The richest people are trying to become harder to control and reach, and its 15 habits range from protecting health, privacy and attention to favoring cash flow, owning businesses and investing through private channels. The countdown runs from 15 to 1 and treats the final habit as the one that holds the rest together. Several habits come with a suggested action, and the video notes that the further down the list you go, the more uncomfortable it gets.
Prices, percentages and examples below are as the video gives them, and some of the habits touch on health, religion and security, so read them as the video’s observations of how the wealthy live.
Watch the full video here, or skip to the breakdown below.
The 15 habits at a glance
- Health is the new status asset (0:15)
- Retracting wealth visibility (2:15)
- Anti-algorithm in public, algorithmic in private (3:59)
- Doubling down on taste and culture (6:07)
- They pay a coach for everything (7:48)
- Hosting dark salons (9:28)
- Going to church (11:05)
- Acquisition mode, not building mode (12:40)
- They make fewer decisions (14:06)
- Post-hustle, not lazy (16:05)
- Cash flow over enterprise value (17:56)
- Obsolete education (20:20)
- International safe havens and bunkers (22:18)
- They are cutting people out of their lives (24:14)
- They invest through private channels (26:00)
- Bonus: They don’t know how to be rich (29:08)
15. Health is the new status asset
The new flex is a biological age at least eight years younger than your driver’s license. Watches got cheap, cars became common and mansions show up on TikTok, so the rich now compete on how functional their body is at 60.
The price tags: Function Health charges 499 dollars a year for over 100 biomarkers, Lifeforce 1,800 a year with hormone testing and a coach, and concierge medicine with a doctor who takes only 50 patients runs 150,000 to 300,000 a year. Beyond ice baths, it says the rich do DEXA scans, VO2 max testing, cancer screening and annual full-body MRIs, and travel for longevity treatments in places like Switzerland and Germany.
Grind culture is dying because it costs life. The lesson, in the video’s words, is that vitality is up for purchase, so see how much you can afford.
14. Retracting wealth visibility
Showing off wealth is out. There are no more logos, as the rise of quiet luxury brands like Loro Piana, The Row, Khaite and Phoebe Philo shows, and the video says some wear platinum in public because it looks like silver.
The reason is that extreme displays are no longer aspirational. When the gap between the 1 percent and everyone else gets visible, the 1 percent becomes a target. Median executive security spending at S&P 500 companies more than doubling from 2022 to 2024, from 40,000 to 94,000 dollars per executive, and Coinbase spending 6 million on CEO security alone in 2025.
So the walls get bigger, the digital footprint disappears and holdings sit in LLCs or trusts. Status signaling moves to things you do not show, like how many kids you can support or which hotels you can book. Try this: unless you are extracting value, there is little point in sharing the insides of your life with strangers.
13. Anti-algorithm in public, algorithmic in private
The wealthy have deleted their accounts, made them private or use them only as broadcast tools. They post and leave, and they stopped reading comments. The public algorithm serves the average, blended experience of regular people, so the rich unplugged. It is eroding your brain and doing the programming for you.
In private, they still consume relevant content, but it moved to Telegram, WhatsApp and Signal groups where people they know share useful information. They track health, net worth, meals and blood work, and they pay for curation: Grant’s Interest Rate Observer costs 1,950 dollars a year, PitchBook starts at 15,000 per license and Puck covers Hollywood, Wall Street and DC.
The pattern is to opt out of what is optimized for ad revenue and opt into what is optimized for accuracy or goal match. Your move: be intentional with consumption and take back control from the algorithm.
12. Doubling down on taste and culture
There are roughly 22 million millionaires in the US, so being rich is no longer rare. Being rich and interesting is. The wealthy buy furniture from named designers, first-edition books and rare cars, anything that says they have a personality.
They travel for cultural moments instead of beaches, the video says, from Davos and Dakar in January to the Masters in April, the Met Gala and Monaco Grand Prix in May, Cannes after that, Art Basel in June and Wimbledon in July. They go to architecture and desert art installations and read fiction and poetry, from Cormac McCarthy to Ocean Vuong, Anne Carson and Maggie Nelson.
Good taste is hard to build because it is the slow accumulation of pattern recognition over decades. The line is that you are not interesting for having read Atomic Habits, but you might be if you co-produced a short film that got a standing ovation at South by Southwest. To copy it: expose yourself to more beauty and try to understand why you like it.
11. They pay a coach for everything
The rich hire coaches to compress ten years of mistakes into six months, just as a personal trainer gets you to your gym goals faster. An executive coach runs 1,500 to 5,000 dollars an hour, and the video says executive coaching is now a 20 billion dollar global industry. They also use speech, voice and accent coaches, breath coaches, movement coaches, parenting coaches and relationship coaches.
One of its app members worth over 50 million dollars spends around 200,000 a year on coaches, and that this is not uncommon. The difference it draws is between buying information and buying results. It calls this the most copyable habit on the list and one the rich keep behind closed doors, so you think they are simply smarter.
Start here: find a dedicated coach for what you are trying to do, or get access to the same kind of coaching at a fraction of the cost.
10. Hosting dark salons
These are not rituals, just invitation-only dinners at someone’s home with six to twelve people, phones in a basket and no photos or recordings. The salon model is older than the country club and is returning because country clubs no longer work.
The host, often a founder or family office head, curates a guest list around a goal, and the edge comes from cross-pollination of what the guests know. Some are one-offs and some recur, with each meeting bringing a problem or opportunity the group works on. The aim is a sounding board of people who can make an intro, join a deal or have dealt with the situation before.
These rooms matter because public conversation has become performative. These people avoid networking events with 2,000 others and use hospitality to build trust before deals, introductions and influence. Put it to work: host a dinner for four to six interesting people who do their own thing in a way you admire, rather than only your friends.
9. Going to church
This is the most surprising comeback on the list. Religious affiliation among high-net-worth individuals under 50 has climbed for three years after decades of decline, and that it is active practice rather than nominal. This is the video’s observation, and no data source is named for it.
Its explanation is that the wealthiest people have won the materialist game and found it did not give them what they hoped. The more you optimize every aspect of life, the emptier it feels: less friction, less meaning. Faith communities are dense networks of high-trust relationships, a place to raise kids, to grieve and to feel small, and in a low-trust society, shared values become valuable.
Religion, the argument goes, has always been one of the highest forms of self-help, and that for a period we threw the baby out with the bathwater. In practice: if you have been feeling off spiritually, try a Sunday somewhere and find the right fit.
8. Acquisition mode, not building mode
The phrase I’m working on a startup is no longer a flex, the video says. It reads as being broke. Saying you just acquired a business signals that you are in private equity and had enough money to buy something profitable.
Somewhere between 2022 and 2023, the trend shifted from building the next Facebook to buying car washes. The math: building a company from zero to 10 million dollars takes 5 to 10 years and carries a 90 percent chance of failure, while buying a 10 million dollar company takes 6 months with an 80 percent chance of success. These are not billionaires but the upper-middle 1 percent buying 2 to 20 million dollar businesses with seller financing, SBA loans and partner equity.
Starting from zero is for people with more energy than capital, and buy-then-build or roll-up has become standard. The point: you get rich by taking large risks with little money, and you stay rich by taking little risk with a lot of money.
7. They make fewer decisions
Every decision drains the same battery. You do not get rich by chasing a new opportunity every week but by waiting for the right one and throwing your full weight behind it. So the rich organize their lives to protect the energy, attention and capital they need when one or two big decisions show up, and everything else runs on autopilot, through technology or someone senior hired to make those calls.
Trading 500 dollars of stock every month feels like investing but is decision pollution, and that set and forget beats actively managed funds over the medium to long term. Its example is Bill Ackman in February 2020: he paid 27 million dollars in premiums on credit default swaps betting on a bond market crash and closed the position 30 days later for 2.6 billion, a 96x return. Later that year he bet 177 million on Treasury options and exited 18 months later with 1.25 billion in additional profit.
The point is that he made two trades in one year with his full conviction behind them. One step: pick the one big decision or goal that would change your trajectory, and focus on it.
6. Post-hustle, not lazy
For 15 years gurus have said to wake up at 5, grind harder and sleep when you are dead. The 1 percent is not anti-work but anti-looking-busy. Today, saying you sleep four hours a night reads as poor design, billionaires brag about sleep quality and CEOs protect their recovery like a board obligation.
Hustle culture, the view goes, is downstream of being poor, and that people still grinding 16-hour days are the ones who have not won yet. For the rich, the biggest lever is decision quality, not hours. Hustle was the price of admission, and once you are inside, the strategy changes. There is no nobility in suffering.
Do this: it takes about seven years on average to escape poverty and create life-changing wealth. Hustle as hard as you can to get there, but know that the biggest indicator of freedom is knowing enough money is coming next month and the month after.
5. Cash flow over enterprise value
Enterprise value on paper does not pay a mortgage. Companies worth a ton one week can be worth pennies the next, as the video says is happening to some disrupted by AI. The antidote is cash flow: money hitting your account every day, week and month, from companies that distribute cash quarterly, real estate with monthly rent, royalty and licensing deals, and boring businesses like laundromats, car washes, parking lots, storage facilities, mobile home parks, ATM routes and vending routes.
The richest people you do not know in your city probably own 6 to 12 of these, each throwing off 5,000 to 50,000 dollars a month, for 300,000 to 1 million a year gross. Compare a 2 million dollar boring business earning 400,000 a year, held for 20 years, with a startup that exits for 50 million. Cofounders sometimes walk away with about 1.2 million each after 5 to 10 years, which it calls 2.4 percent of the exit value.
The 1 percent has a name for the alternative: fake rich. That is a company worth 40 million on paper that you cannot sell, a startup with no personal liquidity, a house up in value while your lifestyle depends on debt, or looking successful while one bad quarter from panic. Takeaway: cash flow buys freedom.
4. Obsolete education
A private four-year college now costs over 250,000 dollars in tuition alone, north of 400,000 with room and board, and closer to 600,000 in after-tax earnings. The expected return on a degree outside the top 20 schools has been declining for 15 years, and in its words AI killed the only mass lucrative major.
So the 1 percent has been homeschooling, or doing what it calls parallel education, and when they want something formal they pick one of three routes:
- International boarding schools or universities with other rich kids, like Le Rosey in Switzerland at 130,000 dollars a year, where the network is the edge.
- Giving their kids the tuition money to buy and run a business, or arranging an apprenticeship with a family friend, for an applied MBA.
- New schools like Alpha, kindergarten to 11th grade at 1,500 dollars a week, where kids learn for two hours a day and spend the rest using AI and acquiring skills.
Most education prepares children to be accepted by institutions, while the 1 percent wants theirs to own, fund, influence or bypass them. What it teaches: optimize for who you want to become, not what you want to know.
3. International safe havens and bunkers
Public reporting suggests that tech billionaires own property in New Zealand, Hawaii and Miami. It says Larry Page bought New Zealand citizenship in 2021, Peter Thiel got his in 2011 after 12 days in the country, and Mark Zuckerberg’s Kauai compound includes a 5,000-square-foot underground structure. It adds that Rising S Company has built over 600 shelters in New Zealand and Vivos Group is building bunker communities in South Dakota.
For the next tier, the move is citizenship by investment: Vanuatu at 130,000 dollars, St. Kitts at 250,000 and Malta at 1 million, with Portugal’s Golden Visa shut down in 2025 after 500,000. Most wealthy Americans now hold at least one second passport, the video says, and the standard playbook is one for every adult and child.
It frames this as family planning, not paranoia: once you have enough to lose, stability becomes something you buy in advance, and they are preparing for the end of the assumption that their country stays stable. The takeaway for you: check whether your family has connections that could qualify you for a passport by descent.
2. They are cutting people out of their lives
The most expensive thing someone can abuse is access to you. The ultra-wealthy have cut more people out of their lives than the average person has met, and that pruning, not adding, is the discipline. It is often handled by assistants through what it calls a kill file: people the team will never connect them with, fired vendors, blacklisted former employees and relatives removed from the family office.
The categories include people who leak private information, those who always need rescuing, the unstable and drama-prone, chronic victims and status vampires. After a certain level, one bad person around you can cost a marriage, a deal, a reputation or your peace.
The flip side is that the relationships they keep are protected like assets. You show up for the funeral as well as the wedding, take care of their kid and call or send a gift on their birthday. The upshot: relationships compound, and the right people accelerate everything while the wrong ones tax it.
1. They invest through private channels
The public stock market is for the public, the video says, and this habit explains all the others. It cites Citi’s 2025 Global Family Office Report, which found that 70 percent of family offices engage in direct private investing, and Preqin data showing family office allocation to private markets rising more than 500 percent in under a decade. It claims the wealthiest 1 percent has shifted 40 to 60 percent of portfolios into alternatives.
In practice that means LP positions in 8 to 15 private funds, each requiring 1 to 25 million dollars per commitment, direct deals with founders they trust, pre-IPO secondaries through platforms like Forge and EquityZen, and family-office-to-family-office loans at 7 to 9 percent, fully collateralized. It also means private credit funds yielding 9 to 12 percent, as banks have pulled back from middle-market lending.
The list then ties together: the cash flow of number 5 funds the lifestyle, relationships generate deal flow, taste and judgment decide which deals get a yes, fewer decisions protect the bandwidth to evaluate them, salons are where introductions happen, coaches help avoid mistakes and even the bunkers are paid for by this engine.
It ends with a choice: spend the next decade hoping things change, or build the capital, network and judgment to be fine whatever comes.
Bonus: They don’t know how to be rich
The bonus says this comes from a deep fear of going broke again. In the video’s view, after a certain net worth life narrows into a small loop of expensive, repetitive choices: the same four schools, the same six vacation destinations and conversations about other rich people, real estate and health.
It argues the wealthy now invest in data centers rather than landmarks, unlike the Medici, who funded the Renaissance. It imagines 30 of the world’s 2,800 billionaires committing 5 million dollars a year each to fund 1,000 artists, composers and scientists for life, 150 million dollars a year they would never notice. It recalls Andrew Carnegie building 2,509 libraries with 60 million dollars in 1900, worth about 1.7 billion today.
The conclusion is that the math to fund a new Renaissance is small and that we need more beautiful things in the world.
What you can copy at your own scale
Not every habit scales down. Bunkers and private funds are out of reach for most people, but several are not: being deliberate with what you consume, paying for coaching, hosting a dinner, pruning your circle, making fewer and bigger decisions and valuing cash flow over paper wealth.
The central point is that the rich are optimizing for control. Start with the habits that give you more control over your attention, time and money.
FAQ
What habits do rich people have?
The list has 15, including prioritizing health, keeping a low profile, controlling their information diet, hiring coaches, favoring cash flow over paper wealth and investing through private channels.
Why do the wealthy hide their wealth now?
Extreme displays are no longer aspirational and can make the 1 percent a target. It points to executive security spending more than doubling at S&P 500 companies from 2022 to 2024.
What is a dark salon?
It is an invitation-only dinner at a home for six to twelve people, with phones in a basket and no photos or recordings, built to produce high-trust conversation and introductions.
What does fake rich mean?
It describes people whose wealth is on paper only: a company worth millions that they cannot sell, a startup with no personal liquidity, or a house that rose in value while their lifestyle depends on debt.
Which habit can anyone copy?
Paying for coaching is the most copyable habit, and suggests hosting a dinner, being intentional with consumption and focusing on one big decision as other starting points.
Keep reading
- 15 Daily Habits to Boost Your Intelligence
- 15 Investing Mistakes the Ultra-Wealthy Don’t Make
- 15 Things Poor People Think Rich People Do (That They Actually Don’t)
