel Castro’s dad was a rich landowner. So was Mao Zedong’s. If there isn’t a better example of nepotism gone wrong than Donald Trump, I don’t know what is. So instead of crediting your kids on an album they didn’t help create, try having them make their own album and see where that goes. I’m sure the process will humble them as much as my own music career did to me.
4 – Gift them the family company
This entire blog is actually hilarious coming from me. I work for my parents. That’s right – I am one of these nepo-babies. But the difference is that my parents do in fact make me work.
In order to get the job, I had to graduate college. What a bummer that was. Instead of graduating high school to a 50k a year job I had to party away their money and keep up a middling GPA in order to get hired. What a rough life I’ve had.
More importantly, when I did start working, there was a five year stretch when I was by far the worst employee at the company. I watched all the other employees take home bonuses and raises as my dad laughed in my face. His exact words were – “I should deduct your salary every year the way you have been producing.” Even that wasn’t enough to get me to work harder.
It took my dad almost dying to wake me up out of my stupor. My father had to get his aorta replaced (kind of the most important part of your heart) and realizing that I couldn’t mooch off him if he died during surgery really turned this ship around. I’ve been an all-star employee ever since.
So here’s a bit of advice for the rich and famous. Fake a health scare. It might actually work to get your kid’s head out of their ass. It did for me!
5 - Have kids in the first place
We all know the saying - kids are entertainment for the poor. Boy can I relate. Not only do they cost money, they continue to cost money forever. Having kids is like the opposite of compounding interest. Sure they give you an insane amount of love, affection, and purpose but if I had a billion dollars in the bank couldn’t I just buy those things? Look at Diddy. With all his money he was able to buy whatever he wanted and in the end his kids just got in the way by getting arrested. Maybe if he never had kids he would never have:
- Sexually assaulted male strippers (allegedly)
- Filmed said sexual assaults (allegedly)
- Murdered someone and made his “friend” take the fall (allegedly)
- Assaulted a UCLA coach (allegedly)
- Fucked Bruce Willis (allegedly)
- Locked Cassie up like a princess in a Disney movie (allegedly)
- Let his son King make music (unfortunately not allegedly)
- Etc…
The moral of the story is if you’re going to be rich and weird there are ways you can prevent your kids from following down the same path. And the best way to do this is to not have them. Otherwise you might end up like P. Diddy and the fam, who you know do it better?
Thanks Alex! Now I know entirely too much about The Diddler 😁
Just diddyed on em