If you’ve survived enough family office dinners, you already know how this starts: someone’s 23-year-old heir, fresh off a Web3 panel in Lisbon, leans across the foie gras and whispers: “Why don’t we DAO this thing?”

If you think a Rothko is art, you’ve never seen one stapled into a loan agreement. That’s the game. Culture doesn’t hang anymore - it leverages.

If you think Picassos hang in museums, you’ve clearly never been to a family office tax-planning session in Geneva.

Medieval art wasn’t decoration. It was balance-sheet armor. Gold leaf wasn’t about beauty. It was about liquidity. A

Fine dining isn’t gastronomy anymore. Ghost kitchens aren’t kitchens. And the chef you just wired a Series A check to? He’s a human SPAC waiting to be franchised in Qatar.

You can’t afford a two-bedroom in San Jose, but a 15-room French castle? That’s within reach if you’re brave, broke, and a little deranged.

They rent Lambos, yachts… even fake friends. All to pitch one fake fund. In Monaco, not all billionaires are real — but the scams absolutely are.

The only thing cheaper than a €1 home in Italy is the due diligence investors pretend they did before buying it.

Risk management is just PR until the tide goes out. Then it’s a margin call written in blood. You think your fund’s safe because your risk team built a pretty VAR model? Cute.

Welcome to the next version of Nigerian prince emails. Only now - the prince has a Delaware C-Corp, a fake OpenAI partnership, and a pitch deck that would make Sequoia sweat.

You could be depreciating drywall in Ohio. Or you could be sipping Sancerre in a 400-year-old estate while the French state pays for your new copper roof. Monument Historique tax breaks aren’t a rumor. They’re the cheat code for capital that wants ROI and rococo.

Remote work killed the office lease. It also created the most lucrative real estate arbitrage since ski-in/ski-out.”

Manila is in the middle of a $50B urban facelift — glass towers, skybridges, artificial islands, and malls big enough to have their own weather reports. 

A client once bought three Bangkok penthouses in 2021. He now rents them out to TikTokers for less than his parking garage makes in Lisbon.

A pension CIO once told me their ‘impact mandate’ included buying a warehouse full of used IKEA furniture. That fund did 11% IRR — outperforming their urban office exposure by 300 bps.

He moved to Bali to find purpose. He left with a parasitic infection and a $400 tax bill." Meanwhile, in Lisbon? They're giving out 10-year tax holidays like it's Nando's sauce samples.

You paid $10K for that ‘exclusive wine tasting’? That was tap water.

They bought a crumbling estate, filmed the leaks, and made $2M on ad revenue.

Allocators are hunting real yield in real assets. But they’re ignoring a not-so-sexy threat: Sovereign risk is back.

When Google starts buying warehouses in Warsaw, and Apple’s building in Jakarta… you’re not leasing space—you’re watching empire-building in real time.