Welcome to DIY Rich Guy Fantasy Camp | Canada Voices

There’s this thing happening. Let’s call it DIY Rich Guy Fantasy Camp. It goes like this:

A very wealthy person reveres a certain field for which they have some amateur ability, but not nearly enough to get them to the top shelf on their own. So they pay to play, buying access to an experience that’s normally available only to a tiny rarefied circle.

It’s like those passes that allow you to skip the line at Disney – but if your pockets are deep enough and your imagination broad enough, it applies to the entire world.

In late June, wealthy entrepreneur and untrained conductor Mandle Cheung paid roughly $550,000 to lead the Toronto Symphony Orchestra at Roy Thomson Hall in a performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” symphony. Some of the musicians were unhappy about it and worried that the orchestra’s reputation could be dented by performing a complicated piece of music under an amateur’s baton.

A few weeks later, billionaire Bill Ackman competed in – and was swiftly eliminated from – a professional tennis tournament by partnering with a retired pro who held a wild-card entry.

“I feel like maybe it’s one and done,” Ackman – a major donor to the International Tennis Hall of Fame, which hosted the tournament – told The New York Times after the match. “But I figured one, in my life, that seemed fair.”

Also this summer, Jeff Bezos basically rented out the city of Venice as though his multiday wedding extravaganza was the Biennale, inspiring furious protests in the process.

Private space tourism, still in its toddler phase, seems destined to become the next frontier in cultural flexing: For the right price, you can play astronaut(ish) for a day and come home in possession of an edge-of-the-world perspective that was once confined to a cadre of elite recruits.

But, sometimes, there are brutal limits to what imagination, money or hubris allows.

The Titan submersible was supposed to ferry passengers to the inky grave of the Titanic – for US$250,000 each – but instead imploded in horrifying fashion in 2023, killing all five people aboard. And every spring, there are stories about the sometimes deadly pursuit of Mount Everest by those who pay outfitters and guides to get them to the top of the world.

So what is all of this exactly?

It might just be an elaborate version of a truth so obvious it hardly bears saying: Being rich gives you access to a different world than mere mortals. Elite schools, first-class travel, living inside a daydream – sure, why not?

Maybe this is just a gold-plated, bespoke version of one of those fantasy camps in which anyone can pay a few thousand dollars to take batting practice with a big-league club. (See also: Mark Carney invoking prime ministerial privilege to skate with his beloved Edmonton Oilers – and produce weapons-grade Canadian political advertising – soon after assuming office.)

So does that mean any of us would do this if we could? That thing you wanted to be or do more than anything on earth when you were 8 or 17 or 30 years old – if you could see a way to inhabit that for a few hours, would you?

There’s a raft of research that suggests that’s not the case, that there is something distinct about the way the wealthy see the world and their place in it.

Paul K. Piff, a psychology professor at the University of California at Irvine, has done extensive work on how social hierarchy and inequality shapes the way people behave. He’s had research subjects play a rigged Monopoly-type game and found that people who play with more cash in hand and the rules on their side behave aggressively. And when they (invariably) win, they attribute it to their good decisions and not luck.

He’s also found that people who drive more expensive cars are more likely to break the law and keep driving through crosswalks. And in a host of other experiments, he’s documented that upper-class people are more prone to entitlement and narcissism, and to self-interested behaviours in their interactions with others.

“The wealthier you are, the more likely you are, in various ways, to prioritize your own needs, your own goals, your own desires, your own interests, above the interests of other people,” Piff explained recently on the podcast of the American Psychological Association.

His research team has also compared people who were born wealthy with those who made their own fortunes, examining which group is more empathetic. It’s intuitive to think that self-made rich people would be more willing to help others in tough circumstances because they’ve been there, he explained on the podcast, but their findings were the opposite.

“Those that had earned their wealth had a certain story they could tell, and the story that they could tell was one of deservingness,” Piff said. “Because I experienced upward mobility, I know it’s possible to be upwardly mobile, so I feel deserving of that wealth that I now have.”

And in terms of what to do with that justified wealth, DIY Rich Guy Fantasy Camp is not a new invention.

Across all of Carnegie Hall’s storied history, one of the most popular requests from its archives is the program from a 1944 vocal recital delivered by Florence Foster Jenkins. The wealthy socialite adored music and used her money to book various New York venues, becoming a howling cultural phenomenon, despite the fact that she could not, by any common understanding of the term, sing.

And in a remarkable similarity to Cheung’s quest with the TSO, businessman and publisher Gilbert Kaplan was captivated by the same Gustav Mahler symphony and finagled dozens of amateur gigs conducting it with major orchestras around the world, starting in the 1980s and stretching on for decades.

“Much has been written about Kaplan’s passion for Mahler’s great symphony as if this emotion is unique to him,” trombonist David Finlayson wrote in 2008 after he performed with the New York Philharmonic under Mr. Kaplan’s baton. “This assertion is an insult to all professional musicians who have dedicated their entire lives and have sacrificed much toward the preservation of all the great works of history’s finest composers.”

Along those lines, USA Today sports columnist Dan Wolken excoriated Ackman’s blink-and-you-missed-it pro tennis career for “indulging his sports fantasy while making a mockery of the tournament and the ATP Challenger Tour where players strive to eke out a living.”

This is what inspires more fury than eye-rolling in response to some of these pursuits.

It’s the sense that money and a certain type of ambition allows someone to skip a long line of people who have shed blood, sweat and tears to earn their mastery. Or – a few shades darker – the idea that for the right price, someone can co-opt the legitimate professionals and institutions standing in their rightful places in that line, and force them to them play house.

A variation on this, as with Bezos’s wedding, is the ick of a wealthy person who wants to possess – even temporarily – something that does not belong to them, something that should not belong to anyone, because it belongs to all of us.

We all agree, in some unstated but real way, that the city of Venice is magic on Earth, and that to perform in a major urban orchestra or compete in a pro tennis tournament or fly to space says something special about a person’s abilities. Of course we all agree on that rarity and reverence: There would be no reason for a wealthy person to want a piece of it for themselves if we didn’t.

Rich Guy Fantasy Camp feels wrong because it’s a cheat code for the one thing you’re not supposed to be able to buy or hoard, no matter how much money you have: wonder.

Will Cockrell begins his book Everest, Inc. with some startling accounting about the rarity of a certain kind of towering achievement. Between 1953, when the first climbers reached the peak of Mount Everest, and 1992, when the first paid and guided expedition got there, 394 climbers summitted. And between that point and 2024, more than 11,500 others followed.

Precisely because reaching the summit has become less rare, the author says fewer people now do it for status or expect to buy their way there. He argues that the experience demands so much from a person that there are no real dilettantes at the top of the world anyway.

“Doing something like training for Everest and then spending two months climbing it, it’s almost impossible not to be changed by that experience,” Cockrell said.

He dislikes the notion of questioning who “belongs” on the world’s highest mountain. With any of these rarefied experiences, he believes the better question is, “Who is it hurting?”

I would argue that when our shared daydreams – the great big things in the world that we all worship like children, still – become plunderable by a lucky few, the answer to that question is: all of us.

A couple of days after his TSO performance, when I spoke to Cheung, the smile he couldn’t wipe off his face was audible through the phone line.

“I feel so happy,” he said. “One of the people I work with keeps telling me, ‘You look so happy, Mandle, you look so happy.’”

It was a fascinating conversation because of what he didn’t say. He didn’t justify the concert by claiming he was trying to boost the profile of classical music or support the orchestra. He didn’t insist he had worked independently toward mastery – he freely admits he was “too lazy” to learn piano as a kid and can’t read sheet music now, but simply follows the rise and fall of the instruments.

“I fully understand their frustration,” Cheung said of the unrest among some TSO musicians. “They work half their lives, this is their career, they are professional musicians and they play in one of the best orchestras in Canada or beyond. And then some guy who’s not musically trained comes in and wants to write a cheque to the Toronto Symphony and then come and conduct?”

I asked him how he answers their frustrations – or whether he ever worries that by being able to pay for such an experience, he might hurt the very thing he loves. His responses focused on his preparation – he employs an orchestra of freelance musicians, called Mandle Philharmonic, with whom he’s practised and performed for several years – and the fact that the TSO performance went smoothly.

Cheung was, frankly, disarmingly straightforward and human about it all. What it amounts to is that he loves classical music and this piece in particular, and he could afford to make this happen, so he did, and it had made him very happy.

“It’s not a dream come true, it’s a fantasy come true,” he said. He explained the distinction: A fantasy is a dream that is simply never going to be real. Until it is.

Next he wants to talk to the New York Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra or the Berlin Philharmonic to see whether he can do something with them, now that he’s proven himself in Toronto.