America’s super-rich believe extravagant personalities such as Donald Trump and Paris Hilton are giving them a bad name, according to a wide-ranging survey of the country’s wealthiest families.
The study, which focused on 500 families with average liquid net assets of $28m (€23.3m, £15.8m), found 69 per cent of respondents thought wealthy people were portrayed negatively or somewhat negatively in the media. Sixty-two per cent felt they were “under assault” in the media.
Jim Taylor, a former chief executive of Yankelovich, a market research firm, who co-directed the Worth-Taylor Harrison survey, said the public image of wealth was at odds with the predominantly middle-class backgrounds of a new generation of rich Americans who built their fortunes as entrepreneurs in the 1980s and 1990s.
“They perceive the media to be dominated by images of indulgent and criminal wealth – from Donald Trump and Paris Hilton to Bernie Ebbers,” he said. “They have really strong feelings about the extent to which they are under assault.”
Mr Taylor and Doug Harrison, who worked on the project with support from CurtCo Publishing’s Worth magazine, argued the survey reflected the largely entrepreneurial and middle class background of a majority of the respondents, 81 per cent of whom had become wealthy in the past 15 years.
“They hate the word luxury because this class represents the triumph of the American middle class . . . luxury offends against their notion of who they are,” said Mr Taylor.
Only 8 per cent of those surveyed said they came from wealthy or affluent backgrounds, while 81 per cent said that they would still describe themselves “as middle class at heart”.