With or without playing cards, the Palm Beach Society continues

The last thing you can see in the sky on the evening of February 28th was mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune stacked up until 2040.

A different kind of unusual sight was underway, far below the celestial conga line on the narrow barrier island of Florida. Many of the world's wealthiest people gathered in sunny wall tents for the annual dinner dance hosted by the Palm Beach Conservation Foundation. With so many heeled guests in one place, the scene resembles a billionaire mosh pit.

There stood among the creeping grape plants and spiked agave plants, Robert Wood Johnson IV, owner of the New York Jets and former ambassador to St. James' Court.

There, investor Peter Soros is a Cuban-born couple whose family-run sugar cane farms spread on 190,000 Florida acres, chatting with Pepe and Emilia Vanjul, whose annual Christmas card in the form of a directory, the basic documents of social life in Palm Beach.

And in the chic white column dress was Aerinloader, a businesswoman who, former chairman of Esti Lauder, had nearly $200 million down two waterfront lots in Palm Beach. Unlike guests whose wealth has been newly minted into technology, healthcare, banking, entertainment and logistics, Lauder came in the old fashioned way. She inherited it.

If it's true that the rich are always with us, then that's also the case today they aren't that often among us. American Super Rich is increasingly sliding the presence of frictionless passages from such gated communities to private jets, yachts and island enclaves, home to Donald J. Trump since 1985.

Palm Beach on the mainland is easy to forget, and is an island. Long before the 45th and 47th Presidents made many of them into intermittent, high-security zones, their isolation addressed local awareness. Anyone who visits will inevitably become the wrong side of the water when one of the three Bassur drawbridges is awake.

The profit, a highlight of the social season, took place in Bradley Park, a sloppy public space, before the Preservation Foundation gave it a $2.7 million glow in 2017.

According to Forbes, the wealthiest of that number managed around $5.4 trillion in 2024, with at least $58 trillion having homes in Palm Beach. One of these, Julia Koch, has an estimated $74 billion fortune, making her the second wealthiest woman in the United States. Seven other major league sports teams belonging to this group. And one is the president.

Even before he became the dominant figure in American political life, Trump was rarely spotted at Palm Beach Society events, said one guest, designer Stephen Stolman.

“In my years of life and work at Palm Beach, I've never seen Donald Trump shop at a local store, eat at a restaurant, or take part in a cultural or charity event outside of his facility,” said Stolman, who lived on the island 30 years ago before sending his packages to Palm Springs, California, a state where the state's right shift is blue.

Other guests who don't want to be quoted by name when discussing with the president said that old Palm Beach security guards kept a careful distance from Trump, at least until he returned to the country's best office. Now they're now accepting that he's here.

His second administration brought a significant change to the chatter tenors of the local party. Just as many of the president's critics remain silent in Washington, members of the Palm Beach Society said they are keeping their own ideas about politics. Even at private dinners, conversations tend to be cautious and cautious.

Instead, it is much safer to disrupt social discourse about the different species types of Palm Beach, from the old-fashioned Blue Blood to Panus. To these inexplicable topics of Idol Chicchit, calculating wealth metrics has been added as a kind of parlor game.

“The saying goes, always to come to Palm Beach thinking you're old and rich,” said Robin Gillen, a former San Franciscon who moved to Palm Beach six years ago. “Then you come here and realize you're not one.”

After all, funny money is always fun to talk about – Zero marching towards Google is all abstract enough to look cartoonish. At least that's what it looked like at the Habitat for Humanity charity cocktail party held on March 2nd on the lawns of La Forin, an Italian Renaissance-style mansion not too far from Mar Arago.

La Follia is the former home of Broadway producer Terry Allen Kramer, an investment heir who was an avid supporter of Trump and his wife Melania's best friend until his death in 2019. The new owner, hedge fund billionaire and Republican donor Kenneth Griffin, has lent the use of the property to nonprofits building and improving economically disadvantaged homes.

One such person was Teawannathir. The two single mothers moved to their own coral-colored Habitat for Humanity Home in West Palm Beach a while ago. In a floral dress, Thiel, 34, stood on Bayes green grass in a crowd fitted with patchwork madras and resort pastels. If guests were financially slightly less than they would benefit from the Preservation Foundation a few nights ago, they nevertheless exuded an aura of money guarantee.

In this environment, it's easy to lose sight of the reality that Palm Beach County has a grasp of the housing crisis. Crossing the bridge the previous morning, many homeless people lined up outside the cyclone fencing around Curry Park in West Palm Beach for food bank giveaways.

The economic distances for Mr. Thiel and some of the guests on the Habitat for Humanity Benefit, which won $100,000, appeared to correspond to countless miles separating Earth from one of the stacked planets. But she said she had no ill will towards people in the billionaire class.

“For me, this place represents a long amount of money. It's money that makes your own money,” Thiel said. “I don't look around and think, 'You can't achieve this.' I looked around and said, “This is gold. This is a dream.”