Millionaires-only R360 club filters out ‘wrong people’ to stay ultra-exclusive
Sometimes, even being rich isn’t enough to buy you what you want.
“Letting in the wrong people is the type of thing that will bring down a community,” said Charles Garcia, co-founder of R360, a new social and investing club for millionaires that makes Soho House look as easy to join as the Boy Scouts.
The year-old private group is aimed at anyone with assets of at least $100 million; the sign-up fee alone costs $180,000 (although that does include three years’ worth of membership). But good luck getting accepted.
While there are plenty of people who qualify on paper — more than 20,000 families in America have wealth of that level — prospective Bond villains need not apply; only those with clean cash and a sense of higher purpose will squeak past the approval committee.
Take the cashed-up applicant who was turned down because his family wasn’t motivated to join him in pivoting away from frittering money on luxuries. Or the one who was 86’d because it was clear he viewed R360 as a chance to network and sell his investment services.
“We filter out those folks pretty aggressively,” Garcia, 60, told The Post. “This is a conflict-free zone.”
Member Pearl Baker Katz said it’s a relief to be among people who understand the peculiarities of being rich.
“I can have a conversation about exactly how much money I have, which you can’t have with most people out in the world. It’s a community,” said the 57-year-old, who winters with her husband, Marcus, on Fisher Island in Miami Beach, and summers in San Diego. Her fortune derives from the student loan business she founded by borrowing a million bucks from her then-boyfriend, which she parlayed into a company worth $144 million when she sold it in 2009. That was enough for her to retire at just 44.
Of course, for members like Baker Katz, R360 does offer advice on how to invest — it would be a waste not to pool that brain trust — but this isn’t some cookie-cutter stock tip service. The club acts as an elite mashup of therapist, concierge and financial adviser. It can even offer unexpected benefits — like a date.
Co-founder Garcia said that wealthy straight women in particular still often struggle with a stigma around being the breadwinner. “We have several situations where [the woman making more money] led to a divorce,” he noted. Then, “when women are divorced and have a lot of wealth, all they’re looking for is a really nice person to share their life with, but they have a lot of trouble as men get very intimidated.”
In fact, it’s such a topic of discussion that Garcia is mulling a “thoughtful program around it” for 2022 as part of R360’s official remit.
Garcia, who is himself married to wife Christina, 50, with whom he has four kids, is a former US intelligence officer who ended up filthy rich after switching careers to wealth management and selling his company, Sterling Financial, in the late 1990s.
https://nypost.com/2021/12/11/millionaires-only-r360-club-filters-out-the-wrong-people/