Seven Cheap Dates to Save Billionaire Marriages on the Rocks
Fortunately, there are ways to recapture the magic!
IMAGE: KAMIL ZIHNIOGLU/AFP/GETTY
by Rich Herschlag
First it was Jeff and MacKenzie Scott Bezos. Then Bill and Melinda Gates. Pretty soon there will be no power couples left to go island shopping with. None left to gang up on South American strongmen for clear-cutting the rainforest. None left to shame for not taking the Giving Pledge. That may be okay for some folks, but you can hardly call it living.
The question is, who’s next? It could be you. Face it—you’ve lost that spark. What used to be a freewheeling, spontaneous exchange of algorithmic epiphanies, sweet nothings, and saliva has turned into a sea of hostile takeovers, stock buybacks, and frantic attempts to rid continents of contagious diseases. The teamwork and intimacy of making that first $100 million together undercutting (fill in name of long ago vanquished rival) has been eviscerated by the drudgery of creating a global empire so big it swallows more competitors by 8 AM than all other online businesses the rest of the day combined.
Fortunately, there are ways to recapture the magic. Recently, a small group of Fortune 500 CFOs and hedge fund managers got together and came up with seven cheap dates for billionaire couples on the brink to rekindle the flame and protect that foundation of yours from a messy, complicated financial restructuring.
Get Lunch at a Drive-Thru
Remember the thrill of pulling up to a Taco Bell for a nooner? The joy of one of you spreading out the bean burritos back at the office on a foldout table while the other edited an Excel spreadsheet listing your commodity options? You can recapture that pure sense of abandon by having your chauffeur access one of the more worn Lamborghinis from Lot B and programming the GPS. While your other half orders the Chicken Quesadilla Combo, from the passenger’s side you can recreate that one-handed lap dance straight out of the 1987 playbook. To protect your anonymity, make sure your assistant traveling secretary has the establishment rented out and cordoned off at least 24 hours prior.
Shoplift
It was decades ago during your visionary trek out to Seattle to buy a dilapidated warehouse and start a retail outfit on the “World Wide Web.” Your credit cards were maxed out and you spent your last $30 in cash filling the Chevy Cavalier with regular unleaded. You really wanted that Mounds bar for the road so you slipped it under your shirt while he distracted the cashier with the joke about the rabbi, the priest, and the imam he heard on Wall Street. You can experience that same adrenaline rush all over again so long as you own the Piggly Wiggly chain and can keep the whole thing off TMZ.
Meet Up in a One-Star Motel
Nothing rekindles the elusive thrill of cheating on your former significant others while developing a new platform for C++ like a one-hour rendezvous in a motel where they found a body last week and the bedspread has more burn marks than a Medellin Cartel hostage. Being well past the age where procreation is even a remote possibility is no reason to spare the birth control, which like back in the day will be ribbed. And remember to relax. Those shrill screams coming through the paper thin walls are not meth addicts doing the nasty but actors your staff hired when you bought the place earlier in the day.
Sneak Down from the Cheap Seats at a Ballgame
Why not take a break from devouring small tech upstarts and go to a ballgame? You remember that thing you used to do—buy general admission tickets, start way up in the nosebleed seats, and every couple of innings sneak down a level until by the ninth inning you’re sitting warily in the third base side box seats of superrich people like yourselves today who not only never used them but were unaware they owned them. Nothing forestalls gray divorce quite like the illicit thrill of worrying if an usher is going to ask to see your ticket stubs. With the pandemic not quite over, there are plenty of empty seats to choose from and only a small chance of being spotted on TV as no one at home is watching.
Make Out at the Movies
The 70s were a great time. For a buck-fifty you could get into the late show of a flick toward the end of its run, slink up to the balcony, and with the exception of occasional snoring from a vagrant five rows away, fool around undisturbed for about two hours straight plus previews and intermission. Nobody really cared about teenagers making out in the 70s. In fact nobody really cared about anything in the 70s. Recreating your carefree early dating life should be relatively inexpensive as movie theaters remain largely idle during the waning days of the pandemic. Failing that, there is always the mezzanine of the screening room in your own compound.
Sleep Out on the Fire Escape
After a long hot summer night of coding and popping NoDoz in his rent controlled tenement apartment, you shared a Colt 45 Malt Liquor and realized with the air conditioner on the fritz your best shot at a little shuteye was the fire escape. Lying there side by side six stories above the sounds of car horns and trucks delivering stacks of morning papers, you looked up at the stars, and without the money to pay the next month’s rent or even dream of a prenup, you made a pact—one day you would address Third World reproductive issues and he would solve climate change.
Okay, nothing like this ever really happened. You borrowed $150,000 from his parents and lived in a condo on Bainbridge Island. The images above were largely stolen from West Side Story and an episode of The Honeymooners. You never slummed it and you never lived in a slum. But one time you did sleep on a pullout couch.
Go Skinny Dipping at a Public Pool
You don’t remember who dared who, but it wound up in the deep end of Stoner Park Pool in West LA. You dropped your trunks, she tossed her top, and pretty soon you were both leaning in. With elderly folks nearby in a YMCA water ballet class and mischievous children with water pistols apparently none the wiser, you completed one of your first mergers. Okay . . . don’t do this one. It was borderline then but now it’s just gross. With your dad bod and her faded stretch marks this is neither for the faint nor the sturdy of heart. I’m saying not even in a rented pool with extras from Central Casting. Maybe just fill up the old waterbed and never mention it again.
Read the latest for Banter Members:
How To Force Joe Manchin To End The Filibuster
The Democrats must find leverage on the Senator from West Virginia before he allows Republicans to destroy democracy in America.
(Leigh Vogel/Pool via AP, File)
by Ben Cohen
In response to Mitch McConnell’s announcement that he will be opposing a bipartisan bill investigating the Capitol riot, Joe Manchin called it “disheartening,” and said that he was “really concerned about our country.” Speaking to Politico, Manchin also said that he was “still praying we’ve still got 10 good solid patriots within that conference.”
It is unclear whether Joe Manchin genuinely believes Republicans can still work with Democrats in good faith, but he has not budged an inch from his pro-filibuster position. Manchin, along with his centrist bedfellow Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, are the major roadblocks to passing a host of vitally important Democratic legislative ambitions. From the vital voting rights HR1 bill to infrastructure spending and now an investigation into the attempted coup on January 6th, Republicans are gearing up to filibuster, well, everything.
End the filibuster, or be ended by it
Without ending the filibuster and allowing a simple majority to pass legislation, the Democrats and the Biden administration will be severely handicapped moving forward. If they can’t deliver over the coming months, the Democrats are likely to lose the House and the Senate in 2022 — a blow that could be fatal to the Biden White House.
It is now recognized by most Democrats that there is no point in decrying Republican obstructionism. As most rational observers concluded many years ago, the GOP is not a conservative political party by any meaningful standard and cannot be counted on to act rationally.
Under Trump, the shift towards authoritarianism has been as rapid as it has been extreme. Last year, the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden showed with thorough analysis of the world’s democracies, the Republican Party has gone through what director Anna Lührmann calls “certainly the most dramatic shift in an established democracy” under Trump. The study concluded that, “the data shows that the Republican party in 2018 was far more illiberal than almost all other governing parties in democracies….Only very few governing parties in democracies in this millennium (15%) were considered more illiberal than the Republican party in the US.”
In other words, the Republican Party is now a quasi-fascist organization that has little interest in preserving the tenets of democracy, let alone working with Democrats on meaningful legislation.
Newt Gingrich’s dream
Republican obstructionism in its current form can be traced back to Newt Gingrich’s all out assault on the Clinton administration in the mid 90’s. As McKay Coppins summarized in a piece for The Atlantic back in 2018, “Newt Gingrich turned partisan battles into bloodsport, wrecked Congress, and paved the way for Trump’s rise.” Gingrich’s nihilism has worked incredibly well for Republicans — so well that they have found a way to remain relevant without engaging in real policy debate for almost three decades.
Under Mitch McConnell’s watchful eye, the party now exists solely to obstruct and destroy. There are no policy objectives, no long term plans, and no desire to work with Democrats in the national interest. This obstructionism has now morphed in an even more extreme version based on the maxim of “Owning the Libs”….
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