My experience with billionaires? I read a book, Richistan.
Basically, they can afford to pay someone(s) to handle the mundane stuff. Pick up a car from the dealership? Arrange for hotel rooms and private jet flights? Make medical appointments? Take the dog to the groomers? Pay the bills? I presume they could even arrange an after-hours appointment or have someone sit in line for a DMV visit, if they are celebrity enough to need privacy. i wonder if there’s a “personal shopping” type DMV office for VIP’s who need to get things done on their schedule? (Much like they see the bank manager, don’t line up for the tellers).
It’s pretty well documented. I’ll never find it but I once saw an interview with Jobs where he also acknoledged doing so. Until recently, California didn’t have temporary plates, so when you bought a new car, you got a folded piece of paper to stick in the front windshield. If you bought a motorcycle, you just freestyled it until the plates showed up.
Things are less fun now. There are temp tags for everyone, and you no longer have 6 months to put on plates but 90 days.
If it’s fully true, and I don’t doubt it could be, I’m not understanding what Jobs thought he was gaining by this. Was he stickin’ it to the Man?
Or was it more of a joke: I’m so rich I get a new car every 6 months when I get tired of the color of the current one. And by happy coincidence that means I can even skip registering it. Tee hee.
Because it’s sure not like he was going to have to stand personally in line at the DMV to register and title the darn thing. Which ISTM would be the only thing a person in his position would rationally and appropriately object to.
What I’m reading says it was about not having a plate on the car. Apparently he really didn’t like license plates.
It was the license plates. Jobs hated license plates. California allowed for the first six months of car ownership, depending on a few things, you didn’t have to plate it. Jobs worked out a deal to lease a new car every 180 days or so and therefore never had to have a plate.
Well, it was Steve being Steve. He kept getting more or less the same silver Mercedes SL-55 AMG. I think his base reasoning was that he always had a crispy-fresh car, but he also said he really liked having ‘less visual clutter’.
Supposedly he also liked that helped him maintain privacy, but that’s a little weird because who in the Silicon Valley area wouldn’t know whose untagged AMG that was?
Also, asshole that he was, he regularly parked it in handicapped spaces.
From the link I posted (no idea if it’s actually true though)
For years, he replaced his black Porsche 911 with another black Porsche 911. He eventually moved to Mercedes-Benz SL55s. Always the same car, always the same color.
I’m sure that if he was still alive and driving today he’d enjoy the trend of custom painted or fully obscured license plates that many people get away with. He’d be leading that charge. More likely he’d be unwilling to accomodate the state even that far and would simply up his car replacement cycle to 90 days so he still could avoid registering it.
When I was on the Apple campus (the old one) circa 2002, Steve Jobs silver sports car was parked in the employee parking lot. It had no plates. There is (or was) a loophole in California law that allowed brand new vehicles 6 months to get license plates, so Jobs simply got a new car every six months. He’d had problems with people harassing him and following him home, a staffer told me, and this was his way around that.
That was the official line, anyway.
I think if they drive, most billionaires go to the DMV IF and need to renew their licenses in person. Bill Gates used to own a ranch near the town where I lived in Wyoming. He used to drive into town alone and walk around, so he must have had a Wyoming license. .
The one thing that’s missing is that back then, any new car in California wouldn’t have plates, as there was no system of temporary tags. Lots of shiny new cars around campus without plates in those days. What Steve did that was different from most people is that he also went out of his way to take the dealer frame and ad off the back too.
Yeah, but back in the pre-temp tag days here, that dealer ad was what signified to the cops that you got a new car and weren’t worth pulling over for no plates.
Ah, who am I kidding. Cops down here don’t care if you have plates.
Huh? The dealership decals were applied to the rear deck face when the car was sold as new and generally stayed there until the car was scrapped. So in no sense did that signify a new car
Only purists like you, me, my Dad, and @Whack-a-Mole insisted on removing those excresences.
Or are you referring to the advertising paper with “JONES Chevrolet” or whatever that was fitted into the license plate frame back in the day? I’d almost forgotten those things.
It’s definitely wacky and not an urban legend—that detail about buying a new Mercedes every six months was included in Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of Steve Jobs.
And “wacky” was par for the course for Jobs; he intentionally parked in handicapped spaces. He also tried to cure his own highly curable cancer with a vegan diet rather than having his tumor excised. This delay meant he required a liver transplant, and he arguably paid to jump the line (by getting registered in Tennessee, IIRC) while waiting for a donated organ. Obviously, the cancer he ignored killed him anyway.
After I read Isaacson’s biography, I resolved that if one of my kids grew up to be “the next Steve Jobs,” then I must have failed grievously as a parent.
