Not to be outdone, in April 2022 another billionaire private equity mogul, Robert M. But heads spun around completely in August 2021 when Stephen Schwarzman, the co-founder and CEO of the Blackstone Group, scooped up a waterfront estate known as the Breakers for $32.5 million, then the largest private home sale in the island’s history. Campolongo / Alamy S // AlamyĮxtreme wealth has long been part of the mix on Nantucket, so a megayacht in the harbor or the construction of a new estate rarely raises an eyebrow. Home prices on Nantucket, even for small harborside shacks, have skyrocketed. Is it the new cohort, or has time just caught up with the island? Suddenly everyone seems eager to pay whatever it takes to get what they want, and they don’t mind if others notice. The island pants, Nantucket reds, looked worn in when you bought them. People drove to the beach in beat-up Land Rovers. For years there was a kind of unwritten old-money code of discretion. Part of the appeal of Nantucket has long been that-unlike the Hamptons, Aspen, or many other wealthy enclaves-it manages to maintain a somewhat low-key vibe. The pandemic brought more people to the island, surprising even the most crowd-weary locals, including another influx of East Coast billionaires, who, like so many before them, discovered Nantucket’s beauty, how easy it is to get there (by private jet, at least), and the fact that it has, as Nick Carraway put it in The Great Gatsby, a “consoling proximity of millionaires.” Billionaires such as Eric Schmidt, David Rubinstein, Charles Schwab, and Charles Johnson have long called it their summer home, as have generations of New England bluebloods. Whether it’s that ephemeral quality, or the fact that the island’s overlords long ago decreed that its quaintness be preserved in perpetuity, or that a 1,300-foot extension of the airport’s main runway in 1970 made it possible for private jets to come and go with ease, Nantucket remains a playground for the rich and powerful. Thirty miles off the southern coast of Massachusetts, with an average elevation of around 30 feet, Nantucket is also essentially a 48-square-mile pile of sand that’s busily eroding into the Atlantic Ocean. It was at the cutting edge of the technology of the day: harvesting and manufacturing whale oil. That’s as true today as it was in the 18th century, in the years before the American Revolution, when the island was the equivalent of Silicon Valley. Nantucket has always been part fantasyland, part economic miracle.
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