Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sho 1285 days ago
I think it depends on the country and the viability of any sort of attack on the person as an enterprise likely to produce profit.

In countries known for their lawlessness, perhaps Brazil for example, or Papua New Guinea, HNW people do indeed have security details and live in pretty fortified areas (whole districts, typically, not just houses). A visiting CEO or whoever, depending on how well-known they are and how publicly knowable their visit is likely to be, might well organise such protection when they visit. Countries like this, all countries actually, have companies specialising in exactly that.

But I think in countries where there is a credible claim to rule of law, attacks on the actual person are pretty rare. Kidnapping as a general crime is all but extinct in most of the developed world, and you'd have to kidnap someone to make any actual money - it's not like they have a billion dollars in cash on their person. You'd have to kidnap for ransom (or I suppose crypto keys these days?) which is just extraordinarily risky and unlikely to succeed in the modern, developed world.

As to the "uber from the airport" question, anyone above a certain net worth has at least one assistant who organises their calendar and travel (and their whole lives, actually) and they will have arranged transport to/from airports in advance.

1 comments

To give an example of this, I live in Hong Kong and I've seen people park their very expensive lamborghini, ferrari and mclaren and just go to a small completely unassuming restaurant. I'm always curious so I google the car make I see and some were valued over a million usd. So at least high net worth individuals (not the extremes) feel safe in this city.
Hong Kong actually had famous cases of kidnap-billionaire-for-ransom in the 1990s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheung_Tze-keung#Kidnappings
Yes and a murder in Luk yu tea house. This doesn't stop high net worth from feeling rather safe. The extremes like the billionaire tycoons are a different matter and I've seen Richard Li come in a restaurant I was eating with his entire retinue of body guards.