Even Millionaires Can’t Stay
I heard a story about Berlin’s wealthiest neighborhood, Grunewald, where the villas sit massive and old and expensive, the kind of place you’d think was untouchable. Turns out billionaires are buying them up, pushing out the millionaires who’d been there for decades. The wealthy have finally discovered what everyone else already knew: if you have something someone richer wants, you’re not going to keep it.
I found the whole thing weirdly satisfying, in a bitter way. Not because I care about millionaires losing property—they’ll be fine. But because it’s so perfectly logical. Gentrification doesn’t stop at some magic threshold of wealth. It doesn’t get more humane the richer you are. It just keeps going, pushing everyone up the chain until someone with deeper pockets shows up and you’re moving again.
I’ve watched it happen in every city. The pattern’s always the same: artists move to cheap neighborhoods, investors notice, prices climb, artists get pushed out to the suburbs, young professionals move in, those prices climb too, and eventually even the people who thought they’d finally made it enough money end up looking at moving vans. It’s a machine that never stops, just keeps churning upward through the tax brackets.
The dark part is how we only call it a problem when it affects people we think deserve better. Working-class families displaced from Kreuzberg or Friedrichshain—that’s gentrification, that’s worth talking about. Millionaires losing their villas to billionaires? That’s just the market, that’s just how it works. Same mechanism, same displacement, same cruelty. Just a different number of zeros, which apparently changes the whole moral weight of it.
I don’t have energy for sympathizing with millionaires watching their real estate portfolios shrink. But I do get something from the symmetry of it—the inescapability, the way greed never runs out of people richer than you, the way there’s always another level you can’t reach. It’s not a lesson about anything. It’s just how it is. The cycle keeps spinning, and everyone thinks they’re finally safe until someone taller walks in.