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Rosenweis exacted from New York City by threatening to build STST’s new global headquarters across the Hudson in New Jersey. That is a lot of money, if you translate it into teachers’ salaries, or infrastructural improvements, or health-care assets, or poor kids’ school meals, or fixing up public housing.
    I know from my Maecenas work that the rich always threaten to take their money elsewhere if they don’t get what they want. Frankly, I think it’s all a big bluff. What’s the point of having all that money if you can’t live where you want, do business where you want? Restaurants you want to eat in, where there are servitors and sycophants to bow and scrape, where there are the sort of people you think your money qualifies you to hang out with, where there’s what the immortal F. Scott calls the consoling proximity of other millionaires? But the bluff is never called. It’s other side that always folds, the side playing with taxpayers’ dollars. And why not? It isn’t their money; more importantly, when the time comes to leave public service, quote unquote, favors get returned in the form of lucrative Wall Street employment.
    Let me make clear how I personally think about money. Think about it morally, if you will. It’s a tricky part of my business and frequently requires fairly agile rhetorical footwork.
    Frankly, I keep my thoughts on the subject of wealth and its concomitants to myself. Perhaps that’s a bit cowardly, but I have a living to make. We live in an age that worships money and has forced it into every crack and cranny of existence. Nothing is examined, nothing is evaluated, nothing is thought about without attention being devoted to its pecuniary aspects. Professionally, I respect money; I appreciate what it can make happen; 99 percent of my work at one stage or another involves wealthy people, and I have totake into account
their
attitudes toward
their
money, which tend on the whole to be pretty worshipful and not always attractive.
    But I will never become rich, because I lack that love of money that is essential to attaining or maintaining great wealth. In the chapels of my soul, I have built no altars to Mammon. When asked by someone I trust with my confidences whether I wish I were as rich as so-and-so, I usually answer, “Not really—because then I would have to
be
so-and-so,” and leave it at that.
    I can say fairly that my business is a success. Between family offices, wealth managers, sovereign funds, humongous overseas investors, and nonfinancial corporations, there’s more business out there than was ever dreamt of in my initial philosophy. Take my two Russian clients, who until Putin came in had a net worth of zero and are now worth billions. People tend to be snotty about them, but you have to put yourself in their brand-new bespoke driving shoes. How would you handle it if on Tuesday you were scrabbling for crusts in the dumpsters of Moscow and on Thursday, thanks to your friend Vladimir, you controlled all the phosphate in Russia and were booking a suite at the Ritz in Paris and leafing through books of yacht designs and Gulfstream configurations. The adjustment must be traumatic, like PTSD.
    My clients don’t complain about my fees: a monthly retainer cancelable on ninety days’ notice, plus an hourly charge of $300 an hour for me, less than that for my senior associates. I employ roughly a dozen people. I give them their heads, pretty much, and pay them decently, usually with a nice bonus. School and college taught me to be a team player, with morale and leadership the captain’s responsibility.
    I do well enough. This year on the basis of projects in hand and my existing client base I may bring down a half-million dollars-plus to the annual bottom line after paying myself $450K for personal living and taxes. That’s plenty for me. “Sniff at” moneyon Wall Street, I know, but very good pay for work I enjoy and that gratifies me, that allows me to see marvelous