The most “defensive” real estate in 2025 isn’t offices, isn’t multifamily, and isn’t the industrial you see on billboards — it’s the niche stuff you can’t tour without a safety vest, a lab waiver, or a neighbor complaint. Cold storage. Bio labs. Creative space.

Jets are not toys. They are not businesses. They are capital-intensive mobility instruments that punish delusion and reward structure.

In 2024, the cleanest exits some family offices had were not IPOs, not secondaries, not tender offers — but handbags. Not companies. Not tokens. Bags.

Let’s skip the pleasantries and begin with an obscenity: “In 2024, more global wealth flowed into heritage estates than into early-stage venture capital.”

Let me begin with a small crime: In the kingdom of alternatives, the quietest cash flow is the one nobody wants you to look at, because they’re already eating it.

Buying a case of Château Lafite and forgetting the cellar is like hiding gold in a cardboard box. We’ve all heard it: “Fine wine is a passion asset, a hedge, an uncorrelated alternative.”

FROM SAWLOGS TO CARBON CREDITS: WHY SMART ALLOCATORS ARE BUYING FORESTS AS CLIMATE HEDGES

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.