Oligarch’s’ yachts seizure pays JP Morgan, raising eyebrows

BAGGING A TYCOON

I am writing this on a train and, though I am determined to make some serious points in today’s newsletter, I keep being distracted by a middle-aged woman next to me who is avidly reading an article in the Daily Mail headlined “Yes, you can bag yourself a billionaire tech titan.” Initially, I was amused by the headline’s (probably accidental, but possibly ironic?) echo of one of Barack Obama’s most famous lines.

  • “Yes, we can heal this nation. Yes, we can seize our future. Yes, we can bag ourselves a billionaire tech titan”.

But then (as I read over her shoulder) I became intrigued by the idea that Silicon Valley is full of lonely male tycoons just waiting for a call from the female readers of a British midmarket tabloid. Having someone reading over your shoulder on a train is annoying, so I looked up the piece for myself. It’s a profile of Amy Anderson, who runs a dating website for the “loaded-but-lonely” and it’s full of possibilities for a 21st century version of the kind of “She was only a factory girl” shlock that have kept the publishers of romantic novels in business for so long, with plentiful suggestions for what tycoons are looking for in a partner.

  • “Another wants a woman who is ‘incredibly beautiful, has been educated abroad and speaks multiple languages, because he speaks five’. In addition, he wants someone who is ‘with him for the right reasons’ — as a billionaire, that’s always tricky — and a woman, says Amy, ‘who he can geek out with and be himself. He has a couple of tattoos and is looking for someone with an edge — basically, a young Angelina Jolie.’”

Hmmm. How many women (a) speak multiple languages, (b) look like a young Angelina Jolie, (c) understand tech jargon well enough to “geek out”, (d) are sufficiently unlucky in love that they’d sign up to a website in the hope of finding a tech titan, (e) wouldn’t be in it for the cash, and (f) read the Daily Mail, a newspaper not known for its forward-looking outlook (“Being bilingual can be bad for your brain”)? That has to be an exclusive club. Still, though, it did remind me of this brilliant piece by Peter Pomerantsev, like me a Coda contributing editor, from a few years back about one of London’s biggest oligarch-vs-oligarch trials.

  • “On the opening day a small procession of stunning females in short skirts and high heels made its way to the back of the room: ‘Look,’ the Russian journalist said to me, ‘they’ve come to see if they can bag an oligarch’.”

Public service announcement: if you’ve not read Pomerantsev’s Nothing is True, and Everything is Possible, you should do so forthwith. It hits the perfect combination of funny and serious while revealing a lot about how Russia ended up in the mess it’s in.