Just barely visible in the evening sky on Feb. 28 was an exceptional planetary alignment, with Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune all stacked up in a row for the last time until 2040.
Far below the celestial conga line, on a slender barrier island on Florida’s east coast, another kind of rare spectacle was underway. Many of the world’s wealthiest people had gathered in a clear-walled tent for the annual dinner dance hosted by the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach. With so many well-heeled guests in one place, the scene resembled a billionaire mosh pit.
There, among the creeping vines and spiked agave plants, stood Robert Wood Johnson IV, the pharmaceuticals heir, owner of the New York Jets and former ambassador to the Court of Saint James.
There, the financier Peter Soros was chatting with Pepe and Emilia Fanjul, the Cuban-born couple whose family-owned sugar cane farms sprawl across 190,000 Florida acres and whose annual Christmas card, in the form of a directory, is a foundational document of Palm Beach social life.
And there, in a chic white column dress, was Aerin Lauder, the businesswoman whose cousin, William, a former chair of Estée Lauder, recently unloaded two waterfront lots in Palm Beach for nearly $200 million. Unlike those guests whose fortunes had been newly minted in technology, health care, banking, entertainment or logistics, Ms. Lauder came by hers the old-fashioned way. She inherited it.
If it is true that the rich are always with us, it is also the case that nowadays they are less often among us. Increasingly, the American superrich glide through their existences in friction-free passage from gated communities to private jets, yachts and island enclaves like this one, a home base for Donald J. Trump since 1985.
Palm Beach, mainlanders tend to forget, is an island. Long before the 45th and 47th president had rendered much of it an intermittent high-security zone, its insularity worked itself into the local consciousness. Anyone who visits will inevitably end up on the wrong side of the water when one of the three bascule drawbridges is up.
The benefit, a highlight of the social season, took place at Bradley Park, a scruffy public space before the Preservation Foundation gave it a $2.7 million glow-up in 2017. And it provided an unusual opportunity to observe in its natural habitat a subset of the world’s 3,000-plus billionaires.
Of that number, the 400 wealthiest, according to Forbes, controlled roughly $5.4 trillion in 2024, and at least 58 have homes in Palm Beach. One of these, Julia Koch, has an estimated fortune of $74 billion, making her the second richest woman in the United States. Seven others belonging to this group own major league sports teams. And one is the president.
Even before he became a dominant figure in American political life, Mr. Trump was seldom, if ever, to be found at Palm Beach society events, said one of the guests, the designer Steven Stolman.
“In all my years of living and working in Palm Beach, not once did I see Donald Trump shopping in a local store, dining in a restaurant or attending a cultural or charity event outside of his own facilities,” said Mr. Stolman, who lived on the island for three decades before the state’s rightward shift sent him packing to Palm Springs in blue-state California.
Other guests, who did not want to be quoted by name when discussing the president, said that Palm Beach’s old guard had maintained a wary distance from Mr. Trump, at least until he returned to the nation’s highest office. Now they have come to accept that he is here to stay.
His second administration has led to a notable shift in the tenor of local party chatter. Just as many of the president’s critics have gone silent in Washington, members of Palm Beach society said the they have been keeping their thoughts about politics to themselves. Even at private dinners, conversation tends to be cautious and circumspect.
It is far safer, instead, to confine social discourse to banter about the various species of Palm Beach resident, from old-money blue bloods to parvenus. To these imperishable topics of idle chitchat, calculating the metrics of wealth has been added as a kind of parlor game.
“The adage always was that you come to Palm Beach thinking you’re old and rich,’’ said Robin Gillen, a former San Franciscan who relocated to Palm Beach six years ago. “Then you get here and realize you’re neither.”
Funny money, after all, is always fun to talk about — all those zeros marching toward googol are so abstract as to seem cartoonish. At least it appeared so at a charity cocktail party for Habitat for Humanity held March 2 on the lawn of La Follia, an Italian Renaissance-style mansion not far from Mar-a-Lago.
La Follia is the former home of Terry Allen Kramer, an investment heiress and Broadway producer who, until her death in 2019, was an avid supporter of Mr. Trump and close friend of his wife, Melania. The new owner, the hedge fund billionaire and Republican Party donor Kenneth Griffin, had lent the use of the property to a nonprofit that builds and improves housing for the economically disadvantaged.
One such person was Teawanna Teal, a single mother of two who not long ago moved into her own coral-colored Habitat for Humanity home in West Palm Beach. Wearing a floral-patterned dress, Ms. Teal, 34, stood on the baize green lawn among a crowd of people outfitted in patchwork Madras and resort pastels. If the guests were marginally less financially exalted than those at the Preservation Foundation benefit a few nights earlier, they nevertheless exuded an aura of moneyed assurance.
It is easy in such a setting to lose sight of the reality that Palm Beach County is in the grip of a housing crisis. Across the bridge the previous morning, scores of homeless people had lined up outside the cyclone fencing around Currie Park in West Palm Beach for a food bank giveaway.
The economic distance between Ms. Teal and some of the guests at the Habitat for Humanity benefit — which netted $100,000 — seemed equivalent to the countless miles separating earth from one of those stacked-up planets. But she said she harbored no ill will toward those of the billionaire class.
“To me, this place represents long money — money that makes its own money,” Ms. Teal said. “I don’t look around and think, ‘I can never achieve this.’ I look around and think: ‘This is gold. This is dreams.’”
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