[imagesource: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters]

Good fences make good neighbours.

When it comes to the real estate of billionaires, there’s often more than a white picket fence serving as a divider between properties, but even that can’t ensure amicable relationships between neighbours.

Recent history is littered with examples of bitter falling outs, and Bill Gross (pictured above) is a standout example of what can happen when things turn sour.

He’s currently involved in litigation with his neighbour, Mark Towfiq, who was warned ahead of time that Gross could make living next door rather difficult if he didn’t get his way.

Reporting below via the Financial Times:

Upset by Mr Towfiq’s complaints about a $1m glass sculpture on his property, Mr Gross blared loud music over the fence, including mariachi tracks and the theme song to the 1960s US sitcom, Gilligan’s Island.

“Peace on all fronts or we’ll just have nightly concerts, big boy,” 76-year-old Mr Gross allegedly texted.

He sounds nice.

Let’s not forget that in a 2018 divorce battle, Gross was accused of spraying fart smells around his former marital home, in order to make his ex-wife suffer.

You can read more about the battle between Gross and Towfiq here.

I mean, we don’t want to paint all billionaires with the same brush (they have it tough enough), but there’s a pattern here:

There has been a series of legal battles by the wealthy in California trying to stop surfers crossing their land to reach public beaches. David Geffen, the entertainment entrepreneur, finally turned over the keys to a gate to “Billionaires’ Beach” in Malibu in 2005 after years of conflict.

Mr Geffen was the soul of compromise compared with Vinod Khosla, the venture capitalist, who has fought the California Coastal Commission for a decade in his effort to prohibit access to the beach in front of his 53-acre property south of San Francisco. He tried and failed in 2018 to get the US Supreme Court to intervene.

You may recall David Geffen’s name from that very ill-timed Instagram post about life on his private yacht.

The Financial Times lists a number of other bitter disputes between billionaires and their neighbours, or the general public, and offers a few reasons why these often end up in nasty legal battles.

Firstly, billionaires often thrive on beating others, with Gross once stating that “my desire is to win, and win forever”

Another rather famous wealthy individual had this to say:

…quite a few [billionaires] match the description quoted approvingly by Donald Trump in his 2004 book Think Like a Billionaire.

They possess “a single-minded determination to impose their vision on the world [and] an irrational belief in unreasonable goals, bordering at times on lunacy”.

When you’ve grown up entitled, or grown used to getting your own way, anything less than total victory seems like an unreasonable compromise.

Secondly, billionaires don’t like to share, often travelling by private jet, holidaying on private yachts, and booking out entire islands, all to avoid having to fraternise with regular folk.

Finally, they have the resources to engage in long-term, expensive litigation, with one dispute between wealthy neighbours in the Bahamas (Louis Bacon and Peter Nygard) said to have racked up “tens of millions in bills”.

A drop in the ocean for billionaires, an entirely unaffordable expense for the overwhelming majority.

For those keen to dig deep into how the mega-wealthy often get their way, the Guardian has a long read looking at “how America’s richest zip code stays exclusive”.

[source:ft]