Remember that real estate is about three things: location, location, and location. You bribe your way into tax abatements for luxury condos basically anywhere, but there's currently no way to bribe someone to move Central Park, the museums and arts centers and all the restaurants and other New-York-specific stuff that actually attracts people to within a few blocks of your cheap-tax-rate tower in Wyoming.

Hmm, your fun fact (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_the_numb...) is fun, I agree, but also misleading.

According to the above link, Oklahoma has 5 billionaires, Oregon has 2, Ohio has 4. New York, at #4 per capita, has 88; California has 111. The "surprise" is mostly due to low counts.

For any process (like wealth) with large extremes, if you subdivide it into bins, you are going to get local extrema just due to low counts. The only mildly informative thing is Oklahoma (oil and gas). Ohio is a few elderly (ages 77, 74, 70) manufacturing folks -- their count seems to have dipped to 3, according to http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/#version:static_sear..., which would remove Ohio from the top 3 per capita.

> the states with the most billionaires per capita are... Oklahoma, Oregon, and Ohio. New York comes in at #4.

In residence, perhaps.

Yet how many own a pied-à-terre in New York, while residing primarily elsewhere?

> Wouldn't another city just adopt similar systems and over time start to attract billionaires?

They're willing to pay $100 million for apartments that'd probably go for a tenth or less of that in any other city. Let's not pretend having to pay a bit more tax is going to drive them to live in Tulsa. The prestige of living in NYC is the main draw, I'd imagine.

These are the richest of the richest people anywhere. They live where they want to live. A billionaire doesn't move his whole existence across the country to save 10 million dollars in taxes.

But they don't even need to do that, in this instance.

The article stated $17k tax on a $100M (market value) condo. Assuming the buyer pays in cash, the property retains its value, and ignoring the condo fees, that person is paying $1417 a month for the option of living in one of the most prestigious places in the world.

I'm not an expert on housing costs in NYC, but that seems like a pretty good deal.

That's flawed logic, as it's $100M + $1417/mo.

If you asked me if I wanted to rent that place for $1417 I would absolutely say yes. But I don't happen to have $100M lying around.

The wealth moves from $100M in cash to $100M in ultralux NYC condo. Absent some event that diminishes the value of ultralux NYC condos, the only real sacrifice is in liquidity. It's harder to spend a condo if you need to.

When you can pay cash for everything, the budgetary math is more oriented around periodic cash flows. Taxes and insurance and depreciation become monthly accounting expenses that have to be paid from monthly incomes. The actual sale price of the place is almost irrelevant.

What if you had so much money that you have already bought everything you ever wanted? Keeping it all is now just a matter of keeping the monthly expenses below the monthly incomes.

You still have to have at least a decent amount of that $100MM in cash to start with.

Yes. Yes, you do. But you also need to buy a Costco membership to shop there.

Having money makes it easier to save money, even on a much smaller scale.

If you can pay cash for your commuter car, you pay $15000. If you get a 48-month loan at 5%, you pay 10.5% more total over those 4 years. That additional expense is not added to the resale price of the car.

If you can pay cash for your house, you pay $250000. If you get a 360-month loan at 5%, you pay 93% more total over those 30 years. That additional cost is not added to the value of the property.

Loan interest is an expense that is consumed. It does not return to you as equity in any asset. Rent and taxes are similar, in that the money you pay does not return to you as retained value. They are gone, in the same way that a cake that is eaten cannot be saved for later.

If you're rich, you can establish an accident liability escrow account instead of buying car driver's insurance. You can effectively self-insure with a risk pool of one person. The money in the escrow account still earns interest. Not only do the people who do that not pay premiums, which are lost, they can keep all their money, and even pay themselves a little extra, for not causing accidents. But if they have one, no big deal. They pay for the damage, then top up the escrow account. Their premiums do not increase.

All you need to save money is to be rich. So simple. Everyone should do it, right?

That's what the extreme frugality crowd does. If you drastically reduce your living expenses, you can save more rapidly, and begin to take advantage of the lowered expense opportunities available to people with lots of savings, such as the incredibly simple elimination of all loan interest payment expenses. And that allows you to save more.

And the calculations don't care about how much you earn. The only thing that matters is what proportion of your income you can save, and how much your savings can return in excess of inflation.

But you can't just become rich by doing the things that rich people do. They already have their rich people membership cards; their discounts are not yet available to you. You have to get rich first, then do those things to stay rich or become richer.

Many (most?) of these people don't even live in these apartments. In fact, developers actually use this as an argument in favor of new construction - it won't put any more pressure on local infrastructure, because no one will live here.

The article quotes Michael Bloomberg as saying "If we can find a bunch of billionaires around the world to move here, that would be a godsend". But is attracting billionaires to your city a good thing? I can imagine it would be if they paid their taxes and contributed to the local economy, not just themselves but via their companies and personnel. But the article suggests in many cases they don't, i.e. they pay lower taxes and barely visit let alone invest outside the property market.

In order for it to work, it has to be a place that billionaires would want to be at in the first place. Something like this isn't going to work in the middle of nowhere, for example.