By Brent Crane
Imagine that you are skiing in the French Alps over Christmas when you are invited to a friend’s private island in the Maldives and wish to travel immediately. A private jet gets you there fine but there is a small wrinkle: Your beach wardrobe remains marooned in London and, because of the holidays, cannot be transferred for a week by conventional services. So you call upon an unconventional one. You call your private concierge.
Private concierges are what they sound like: an expensive team of dedicated assistants paid to do your bidding. And among the very wealthy, they’re a common luxury.
“I no longer have to explain what a personal concierge is to friends,” said Lauren Wilt, the C.E.O. of a concierge service called Quintessentially. “It’s a more well-known and understood category.”
For up to $75,000 per year these firms will book impossible-to-get dinner reservations, procure your child’s birthday present or personally courier your beach wardrobe from England to the Maldives over the holidays, as Stuart McNeill, the founder of Knightsbridge Circle, said he once did for a client.
“We fix problems,” said McNeill, who is based in London. The super rich, evidently, have a lot of problems: In the U.S., McNeill said his firm doubled its clientele in the past year and plans to open offices in Dallas, Singapore and Riyadh.
Concierge services vary by size and level of service. Knightsbridge Circle, a boutique firm that charges $50,000 a year plus an initiation fee, has only 120 members. But others, like Quintessentially and Velocity Black, have thousands. Banks like Wells Fargo, Capital One and Chase offer subscriptions to such services, either in-house or through third parties, as a perk to high-end customers. Some event hosts, like Art Basel, also subscribe, so they can pamper their V.I.P.s.
These firms congregate among the moneyed corners of the globe: Manhattan, Los Angeles, Dubai. They maintain contacts in well-to-do holiday destinations: buzzy restaurants and chefs in Nantucket, luxury goods dealers in St. Barts, architects and designers in Cozumel.
“It’s a very hard customer to win and a very expensive customer to lose,” said Sylvain Langrand, the C.E.O. of Velocity Black, a private concierge service that was acquired by Capital One in 2023. (Other elite credit cards, like the American Express Centurion and the Mastercard Black Card, offer private concierge services too.)
One such customer is Silver Kung, a Taiwanese hedge fund manager based in Hong Kong. He said he sampled a few firms before settling on two: Rosemarie Hospitality, a boutique firm, and Velocity Black. The latter is offered as a perk by R360, a social club he belongs to for people with a net worth of at least $100 million. He also has opened accounts for his two daughters.
Kung said he uses Velocity Black mostly for booking restaurants and sorting out travel logistics. Rosemarie is for bigger asks. Recently, the firm arranged an after-hours visit to the Louvre for his family.
“Velocity is like my Tesla that I drive every day,” said Kung. “Rosemarie is my special car, like a Maserati.”
Concierge firms compete in offering what Wilt called “hyper-personalization,” knowing and acting upon clients’ individual quirks, desires, tastes and bothers. “Say we’ve booked you at a restaurant and we know you are a sushi fanatic so there’s a tuna tartare waiting for you at the table when you arrive,” she said.
Services rendered can be comically mundane. McNeill recalled dispatching someone in Mykonos to wait in place of a client for their dinner table to free up. Wilt, who calls her agents “lifestyle managers,” recalls that, after a client’s child became enamored with “a specific breed of penguin,” Quintessentially arranged a private experience involving the breed at an Atlanta zoo.
Agents are different, said Wilt, from hotel concierges, who field “rapid-fire, transactional requests with a new set of clients every day, whereas our service is that we get to know you and build that relationship for many years.” Beyond hotels, the industry’s talent pool draws from personal assistants, celebrity and athlete managers and luxury sales professionals.
Firms make money through annual subscription fees: $12,000 to $44,000 for Quintessentially; $3,100 for Velocity Black plus a $900 initiation fee. They may also receive commissions through hotel and other travel bookings.
“We say that the membership fee keeps the lights on and then our profit is based on the activity of clients,” said McNeill.
Increasingly, firms partner with luxury brands like Sotheby’s, Formula One, and Aston Martin. In this way, they can offer members “exclusive” and “red carpet” access to events like the U.S. Open or New York Fashion Week or access to hard-to-acquire luxury products. “Part of the value in our service is to position ourselves with the C.E.O. of a brand, do some events, make informal introductions and then let our members build a relationship,” said McNeill, of Knightsbridge Circle. That relationship, it is hoped, will translate into ready access to products. Avoiding tackiness requires deft footing.
“We try to be very careful in every experience or access we give — we never want to try to be selling something,” said Langrand. “It’s about finding a way to do it in a very bespoke and meaningful way.”
Kung, the Hong Kong hedge fund manager, has used his private concierge to proffer only one product: a high-end golf putter that was not sold in Asia. His agent located a dealer in London and had it shipped.
“Of course, I can reach out myself,” he laughed. “But right now I’m spoiled.”
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
The Supreme Court decided Lisa Cook can stay at the Fed for now. The decision was a setback for President Trump who has sought to quickly fire the central bank governor, part of a wider effort to exert more control over the Fed. What’s next? The court will begin hearing arguments in January over whether the White House can replace Cook on the central bank.
The federal government shutdown enters its fourth day. Democrats want Republicans to add more than $1 trillion for health care programs to their spending plan. During the shutdown, the White House has halted billions of dollars in funds for Democratic-led states and prepared a plan to lay off civil servants. Economists trying to assess the strength of the labor market were left guessing on Friday after the Bureau of Labor Statistics withheld its monthly jobs report.
The White House is expected to outline a bailout for farmers. An aid package of between $10 billion to $14 billion is on the table, according to The Wall Street Journal. Much of that could go to soybean farmers, who have been hit hard by a retaliatory tariff that China placed on the crop.
More big deals: Paramount is nearing a deal to buy The Free Press for around $150 million and make its co-founder, Bari Weiss, the editor in chief of CBS News. Apple paused the redesign of its Vision Pro headset. Trump struck a deal with Pfizer to sell drugs to Medicaid at European prices. And Spotify became the latest company to name co-C.E.O.s.
Unpacking the EA deal
A group of investors led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund announced on Monday a deal to acquire the video game developer Electronic Arts for $55 billion, which would be the largest buyout of a publicly traded company in history.
But the eye-popping figure, and the role of Jared Kushner as lead deal maker, has a lot of people scratching their heads. Joost van Dreunen, a lecturer at New York University and author of “One Up: Creativity, Competition, and the Global Business of Video Games,” is one of them. He spoke with Ian Frisch, a DealBook contributor, about what the deal really means for the Middle East’s most powerful investor.
Saudi Arabia and its co-investors have agreed to buy EA at a 25 percent premium. Does the math add up on this deal?
It goes beyond any sort of rational measures of math and financial logic.
The EA portfolio isn’t exactly blowing me away in terms of, ‘It’s going to double over the next couple years.’ The market overall is much softer. As a publisher, EA relies predominantly on evergreen, single-percentage-growth assets and franchises.
But they’re trying to do something other than buy an asset, clean it up, and flip it. It’s not a leveraged buyout. They are trying to build a cultural hub more than anything else. And for that reason, they’re happy to overpay.
Tell me more about that. What’s their real strategy here?
Their vision is to, by 2030, dilute their economy’s dependence on oil. They earmarked $38 billion in 2023 to establish themselves as what they call a “Gaming Hub.”
It started with some smaller purchases. They acquired mobile game developer Scopely for half a billion dollars, which turned out to be a success. And that success came from a very simple strategy, which is they have infinite money to buy users in the mobile app store.
With the success of Scopely, I think they were convinced that they could write the bigger check. But EA is really the Rosetta Stone here to establish Saudi Arabia as a gaming hub globally.
Why is becoming a gaming hub so important to Saudi Arabia?
It’s “bread and games.” It’s not enough for Saudi Arabia to be an economic center. It also needs to be a cultural center. With the same money that they spent on EA, they could have bought the New England Patriots seven times over.
Now, imagine they had bought the top seven N.F.L. teams just to have a stake in a cultural industry. People would be beside themselves. What they’re doing is taking real estate in a cultural industry to be a global presence.
You have a variety of countries investing in creative industries, and the Saudis have made gaming the tip of their spear. And I think it has everything to do with their demographic makeup. As a country, 58 percent of people are under 30 years old. Games are just the preferred form of entertainment.
What’s up with Jared Kushner? Why does he want to get in this deal?
Apparently, he’s a gamer. In my experience working with people in finance and Wall Street, they liked EA because it speaks the language of finance people. When you go to these conferences, it’s like this Armani suit-clad management team, where one is richer than the next. It’s a particular type of corporate approach to gaming.
I think what Kushner has that everybody else doesn’t is, if any kind of scrutiny arises from regulators, it could simply be whisked away if he gives the old man a call. But there should be scrutiny, at least with regard to a sovereign entity owning a lot of user data. Jared Kushner is sort of like the ace in the hole that’s at least going to get the deal approved in the U.S. I think it’s fair to say that, without Kushner, this deal wouldn’t have been able to get done.
Quiz: A steep trajectory
In a deal to purchase roughly $6.6 billion worth of OpenAI shares from current and former employees, a group of investors valued the company at $500 billion — a big jump from its $300 billion valuation in March. That makes OpenAI the most valuable private company, surpassing SpaceX.
OpenAI’s market value is now higher than all but which one of the following public companies?
A. Exxon Mobil
B. Netflix
C. Alibaba
D. General Electric
E. Walmart
Thanks for reading! We’ll see you Monday.
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Quiz answer: E.
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