Daniel sent us this one — he's asking about the hidden labor market that orbits around high net worth and ultra high net worth individuals. The personal assistants, the household managers, the PR people, the people who manage the other people. His question is basically: how big is this sector, how do you even categorize it, what's the experience actually like, and what's the money like? And he flags something interesting — there's a popular perception that these are the worst kinds of clients. Which, I have to say, tracks with every story I've ever heard.
It's a genuinely underexamined corner of the labor market. And I think the reason is structural — it's almost invisible to traditional labor statistics because it sits inside households rather than firms. You're not an employee of a company, you're an employee of a person. Or a family office if you're lucky, but often just a person.
The fundamental weirdness of working for someone without being part of the family. You're in their home, you know their schedule, you know what they eat for breakfast, you know things their siblings don't know — but you're staff.
And that boundary is the entire story. Let me start with the size question, because it's surprisingly hard to pin down. The Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't have a category called "works for a billionaire." Private household employment in the US — and this is the broadest bucket — was about two point three million workers as of the most recent survey data. But that's nannies, housekeepers, gardeners, home health aides. The vast majority of those are not working for high net worth families.
The BLS category is basically "anyone whose workplace is someone else's house." Which is so broad it's almost useless for what we're talking about.
The more relevant slice is what gets called private service professionals or family office staff. The number of family offices globally — this is the entity that manages wealth and often employs the staff — is estimated at around ten thousand to fifteen thousand. But that's just the formalized end. Plenty of ultra high net worth individuals don't have a family office, they just hire people directly.
Ultra high net worth, for people who don't have this taxonomy memorized, means what — thirty million and up?
Typically defined as thirty million in investable assets and above. About four hundred thousand individuals globally fall into that category, per the Knight Frank wealth report. High net worth is one to thirty million, and that's several million households. But most of those aren't hiring a full staff. You're really looking at the top slice — maybe fifty to a hundred thousand households globally where there's a meaningful personal staff ecosystem.
We're talking about a labor market that's maybe the size of, I don't know, the entire podcasting industry. Small enough to be invisible to most people, big enough to be a real economic phenomenon.
That's a good comparison. And it's growing, not shrinking. The number of ultra high net worth individuals has been increasing globally — concentrated in the US, China, and the Gulf states. Wealth management is a growth industry, and by extension, so is the ecosystem of people who manage the lives attached to that wealth.
Okay, so size — fuzzy but real. Let's talk about categorization, because that's where this gets conceptually interesting. How do you even slice this labor market?
I think there are roughly four tiers, and this is my own framework, not an official taxonomy. Tier one is the direct personal staff: executive assistants, personal assistants, chiefs of staff, household managers, butlers, estate managers. These are people whose job is to make someone else's life run smoothly.
The "build me a chair nobody notices they're sitting in" tier. If you're doing it right, your employer never thinks about you at all — things just happen.
That's exactly the ideal. Tier two is the lifestyle and family support layer: nannies, governesses, private chefs, personal trainers, drivers, security. These are more specialized, more task-specific, but still embedded in the household.
There's a weird status gradient here, right? A private chef has a certain cachet. A driver, less so. Even though the driver probably knows more about the principal's actual life.
The closer you are to what gets perceived as a luxury good versus a utility, the higher your status within the household ecosystem. Tier three is the external-facing professional services: PR people, personal attorneys, wealth managers, image consultants, reputation managers. These people often don't work exclusively for one client, but for high net worth individuals they're essentially on retainer and function like staff.
The glockenspiel of corporate approachability — the person whose job is to make the wealthy person seem relatable.
Which is a growth industry in itself. And then tier four is the family office layer: investment professionals, accountants, philanthropic advisors, tax strategists. These are the people managing the wealth rather than the life, but in a family office context the boundaries blur. The chief of staff at a family office might be coordinating everything from the investment portfolio to the yacht maintenance schedule.
You've got this spectrum from "I manage your calendar" to "I manage your reputation" to "I manage your money." And the weird thing is, in a corporate context those would all be different departments in different buildings. Here they're all orbiting one gravitational center, which is a person.
Which is what makes it such a unique labor market. Your employer is not an institution with HR policies and an org chart. Your employer is a human being with moods and preferences and a family. And that family has dynamics you have to navigate without being part of them.
Let's talk about the experience, because this is where the prompt's observation about these being the worst clients comes in. I've heard versions of this for years. What does the data actually say?
There's no systematic survey of job satisfaction among private service professionals — again, the invisibility problem. But there are consistent themes in the qualitative reporting. The Wall Street Journal has covered this, Town and Country has covered it, there are memoirs, there are forums. The pattern that emerges is: the experience is bimodal.
Bimodal meaning either great or terrible, not much in the middle.
On the positive side, you have employers who value discretion and professionalism, who pay well, who understand that retention is cheaper than turnover, and who treat staff with respect. These tend to be people who built their wealth rather than inherited it — they've managed teams, they understand employment relationships.
Self-made versus inherited wealth being a predictor of how you treat staff. That's a class dimension that's worth poking at.
It comes up repeatedly. Not universally — there are gracious inheritors and nightmare self-made tyrants — but the pattern is strong enough that people in the industry talk about it. The negative side is what generates the horror stories. Unreasonable demands, lack of boundaries, treating staff as interchangeable, emotional volatility, the expectation of being available twenty-four seven.
The "I need you to fly to another continent because I left my favorite sweater there" kind of thing.
That's not even a hypothetical — I've read accounts of exactly that. The deeper issue is what the prompt identifies: you're working for an individual or a family without being part of the family. In a normal workplace, there's a formal employment relationship with defined boundaries. In a household, the boundaries are constantly negotiated and often violated. You're present for family arguments. You know about marital problems. You witness parenting decisions. But you have no standing to participate.
It's the emotional labor equivalent of being a ghost. You're there, you see everything, you influence things by your presence, but you're not supposed to be a person with feelings and opinions.
That takes a toll. There's a reason turnover in these roles can be high. The industry term is "burnout by proximity." You're close enough to the family to absorb their stress but not close enough to receive the emotional support that family members give each other.
Burnout by proximity. That's a useful phrase. It names the thing precisely.
Another dynamic worth flagging: the isolation. If you're a personal assistant to a high net worth individual, you don't really have coworkers in the traditional sense. You might be the only staff member, or you might be part of a small team where everyone reports directly to the principal. There's no water cooler, no peer group, no one to commiserate with who's not also in the same strange situation.
If you complain to friends outside the industry, they don't get it. "Oh, you had to fly to Aspen on short notice, poor you." They see the trappings, not the actual experience.
It's a version of the "golden handcuffs" problem. The compensation and perks can be good, which makes it hard to leave even when the experience is corrosive. You get accustomed to a certain lifestyle by proximity — the nice cars, the nice locations, the nice meals — and walking away from that feels like a downgrade, even if your mental health improves.
Let's talk compensation. What's the range?
It varies enormously by role and location. For a personal assistant or household manager in a major US city — New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco — you're typically looking at eighty thousand to one hundred fifty thousand a year. That's base. Benefits are often included, and housing might be provided if it's a live-in position.
Eighty to one fifty for an assistant role is actually quite good by general labor market standards. That's more than many people with graduate degrees make.
And at the top end — a chief of staff for a family office, an estate manager overseeing multiple properties — you can see two hundred thousand to three hundred fifty thousand plus. Private chefs at the high end can make similar numbers. Experienced nannies for ultra high net worth families can make over a hundred thousand, especially if they have specialized training or are willing to travel extensively.
The compensation is competitive. The problem isn't the money, it's everything else.
And there's an important nuance: compensation structure. In a corporate job, you generally have a clear path to raises, bonuses, promotions. In a private household, compensation is often idiosyncratic. It depends on how much the principal values you, how generous they're feeling, whether they understand market rates. Some people get annual raises and structured bonuses. Others have to ask, and asking is uncomfortable when your employer is a person rather than an HR department.
Because asking for a raise from your boss in an office is already awkward. Asking for a raise from someone whose children you've seen crying at breakfast is a different kind of awkward.
There's no comps database you can point to. In a corporate job, you can go to Glassdoor and see what people in similar roles make. In this world, compensation is opaque. You might have no idea whether you're being paid fairly relative to peers.
What about the ultra high end? The celebrity assistant world?
Celebrity assistants are a distinct subcategory. The compensation can be higher — one hundred fifty to two hundred fifty thousand for experienced people in Los Angeles or New York — but the demands are often more extreme. The travel is constant, the hours are unpredictable, and the emotional volatility of the principal is famously high. There's a reason "celebrity assistant" has its own genre of horror stories.
The "my boss threw a phone at my head and I had to apologize" genre.
I'm not going to name names, but yes, there are documented accounts that are shocking. And the power dynamic is extreme because the assistant often signs an NDA. So there's a legal barrier to talking about bad experiences, which makes it harder for the labor market to self-correct.
That's a knock-on effect worth sitting with. In most labor markets, bad employers develop reputations and have to pay a premium or improve conditions to attract talent. NDAs short-circuit that mechanism. The information asymmetry benefits the employer.
It's not just NDAs. It's the fact that your next prospective employer in this world might move in the same social circles as your previous one. Badmouthing a former principal, even truthfully, can be career-ending. The whole sector runs on discretion, and discretion cuts both ways — it protects the employer's privacy, but it also protects the employer from accountability.
You've got a labor market that's opaque, atomized, high-paying, emotionally demanding, and structurally tilted toward employer power. It's the gig economy for the one percent, except with better catering.
That's a sharp way to put it. And like the gig economy, it's growing. As wealth concentration increases, more households cross the threshold where hiring personal staff makes sense. What used to be the province of aristocrats and industrialists is now available to tech founders, hedge fund managers, entertainment executives.
The democratization of having a butler. Which is a very strange phrase to say out loud.
It is strange. But it's real. There are now agencies that specialize in placing household staff for "merely affluent" families — not billionaires, but people with five to ten million in assets who want a part-time household manager or a personal assistant. The market is deepening and broadening.
What about the geographic dimension? I assume this labor market looks different in New York versus Riyadh versus Singapore?
In the Gulf states, the household staff model often involves migrant labor, with very different power dynamics and compensation structures. In parts of Asia, multi-generational households mean the boundary between family and staff is configured differently. In Europe, old-money families have multi-century traditions of household service that shape expectations on both sides.
The British aristocracy basically invented the modern household staff org chart. Butler, housekeeper, footman, lady's maid — that whole taxonomy comes out of the English country house.
It's still the cultural reference point. When a newly wealthy person hires a "butler," they're importing a whole set of expectations about what that role means, often without understanding the reciprocal obligations that the traditional model entailed. The old aristocratic model had norms about loyalty going both ways — the family had obligations to the staff, including pensions and care in old age. The modern version often dispenses with the obligations while keeping the expectations.
The Downton Abbey model without the Downton Abbey mutual commitment. You get the hierarchy without the safety net.
And that's a recipe for exploitation, even at high income levels. Money doesn't solve the power imbalance — it just makes it more comfortable while it's happening.
Let me ask a question that I think is lurking under the surface of the prompt. Is this sector actually worse than other kinds of service work, or is it just more visible because the employers are famous and the stories are juicier?
That's a fair question. I think the answer is: it's structurally different in ways that create specific vulnerabilities, but it's not uniformly worse. A personal assistant to a decent employer probably has a better quality of life than a retail worker or a restaurant server. The difference is the intimacy and the isolation. In retail, bad customers come and go. In household service, the bad employer is your entire work environment, and you go home to a place they may own, and your career references depend on their goodwill.
The stakes are higher because your entire livelihood is concentrated in one relationship. If you lose that job, you don't just lose income — you might lose housing, visa sponsorship if you're an immigrant worker, your entire social context if the job came with relocation.
It's the same problem as having your entire investment portfolio in one stock, except the stock has feelings about you and can fire you at dinner.
What's the trend line? Is the experience improving or degrading?
On one hand, the professionalization of the sector is increasing. There are more agencies, more formal training programs, more norms around contracts and compensation. The days of purely informal, cash-under-the-table arrangements are declining. Family offices in particular have become more institutional — they have HR functions, they have compliance departments, they operate more like companies.
The family office layer is maturing. That probably improves conditions for the people who work inside that structure.
The challenge is that many household staff still work outside that structure, directly for an individual. And for them, the quality of the experience depends entirely on the character of that individual. There's no institutional buffer.
Which brings us back to the self-made versus inherited point. If you've ever managed people in a corporate context, you probably have some intuition about how to treat employees. If you've never had a job where you reported to someone else, you might not understand what you're asking of people.
I think that's exactly right. And the wealth management industry is starting to recognize this as an issue. There are advisors who specialize in helping families manage household staff well — essentially, teaching rich people how to be good employers.
That's a job I didn't know existed. "Rich person employer coach.
And it's probably underutilized, because the kind of person who needs it most is the kind of person who doesn't think they need it.
Let's talk about the labor market dynamics from the other side. Who goes into this work, and why?
The pathways are varied. Some people fall into it — they start as an administrative assistant at a company, the principal poaches them for personal work, and suddenly they're in a completely different career track. Some come from hospitality — hotel concierges, high-end restaurant managers. Some come from adjacent professions — former teachers become governesses, former military people become estate managers or security chiefs.
The ex-military pipeline makes sense. Discretion, logistics, chain of command — those translate directly.
There's a growing pipeline from graduate programs in hospitality management and even from top-tier business schools. The family office world increasingly recruits MBAs for roles that blend investment management with family governance. It's becoming a recognized career path rather than something people stumble into.
Which should, over time, improve conditions. When it's a career rather than a gig, people have more leverage to demand professional treatment.
In practice, the power imbalance remains fundamental. You can professionalize the role all you want — at the end of the day, you work for a person who can fire you because they're in a bad mood. No HR policy fully protects against that.
What's the single most important thing someone should know before taking one of these jobs?
I'd say: understand the boundary problem before you're inside it. Ask during the interview process about expectations around availability, about how the principal handles disagreement, about what happened with the previous person in the role. If they won't let you talk to the predecessor, that's information. If they describe the previous assistant as "terrible" or "crazy," that's information.
The "all my exes are crazy" rule of employment. If every previous assistant was a disaster, the common factor is you.
The other thing I'd say is: negotiate an exit. Have a severance provision in your contract. Because in this world, the employment relationship can end suddenly and for reasons that have nothing to do with your performance. The principal gets divorced and downsizes, the principal moves to a different country, the principal decides they want someone younger or more fashionable. You need protection against arbitrary termination.
Severance as insurance against caprice. That's good practical advice.
It's becoming more common. The better agencies now insist on it as a standard contract term. Six months is typical for senior roles.
Let's zoom out for a moment. What does the existence of this labor market tell us about the broader economy?
It tells us that wealth concentration creates its own economic ecosystems. When you have enough money, you stop using services designed for the mass market and start commissioning bespoke versions of everything — including labor. You don't use a travel agent, you have a personal assistant who handles travel. You don't go to a restaurant, you have a private chef. You don't send your kids to school, you hire private tutors.
The unbundling of the middle-class service economy and its rebundling as a personal staff. It's vertical integration at the household level.
And it has downstream effects. When wealthy people exit shared institutions — public schools, commercial airlines, restaurants — those institutions lose a constituency that might otherwise advocate for their quality. It's one mechanism by which inequality becomes self-reinforcing.
The "exit" option undermining the "voice" incentive. If you can just hire a private solution, you stop caring whether the public solution works.
And the personal staff are the infrastructure that enables that exit. They're the human scaffolding for a parallel economy.
Which makes them more interesting than just "people with weird jobs." They're a structural feature of how wealth operates.
They're largely invisible to economic analysis because they don't show up as a distinct sector. They're scattered across NAICS codes and BLS categories. A personal chef and a restaurant line cook are in completely different statistical buckets, even though they're doing essentially the same work.
The statistical invisibility of the servant economy. That feels like a dissertation waiting to happen.
There are a few academics working on this — mostly in sociology and anthropology rather than economics. The economics of household production is a recognized subfield, but it tends to focus on unpaid domestic labor rather than paid personal staff for the wealthy. The latter is understudied.
Because it's hard to study. These households don't fill out surveys. The employers have every incentive to keep things private. The employees have NDAs.
It's a hard-to-reach population for all the reasons we've been discussing. Which means most of what we know is anecdotal, and anecdotes have selection bias — the horror stories get told, the quiet satisfactory arrangements don't.
We should be cautious about assuming the worst, even while acknowledging that the structural conditions make the worst possible.
Most employment relationships in this sector are probably fine. The problem is that when they're not fine, the employee has unusually few recourses.
That's the summary, really. It's a labor market that's simultaneously well-compensated and structurally precarious. Good money, weak protections, high variance.
Which means more people are going to find themselves navigating this world, whether they planned to or not.
Alright, I think we've covered the landscape. Let me try to synthesize. The sector is probably somewhere between fifty thousand and a hundred thousand households globally that employ meaningful personal staff, with maybe half a million to a million workers in total, depending on how you count. It's growing with wealth concentration. The experience is bimodal — great employers and nightmare employers with not much middle. Compensation ranges from decent to excellent, but comes with concentration risk and often weak structural protections. And the whole thing is weirdly invisible to standard labor market analysis.
That's a solid synthesis. The only thing I'd add is that the professionalization trend is real and probably the most important development to watch. As family offices become more institutional and agencies become more standardized, the worst abuses may become less common. But the fundamental asymmetry of working for a person rather than an institution isn't going away.
Because at the end of the day, you can professionalize the contract but you can't professionalize the dinner table. You're still there, in the house, watching the family be a family, not quite part of it.
That's the thing. That's the whole thing.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the 1950s, a Soviet microbiologist isolated a strain of lactic acid bacteria from a clay pot of fermented mare's milk found in a burial mound near the Caspian Sea. The pot was roughly two thousand years old. The bacteria were still viable, and the strain — Lactobacillus delbrueckii subspecies bulgaricus — is now used in several commercial yogurt cultures in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The original pot is in a museum in Baku, Azerbaijan.
...Two-thousand-year-old yogurt bacteria.
Just sitting in a pot.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. If you want more episodes, you can find us at myweirdprompts dot com or wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be back next week.
