Jul 20, 2021
by
Morgan Housel
Wealth is easy to measure but hard to value.
When George Vanderbilt moved into Biltmore – the largest home in America at 178,000 square feet – one newspaper in 1899 wondered what the point was.
The goals of the country’s richest during the Gilded Age, it said, seemed to be “devoting themselves to pleasure regardless of expense.” But often they got the reverse: “Devotion to expense regardless of pleasure.”
George didn’t spend much time in the 250-room mansion which, by the time he died, had nearly bankrupted him.
Twenty years before Biltmore was constructed, the
New York Daily Tribune wrote that “The Vanderbilt money is certainly bringing no happiness to its present claimants.”