New York Times Wall Street reporter Kevin Roose spent a day living like a billionaire for an article. A day that could have been filled with personal parades and hot air balloon rides was instead a total letdown.

Sure, Roose takes a Rolls Royce to the airport and takes a flight on a private jet—but that jet goes to Georgia, not the secret moonbase where billionaires meet and play space golf and decide who's going to win the next U.S. presidential election. And Roose gets a private bodyguard for the day, but it's just some former police detective from Florida, not a cybernetic superhuman with gatling guns for arms on loan from the U.S. Army's special Billionaire Protection Division.

Roose goes on a big night out to the Metropolitan Opera and the Box. The Box? I've been to the Box. A real billionaire would fly to a remote Pacific island to hunt the poor with crossbows, or do cocaine off a congressman's balding head in a secret underground Washington D.C. brothel, or fund a private treasure-hunting expedition to find Cortez's lost gold! Maybe all that stuff went out with the financial crisis.

[Image via Shutterstock]