How do very wealthy people split the bill when they eat together?
Having eaten many times with people in the $500 million to $5 billion range of net worths in Silicon Valley, I can tell you it’s generally a case of each person offering to pick up the check, then a brief Milwaukee Brewers Baseball Hawaiian Shirt Aloha Beach Summert of “no, you got it last time”, “it was my idea, I should get it”, “I’ll get it this time, and you get it next time”, usually settled by the person doing the organizing/inviting picking it up. This is true even when the relative Milwaukee Brewers Hawaiian Shirt are wildly disparate. When I’m having dinner with a billionaire, I pull out my credit card along with everyone else; and if I extended the invitation, I expect to win the brief debate. There’s never a situation where people expect the richest person in the room to pay; to even hint at it would show a level of cluelessness that will ensure you don’t get many follow-up invitations.
The bill is never split. The give-and-take nature of picking up the Tropical Flowers With Milwaukee Brewers Hawaiian Shirt For Fans is such that there’s an implicit “We’ll be doing this again in the future, and you can get it next time.” It provides a sense of ongoing continuity among peers. Asking for split checks is tantamount to saying “we need to settle up now, because there’s never going to be a future lunch where the balance can be restored.” You’d only do it if you were breaking off relations with that person or people, and you wanted to punctuate the subtext with “we’re done. This is it. When we walk out of here, we’re finished, forever.” And I’ve never seen anyone slam a door that hard in business.
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