À La Poubelle With the Gstaad Guy: Why Social Media Misleads People About Wealth

This is not a marketing note, and it is not the half-year review I usually sit down to write around this time. It is closer to a letter, because for months now a small discomfort has been following me around, and I would rather put it on paper than keep carrying it quietly. Every time I open social media and watch someone explain what wealthy people are supposedly like — where they ski, what they wear, which table they are sitting at — I feel slightly off. It is not that the content is always wrong. Sometimes it is funny, sometimes it is genuinely charming, and the Gstaad Guy works precisely because he exaggerates something that really does exist: the codes, the places, the accents, the whole theatre that surrounds money. But that is the heart of the problem. It is theatre, and theatre is the smallest, most flattering corner of a far larger and much less photogenic reality.

It is natural to fantasise a little about what it would be to be rich, the way the old ABBA song does it — if I had a little money, it’s a rich man’s world. I understand the pull of that. What I want to say, gently and from the inside, is that the picture being sold is mostly a costume, and that the people I actually work with rarely live inside it. In most cases they are not spending their winters skiing in Gstaad or their summers drifting between Positano, Monaco and the Côte d’Azur. They are working — hard, and far more than the people who envy them tend to imagine — inside their companies, their trusts and their families. It is not Disney World, and I think it does a quiet kind of harm to keep pretending that it is.

The money is not made where the cameras point

Of course these families travel. Of course some of them ski, and take beautiful holidays, and own a hotel in a glamorous jurisdiction or an apartment somewhere with a good view. That world is real and I am not pretending otherwise. But it is the place wealth is spent, not the place it is made, and the distance between those two things is larger than almost anyone scrolling realises. A great deal of serious money is created far away from the cities and summer destinations that headline the highlight reel — out in the business areas of the countryside, where the industry sits, in places where there is often no luxury to be seen for miles. Sometimes the money being spent in Monaco was made in a cold warehouse in the American Midwest. Sometimes the family staying in the five-star suite built it on a dusty industrial site outside a second-tier city, and sometimes the beautiful house in Europe was paid for by thirty difficult years in the desert of Ras Al Khaimah.

The numbers, for what they are worth, point the same way. Roughly two in three of the world’s billionaires built their fortunes rather than inherited them — about sixty-seven percent were self-made as of last year — and the fastest-rising category of wealth in 2025 was not anything you would find in a resort but industrial wealth, which grew more than twenty-seven percent to around 1.7 trillion dollars, a good quarter of it from people who were not rich a few years ago. Wealth is being made in factories and logistics corridors, on agricultural land, in energy and chemicals and construction and food distribution, in the thousands of unglamorous B2B businesses that no one will ever make a video about. And the founders behind them tend to work the way the surveys suggest founders work: fifty to sixty hours in a normal week, seventy to eighty in the years when everything is being built, with something like eighty-two percent of them admitting they lost sleep over the business in the past year. That is the part the camera never finds.

What the influencers are really selling, underneath the jokes, is a set of instructions — where you should be, what you should wear, where you should eat, which watch and which accent and which table mean you have arrived. It is consumerism dressed up as proximity to wealth, and the unspoken promise is that if you consume in the right way you are somehow closer to that world. But that is not how serious wealth is built, and it is certainly not how it is kept. The wealthiest person in a room is very often the quiet one in ordinary clothes, paying little attention to the performance, thinking about a supplier, a covenant, or a decision that has to be made by Monday.

If any of this is starting to sound like your own life rather than the one on your screen, that is rather the point — and it is the kind of thing worth talking through with someone who sees it all day.

Money is not made out of thin air

I want to be careful here, because I am not making the tired argument that wealth is simply the reward for working hard and everyone else is lazy. That is not true, and I have seen too much to believe it. Plenty of people work themselves into the ground and never become rich, and to be truly wealthy is almost always a combination of things — work, yes, but also timing, capital, the right network, the right country, and the uncomfortable truth that many people who get there were born a step or two ahead of everyone else to begin with. Money is rarely created out of thin air, and I would never insult the people who never caught the same wind. What I am saying is narrower and, I think, more useful: that the founders I sit with are usually carrying far more than the lifestyle would ever suggest, and that the weight does not stop when they go on holiday.

It follows them. A supplier goes quiet, a tax position turns awkward, a lawsuit appears, a liquidity decision cannot wait, a child makes it clear they have no intention of taking over, a competitor moves faster than expected, an investment that looked clever last year now looks strange. None of this shows up in a photograph, and none of it cares whether you happen to be standing on a yacht when it lands. That is the life behind the wealth, and it is why I wanted to write to you — because there are two things I keep wishing the people I work with had understood earlier, and a letter on our own website felt like the honest place to say them.

The first reason: succession

The first is succession, which is probably the hardest work I do, and the work that goes wrong most often when it is left too late. I have spent countless hours with families whose heirs grew up on the proceeds of an empire they never had to build — educated in the best universities, comfortable in the best cities, insulated by design from the years of risk and fear that created the money in the first place. That is not a criticism of those children; it is what every founder says they wanted for them. But it produces a strange and dangerous gap. The founder remembers the debt and the sleepless nights and the negotiations that nearly failed; the heir remembers the comfort. The founder remembers the risk; the heir remembers the result. And very often the heir will tell me, quite openly, that the industry their family is known for is simply not what they want for their own life — that they would rather take some time to reset themselves somewhere expensive in Bali, or travel the world with their friends for a while, than inherit a factory and a set of problems they never chose.

Some of that is entirely fair. Not every heir should run the family business, and forcing an unwilling child into an industry they resent has destroyed as many families as neglect ever has. But the family still needs a plan, because the real danger was never that the next generation might spend the money. The real danger is that they never come to understand what the money represents — that the company becomes “the thing my father built,” the assets become “family money,” and the advisors become “the people who handle things,” until one day the whole structure is being carried by people who never learned why it matters. That is the moment continuity breaks, and it is why I keep saying that succession is not really the transfer of assets at all. It is the transfer of context, of judgement, of responsibility, of memory — and you cannot hand any of that over in the week before you retire. It has to be built slowly, with conversations before the crisis, education before the inheritance, governance before the conflict, and exposure before responsibility.

The reason I am so insistent about timing is that the base rate is genuinely unforgiving. Something on the order of 124 trillion dollars is expected to change hands by 2048, most of it through exactly this fragile moment of succession, and the long-running studies are blunt about what usually happens next: roughly seventy percent of families lose the wealth by the second generation, and around ninety percent by the third. The figure is directional, and people argue about it at the edges, but the direction is not in dispute — and what drives the losses is almost never the markets. It is unprepared heirs, broken communication and missing structure. I have written more fully about the human side of this in Family governance and the next generation, and about how much harder it becomes when the wealth is tied up in land, operating companies and physical assets in Land, physical assets and succession; the work itself sits at the centre of how we think about family governance and education.

If there is an unspoken succession question sitting in your own family, the most valuable thing you can do is bring it into the open early, with someone whose whole job is to hold it with you.

The second reason: to calm you down

The second reason is quieter and more personal, and it is simply to reassure you — the founder, the principal, the person who built something real and now carries the weight of it. Please do not panic if you did not go to the Formula 1 in Monaco this year, if you do not have a yacht, and if you are not planning to disappear to some paradise in the Pacific. It is completely normal if, on a Sunday afternoon, you find yourself not relaxing at all but turning over the investment that still has not performed the way it was promised, the new competitor quietly eating into your industry, the supplier who cannot deliver because he is stuck in a tax dispute with the authorities, or the question of artificial intelligence that everyone keeps putting in your ear — whether you should be throwing yourself into it or waiting calmly for the bubble to burst. If that is your Sunday, you are not behind and you are not failing. You are simply in the large majority of founders who lose sleep over the business, and what you are feeling is not weakness. It is what real wealth actually feels like from the inside, which is to say: responsibility.

People assume money removes pressure. In my experience it mostly changes the kind of pressure. The questions stop being “can I afford this” and start being “what happens if I decide wrong, what happens if my children are not ready, what happens if I am no longer here to hold it together.” You can have a great deal of money and still feel exposed; be widely admired and still feel alone; be surrounded by advisors and still feel that not one of them can see the whole of your situation at once. None of that is the world social media is selling you. But it is the world a great many wealthy people live in, and there is no shame in it whatsoever.

What we actually do, when the cameras are off

For some of the people I work with — friends, really, though you may prefer the word clients — I am closer to a psychologist or a priest than a financial advisor. I am the person they can call to say the things they cannot say anywhere else: I am in trouble. My family hates me. I have no idea what to do next. And what I have learned is that the problem which arrives sounding like the end of the world is almost never as large as it feels in the moment — not because it is imaginary, but because it is unstructured, floating around one person’s head at three in the morning with no shape, no owner and no order. The work, once the trust is there, is almost boringly methodical. We listen properly, without rushing to fix anything. We separate the emotion from the facts, because most of the panic lives in the gap between the two. We find the problem underneath the problem. We gather the few people who can actually move it, map the real options, challenge the assumptions everyone had stopped questioning, and decide what has to happen now, what can wait, and what was never real to begin with. By the end, the thing that looked enormous has usually shrunk back into a small detail — and we have done, as the Gstaad Guy would say, à la poubelle with it. Into the bin: not the family, not the business, but the noise, the false urgency and the comparison that made it all feel so heavy.

That instinct — to take fragmented advice and a frightened founder and turn it into one coherent picture — is the whole of what I built PWA to do, and I have described the discipline behind it at greater length in What is wealth advisory and Private Wealth Advisory explained. Because in the end this is the thing I most want you to take from the letter: wealth is not a lifestyle. The lifestyle is, at best, one possible output of it. Wealth itself is a system — the businesses and the assets and the liabilities, the people and the advisors and the taxes, the banks, the properties, the risks, the family history and the reputation and the succession, all of it connected and all of it requiring someone to hold the whole. When that system is strong, the money buys you freedom. When it is weak, the same money buys you anxiety, no matter how good the photographs look. A family can own a great deal and still be fragile, and a founder can have all the liquidity in the world and still feel trapped. Building the smallest version of that system that actually works is something I have written about in The Minimum Viable Family Office, and the structuring beneath it is the core of our wealth planning and structuring work.

So enjoy the jokes, the characters and the absurdity; enjoy the occasional Gstaad reference, because some of it really is funny. Just do not mistake the costume for the life. The serious money is almost never built in the places where it is later displayed — it is built in the work nobody sees, and it is preserved through the conversations most people would rather avoid. If you are carrying more than the highlight reel will ever show, the first step is not a yacht or a better photograph. It is having someone sit with you, see the whole picture, and turn the noise into a set of decisions you can actually live with.

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Pedro Souto is the founder of PWA — Private Wealth Advisory. He works with UHNW founders, families, and single-family offices to build an independent operating system around complex wealth — combining markets, analytics, technology, and governance to turn fragmented advice into one coherent picture.