Dior is doubling down on its relationship with Johnny Depp. The French luxury fashion house and cosmetics giant, which stood by the star even when he faced choppy PR waters amid his legal battle with ex-wife Amber Heard, has signed Depp to a massive deal, marking the biggest men’s fragrance pact ever.

Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch has announced his engagement to his partner Ann Lesley Smith, a former police chaplain. Mr Murdoch, 92, and Ms Smith, 66, met in September at an event at his vineyard in California.

The billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott’s donations have yielded more than $14bn for about 1,600 non-profits since 2019, according to her new website Yield Giving, which was unveiled on Wednesday night. Scott’s wealth largely comes from her divorce from the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos. She has signed the Giving Pledge, promising to give away more than half. Forbes currently estimates her net worth at $27bn.

At the Monaco Yacht Show, U-Boat Worx unveiled its Nautilus design, a 123-foot, 1,250-ton vessel that the company says can function as a yacht or a submersible that uses diesel-electric power down to about 650 feet below sea level. Cruising speed is projected to be 9 knots for the Nautilus, with an underwater speed of 4 knots.

There are 3,000 ultra-rich individuals around the world who don’t flinch at spending $32,000 for a hotel room and thousands more for dinner without a moment’s thought about inflation.

MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon and Blue Origin’s founder Jeff Bezos, has donated two of her Beverly Hills homes for a total of $55 million.

As a humanist who writes about the impact of digital technology on our lives, I am often mistaken for a futurist. The people most interested in hiring me for my opinions about technology are usually less concerned with building tools that help people live better lives in the present than they are in identifying the Next Big Thing through which to dominate them in the future. I don’t usually respond to their inquiries. Why help these guys ruin what’s left of the internet, much less civilisation?

Kylie Jenner has faced a torrent of criticism for her decision to take her private jet on a flight that lasted just 17 minutes. But the practice of taking brief journeys on luxury aircraft appears to be common among the rich and famous despite mounting concerns over the climate crisis.

Rich people have a problem. No, it’s not lukewarm champagne or confrontation by stories of poor people in the news. How do they get their zillion-dollar yacht to the next sun-drenched destination location when they are tired of getting their feet wet? Thoughts and prayers, people.

The Florida teenager demanding Elon Musk hand over $50,000 to stop him tweeting the location of the billionaire’s private jet has said he is creating dozens more accounts tracking the movements of other rich and famous people. Jack Sweeney, a 19-year-old college student and aviation enthusiast, said he had created 16 automated Twitter accounts, or bots, similar to @ElonJet to follow jets owned by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates (@GatesJet), Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban and the rapper Drake.

In the early 1900s some of the wealthiest Americans claimed their fortunes would never last through the generations. A century of tax avoidance later, the dynasties are going strong.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture guided another suborbital space trip into the record books today — a trip that also marked a giant leap toward making space tourism routine. When Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket ship lifted off from Launch Site One near Van Horn, Texas, every one of the crew capsule’s six seats was filled for the first time ever.

I began writing the Wealth Matters column in December 2008. The column was conceived earlier that year, when the economy still appeared to be running high. But by the time the first one ran, the economy was deep in crisis, and Americans were worried about their investments, their savings and, in many cases, their homes. It took years for many Americans to recover. As for the wealthy, they have flourished in those 13 years.

Dubai, the richest city in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) and the 29th wealthiest in the world, is seeing an influx of millionaires. According to New World Wealth, a research firm that tracks the wealth and the movements of millionaires, multi-millionaires and billionaires globally, Dubai’s population of high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs), rose to 54,000 in June 2021, up by 3.8 percent from 52,000 last December.

Apple CEO Tim Cook just celebrated 10 years on the job. He also marked the occasion this week by collecting — and selling off — three quarters of a billion dollars' worth of stock. The transactions were revealed in a regulatory filing Thursday, which showed that Cook had acquired and sold more than 5 million shares of the iPhone maker.

Jeff Bezos' space company is offering to cover billions of dollars in costs for a contract with NASA to take astronauts to the moon. Blue Origin said it would cover up to $2 billion in operating costs for the first two years of production of a moon lander, waiving payments for the first two years if NASA awards the company the project. The company is also offering to develop and launch a pathfinder mission at its own costs, as well as work with NASA on a fixed-price contract, which would free NASA from any cost overages.

The award for “Best Small Talk on a Flight to Space” goes to Oliver Daemen, the 18-year-old from the Netherlands who was part of Blue Origin’s inaugural crewed flight to space earlier this week. On the roughly 10-minute flight, Daemon told Amazon founder Jeff Bezos what probably sounded like blasphemy to his billionaire ears: He had never bought anything on Amazon.

The commercial race to get tourists to space is heating up between Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson and former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. On July 11, Branson ascended 80 km (49 miles) to reach the edge of space in his piloted Virgin Galactic VSS Unity spaceplane, while Bezos’ autonomous Blue Origin rocket launched today on July 20, coinciding with the anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. Although Bezos launched later than Branson, he set out to reach higher altitudes — about 120 km, or 74 miles.

Yesterday, Jeff Bezos — the founder and CEO of Amazon, and, not incidentally, Blue Origin — took a ride into space along with three other people inside the capsule of a New Shepard rocket.

It's the most 2021 of all 2021 storylines: after gorging themselves on the best of a plague-torn planet, the billionaires are going to space. Corporate giants Richard Branson, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have all drawn on public coffers — as well as their own enormous fortunes — to breach the bounds of earth.