Billionaire Blames School Because His Son Grew Up to Be an Asshole

It must be so tough to be a rich parent. You just want to swim around in your vault full of money, but then you have kids and they grow up to be assholes and everyone looks at you like it’s your fault.

According to CNN, Wang Sicong’s father is worth an estimated $30 billion. His hobbies include playing with his dog and obscene displays of inherited wealth. This week he bought seven $1,200 iPhone 7s for his dog, Coco.

Buying an iPhone for a cat is one thing–at least cats can play with mouse-chasing apps–but buying seven for a dog is ridiculous. They’d rather have tennis balls. But Wang Sicong wasn’t buying the phones for the dog, he was buying them to flex his wealth on Twitter. And people did not love seeing an Alaskan Malamute with over $8,000 of new phones, but that’s not even particularly egregious for this kid. Previously he bought the dog two Apple Watches on designer bands that were worth more than $37,000. Then he went on the air and said that all he looked for in a girlfriend was the size of her breasts.

So, basically just a garden-variety asshole, then. Dude, we already know you’re rich. What are you doing? This isn’t even like if a person got into expensive cars or watches or wine or something. He’s genuinely just like, “Look how I can waste money! I bought watches for my dog! Do you not see that I am rich? Are you not entertained!?” It’s kind of pathetic, really.

When rich kids start acting this way, people tend to look towards the parents. Someone’s paying for all those iPhones, after all. In this case, Wang Sicong’s father seems to think his son is acting like a total tool, but went on TV to say that his son’s asshole behavior was the fault of having gone to school in the west.

Schools are important, but at a certain point a parent has veto power. If the parent is a billionaire, that means the parent has even more control over the situation than might a parent who was subject to financial concerns like, “my neighborhood school sucks, but that’s all there is.” If you’re a billionaire and you see that your expensive private school is turning your kid into an asshole, you take them out of that school. I can name 10 other fancy schools that would take your kid off the top of my head. If your kid thinks the height of humor is putting $40,000 of Apple Watches on a dog, maybe don’t give him so money to throw around like that. (Or at least enroll him in comedy school or something. “Look! Phones on a dog!” isn’t exactly the height of cleverness.)

OK, unless you have access to the ghosts of Chrsitmases Past, Present, and Future,  there’s probably not much you can do to de-asshole a kid at 28. But this degree of grandstanding jerkitude takes time to cultivate, and his parents or caretakers almost certainly had time to oppose this tendency before he was a full-grown adult and out of their control. (I love Batman, but I can’t shake the thought that maybe Alfred could have done more to prevent this whole costumed vigilante thing when Bruce Wayne was a child.)

I do feel the need to defend rich parents here a bit, because it isn’t just the having of money that makes kids turn out like this. It’s the combination of having nigh limitless resources and also no authority figures to curb one’s appetite for indulgence. Scrooge McDuck was the richest duck in the world, and Huey, Dewey, and Louie were all growing up to be pretty sweet kids. But Uncle Scrooge had it right: He was rich. The kids weren’t. Did the kids get to swim around in the big pool of money. No, they did not. They got to travel and go to school and fight crime and everything, but if they wanted stuff they had to run lemonade stands and do all sorts of scheming to get it. I never thought I’d say this, but Scrooge McDuck was a pretty good parenting role model.