In the Pages of These Books, Privacy Is the Ultimate Luxury

Luxury has been, in many periods of history, defined by ostentation. In today’s world of hyper-visibility, however, privacy has become the ultimate luxury. And like all luxuries, it’s for sale. For the ultra-wealthy, privacy can involve not only confidentiality and concealment but also outright seclusion. Private islands, remote ranches, bunkers, superyachts and wealth managed so discreetly it is invisible to public scrutiny are all part of a growing economy built around keeping the day-to-day lives of the world’s elites out of the headlines. Even the desire to belong, which seems untangleable from visibility, can be sated quietly, through exclusive communities, members-only clubs and networks all but invisible to outsiders. 

Our selection of novels, essays, investigative works and books on design explores wealth and the privacy it affords from several very different perspectives: Wall Street in the 1920s, Silicon Valley’s new Gilded Age, philanthropy among the very wealthy, the desire to belong and the many forms of evasion, whether of public scrutiny or tax obligations. Taken together, these books suggest that true wealth isn’t measured by what it displays, but by what it manages to hide.