Giga-yachts, golden visas and the Gilded Age: The startling escalation of Kiwi wealth

Compared to private wealth in the US, New Zealand is a tiny microcosm. Even so, in the past decade the number of Kiwi billionaires has increased from three in 2016 – Graeme Hart, Singapore-based investor Richard Chandler and the Todd Family – to 18 individuals and families listed on last year’s National Business Review Rich List.

Many of the billionaire and millionaire names are familiar: Berridge Spencer, Rod Drury, Sir Michael Friedlander, Sam Morgan, and families including Goodman, Masfen, Manson, Wyborn, Kirkpatrick and Gibbs. But there are new-money names too, people who have risen through the financial ranks out of nowhere.

To put Kiwi rich listers in a global perspective, finding Hart on Forbes’ 2025 Real-Time Billionaires List involves a good deal of scrolling. There he is at No 340 with an estimated wealth of $16.4 billion, although NBR estimates his net worth to be $12.1b. (Ten years ago Hart was worth $7b.)

Scroll even further to No 1245 and there’s Rocket Lab’s Peter Beck ($5.66b). Chandler can be found at 1375 ($5.14b) and film-maker Peter Jackson at 2172 ($3.2b).

Curiously, New Zealand’s wealthiest billionaires, the Zuru gurus Nick and Mat Mowbray (estimated wealth of $20b), don’t feature on the Forbes list even though it includes 3355 billionaires down to those worth a mere US$1b ($1.7m).

Nick Mowbray and his fiancee, beauty product founder Jaimee Lupton, live at Kim Dotcom’s former estate in Coatesville, and have engaged top architects to build them homes at the exclusive Te Arai Links golf estate north of Auckland, and another on a waterfront site in Herne Bay they bought for $24m.

By global standards, New Zealand’s pool of super wealthy is small. The top 1% hold 14% of household wealth ($291 billion) in 20,000 households. Compare that to the US, where the top 1% own 32% ($49.2 trillion) of wealth among 2.39 million individuals and households.

But the pattern is the same; the very rich are getting richer. And the trappings of escalating wealth are now more visible in the form of superyachts, private jets, helicopters, vast homes, luxury cars and a seemingly unlimited flow of cash.

Recognising a gap in the market, property guru Mark Francis and car enthusiast Zlatko Filipchich opened a members-only car storage facility, Matchbox, in Auckland last year.

There, Ferraris, Porsches and McLarens share climate-controlled airspace with Japanese supercars and American collectables. Owners can socialise in a private lounge, and take advantage of on-site grooming, detailing and restoration, and leave chores like WOF and registration to the staff.

Another similar facility, The Garage Club, is due to open in Newmarket next year.

The moneyed club, yes, but the difference in New Zealand, economists say, is that wealthy Kiwis can’t springboard their way up the rich list as a result of outright favours from those in power at the top. They either inherit the wealth, make it through business or from property investment.

The closest schmoozers and their cash can get to Christopher Luxon is to fork out $10,000 for a “platinum” tier seat at the Prime Minister’s table at a National fundraising dinner this month. Revelations about the dinner led to cries of a “cash for access” advantage by those who could afford to pay.

But economist Shamubeel Eaqub shrugs that off.

“New Zealand is a weirdly democratic place, you know. The Prime Minister will talk to me as well and I don’t have to pay him $10,000.”

He thinks Kiwi politicians are, on the whole, still accessible.

However, because so little data is collected on issues like lobbying and gifting in New Zealand, it’s unclear how much influence dominates decision-making, he says, and that’s something the country needs to guard against.

Dr Eric Crampton, chief economist at the New Zealand Institute, agrees that New Zealand has a much “cleaner” political system, as well as a simple GST system, free trade and very low tariffs.

“Our tax code is largely principled; America’s is a catastrophe.”

He describes wealth generation on the back of government-imposed regulations that harm competitors, or by securing subsidies, as bad for economic growth and, in his view, “repugnant”.

Even so, the growing gap between the comfortably off and the hugely wealthy in New Zealand is hard to miss. Never have we seen so much money spent at a lifestyle-of-the-rich-and-famous level.

Well-heeled Boomers growing up in New Zealand in the 1960s and 1970s might have lived in large homes and spent summers at a modest family bach at Manly or Lake Taupō. But their children didn’t travel business class to ski overseas and there was no such thing as a superyacht.

Now, extremely wealthy Kiwis lead lives that most New Zealanders can only experience through enviable glimpses on social media.

They live in homes protected by sophisticated security systems with staff who carry out tasks such as grooming the Lamborghini, ordering Japanese wagyu for the chef or wrapping hundreds of Christmas presents.

They congregate at exclusive golf courses and build expensive homes at places like Tara Iti and Te Arai Links, or in the Southern Lakes region. They party at Ayrburn, Queenstown’s latest hot spot; they join superyachts in the Mediterranean, holiday in the Caribbean, and have favourite ski resorts in Japan and North America.

And they tick off bucket-list musts that only money, plenty of it, can buy: A luxury climb up Mt Kilimanjaro (private tents and bathrooms, chefs and real mattresses); hot-air balloon rides over the Serengeti; and helicopter tours over the Okavango Delta.

Their holiday homes are architecturally designed wonders that make Phil Spencer from New Zealand’s Best Homes gasp in awe. Even second-hand holiday homes don’t come cheap. A recent Ōmaha real estate ad described a $6m property as “entry-level beachfront”.

Auckland estate agent Graham Wall, who sells homes around the $20m mark to HNWIs (high-net-worth individuals), remembers a handful of wealthy families in Auckland when he was young.

“They were rich, but they weren’t crazy, crazy rich. They drove nice Daimlers and lived in big, old houses in Remuera,” he says.

Former National Business Review owner Barry Colman turned heads in the early 2000s when his 30m Italian superyacht Liberte IV arrived in Auckland.

Compare that to the latest acquisition of prolific superyacht, and now giga-yacht, owner Graeme Hart who has blasted posh boating out of the water with his latest $470m expedition giga-yacht Ulysses. At 103m it’s the length of a rugby field, has four jacuzzis and a swimming pool, a helicopter hangar and a glass staircase. Hart’s 80m “shadow” (support) vessel, U-81, worth $172m was sold last year to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

By all accounts owning a mega or giga yacht, large enough to have an Imax theatre and a basketball court, doesn’t make financial sense; the Financial Times described them as “a terrible asset”.

That’s not the point, Osnos says. Apart from soaking up vast amounts of money sloshing around, they’re a way to show the world, and your competitors, that you’ve made it.

In addition, enormous yachts are also a way of delineating between the rich, the very rich and the extraordinarily rich. Each might have a chauffeur, a chef and fly privately but the one asset that will send a clear message about status is the giga-yacht.

And in the case of Jeff Bezos’ schooner yacht Koru, that message is hard to ignore. It’s 125m long – the equivalent of a 30-storey Auckland skyscraper lying on its side – with masts as tall as London’s Big Ben. Tagging along behind is Koru’s 75m shadow vessel Abeona, worth $128m.

Osnos describes this explosion of wealth as the new Gilded Age, where names like Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg replace Vanderbilt, Rockefeller and Carnegie, families synonymous with the opulence and excesses of late 19th-century America.

Aptly, Downton Abbey author Julian Fellowes used the title for his historical TV drama The Gilded Age – borrowed from Mark Twain’s co-authored 1873 satirical novel – that followed the opulent lifestyles of upper-crust New Yorkers in an era of extreme poverty.

Over the past couple of decades, Osnos has watched the growth of the new Gilded Age play out in real time.

The journalist and author makes it his business to observe, interview and rub shoulders with the super wealthy. It’s a topic with which he admits he is “obsessed”, driving him to write his latest book The Haves and the Have-Yachts (Simon & Schuster), a field guide to the ultrarich.

It’s about how the very rich see themselves and “the thinking that sent Katy Perry to space and Elon Musk to Washington”, he says.

And with the new wealth comes new words to explain it all. Ten years ago there was no need for the term centibillionaire, Osnos says, because no one was worth US$100b (NZ$174b).

“Today there are at least 15 people who meet that description on any given day and the number is always going up.”

In one decade, Musk’s wealth has catapulted from US$10b to US$834b, edging him closer to being called a trillionaire ($1000 billion). If Musk’s worth is converted to New Zealand dollars – $1.426 trillion – he’s already there.

And yachts are so enormous they now need a “shadow vessel” to carry extras like the sea plane and submarine. Whereas America’s ultra wealth is largely accumulated from technology and finance, much of New Zealand’s wealth comes from property.

In New Zealand, the top 10% of households hold 48% of the nation’s wealth and nearly half of that wealth sits in real estate ($1.6t). If assets from $408b held in family trusts are included, the property share is likely to be more than half.

But getting on the property ladder without the help of a hefty inheritance is becoming increasingly difficult, and increases in the average pay packet have not kept in step with salary increases at the top level.

Workers at Starbucks learned that in 2024 their CEO Brian Niccol was paid $168.7m at a time when the average barista earned $25,136, a ratio of 6666-to-1.

In New Zealand, too, the top executive salaries of some of the country’s major companies have soared away from ground staff in the 2025 financial year.

Gentrack CEO Gary Miles took home a whopping $17.3m as part of a long-term incentive scheme; A2 Milk Company boss David Bortolussi earned $7.7m and Ebos CEO John Cullity took home $6.95m. In fourth place was Fonterra CEO Miles Hurrell, earning $6.1m. That compares to the median New Zealand salary of $69,836 in 2025.

Economist Cameron Bagrie calls it New Zealand’s “income problem”.

But the cost-of-living crisis is not the real crisis, he says. The problem is the lack of productivity growth, which causes incomes to fall behind.

“When you have stagnating living standards and you have a cost-of-living crisis, boom, a bomb goes off.“

Osnos detects a shift in attitude towards the very rich: Frustration rather than admiration over legal tax evasion, and a younger generation less admiring of excessive demonstrations of wealth than their parents or grandparents were.

“There’s more wariness, more of a hashtag-eat-the-rich feeling than there used to be.”

Social commentators warn of rising discontent between those who can afford to pay a small fortune for Snoop Dogg or Rod Stewart to perform at a private birthday party, and those who can’t afford a birthday cake.

In New Zealand, a 2023 Inland Revenue Department (IRD) study found that 311 of the country’s wealthiest families paid tax at less than half the rate of ordinary Kiwis, and that untaxed capital gains were disproportionately boosting wealth.

Eaqub is among those who question why capital gains on investment property and businesses are not taxed. He points out that the tax burden in New Zealand falls on too small a group and that the burden doubles every 50 years.

“Somehow we make these very specific distinctions about what is income and what is not income, even though the net effect is exactly the same, you have more money in a bank account.”

The problem, he says, is even if tax policies change, the wealthy have access to top lawyers and accountants to find ways around paying more.

In 2021, revelations by investigative journalism platform ProPublica proved that the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, used legal methods to pay no federal tax in 2007 and 2011. Elon Musk achieved the same tax-avoidance feat in 2018.

Apart from very large boats, money – more than anyone can spend in a lifetime – can buy a degree of safety for the worried wealthy.

Osnos, speaking from his office in Washington DC, says the current global instability, fuelled by the Middle East conflict, makes places like New Zealand even more attractive.

New Zealand offers security and distance, a place that feels like it’s insulated from global tensions, he says.

Osnos never did find any bunkers in Queenstown – apart from annoying obstacles on beautiful golf courses. Locals told him that clients abandoned the idea after realising they were thousands of miles away from the White House. But he did find a local construction company busy building helicopter landing pads at the homes of wealthy clients.

And plenty were eyeing New Zealand as a safe place for a second, or third or fourth, home in a faraway country, a safety net that only money can buy.

Such thoughts are no doubt foremost in the minds of the HNWIs landing in private jets in New Zealand in recent months. High-end real estate agents report a surge in inquiries and sales of property, fuelled by the “golden visa” which allows offshore investors to buy certain properties worth more than $5m.

Graham Wall puts it this way: “Kiwis used to talk about the tyranny of distance. Now the tyranny of distance is our greatest asset.”

During his trip to New Zealand Osnos flew in a helicopter with Jim Rohrstaff of Legacy Partners who, with the backing of US billionaire Ric Kayne (#2858 on the Forbes’ billionaires list and worth $2.23b) developed Tara Iti and Te Arai Links. It is a stretch of coastline at Mangawhai where the country’s wealthy engage top architects to design private homes that will give them little change from $30m and more.

Osnos and Rohrstaff walked over the dunes to the deserted beach.

“Waves roared ashore,” Osnos writes in The Haves and the Have-Yachts. “He [Rohrstaff] spread his arms, turned and laughed. ‘We think it’s the place to be in the future,’” he said.

American expat Jack Matthews, the former chairman of Mediaworks, had similar sentiments, pointing out New Zealand is capable of being self-sufficient in terms of energy, water and food.

“Life would deteriorate,” Matthews told him, “but it would not collapse.”

The division of New Zealanders’ wealth

Sources: Stats NZ, Money Hub

Jane Phare is a senior journalist based in Auckland.

Sign up to The Daily H, a free newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.