THE NAKED CITY: WHO WANTS TO BE A BILLIONAIRE?
Image: The Sphere, Las Vegas
When the Opera House lottery was initiated by the NSW Government back in 1958, first prize was a then staggering £100,000 ($200,000). If you won it you were set for life – enough to buy a house, a brand new car and numerous overseas holidays. You were not exactly a ‘millionaire’ but you certainly felt like one. Actual millionaires back then were few and far between, at a time when money had quite a different value.
In the following decades, as the country prospered and a minority became very rich, a million dollars was a much sought after reward. Roll on the new millennium and with increasing inflation and other economic pressures, suddenly a million bucks is not such a big deal after all. When it comes to monetary figures that need to impress, these days you need to be talking billions.
Billions made and billions lost like the $36 billion dropped by collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX last year. A fortune that existed in cyberspace but still enabled the disgraced founder Sam Bankman-Fried to cough up a bail bond of $250 million in good old greenbacks. If there’s the occasional big loser, there are lots of constant winners with names like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates regularly topping the list of the world’s wealthiest billionaires.
There’s now a reverence in the popular media for anything or anybody that’s worth a billion or more. A good example would be the recent unveiling of Las Vegas’s latest temple of mammon, the super high tech, multi-billion dollar entertainment venue known as The Sphere. A mass of programmable LED lighting, it’s a marvel inside and out, with seating for some 18,000.
The opening received widespread awe and wow coverage on Australian morning TV — as do many of the stories that emanate from Vegas, like the recent casino gig from our own Kylie Minogue. Hey, you play Vegas and you have really made it big – up with the likes of Wayne Newton, Siegfried & Roy and Celine Dion. So when the opening season of The Sphere featured an extended season from U2, playing their entire Achtung Baby album, it had the tabloid TV hosts and entertainment reporters salivating.
With some premium seats going for around $10,000, that’s co-incidentally the amount of compensation I’d demand to sit through a concert from the postering Irish outfit. No doubt the reported $25 million that the band are earning for their season will help swell Bono’s personal fortune, currently estimated around $700,000 million, a bit closer to billionaire status.
If the whole episode is not a statement on the world in which we live and the massive disparity between the filthy rich and the impoverished, then what is? You would hate to think that there was any political or social preaching from Bono as part of the concert, within the billion dollar energy sucking illumination. It makes a daggy old rock band, performing for around fifty people in a local pub, with just a couple of par cans and minus a lecture on world peace, seem totally refreshing.
There was once a time in Sydney when Rooty Hill RSL billed itself as “The Vegas of The West”, no doubt tongue in cheek, but a cultural cringe nevertheless. Fortunately they seem to have discarded the title in recent years and it’s unlikely we’ll ever see our own low tech version of The Sphere out west. The odd U2 covers band might float through the venue, the light show might be average, but at least you won’t be paying $10,000 a seat.
