We continue through Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes 2 sounds like the Friday Mansion section of Wall Street Journal which continually tells stories with a common theme:

• (Wealthy) people buy a home for $X million.
• They spend $Y million remodeling it to meet their every whim.
• A few years later, they sell it for $Z million because apparently the house didn’t quite meet their needs for very long.

Solomon’s version goes like this:

I made my works great, I built myself houses, and planted myself vineyards. I made myself gardens and orchards, and I planted all kinds of fruit trees in them. I made myself water pools from which to water the growing trees of the grove…Whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them. I did not withhold my heart from any pleasure, For my heart rejoiced in all my labor; And this was my reward from all my labor. Then I looked on all the works that my hands had done And on the labor in which I had toiled; And indeed all was vanity and grasping for the wind. There was no profit under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 2.4 – 6, 10, 11, NKJV)

As I say, the folks in the Wall Street Journal do all that, then sell. I’m still processing the CEO of Waste Management who had one of the best houses in Aspen. I’ve seen that house. Walking distance to the music festival that we try to go to for a couple of days each summer. He only lived in it for about a year back in 2020 before he “upgraded to the 11-bedroom compound at the base of Aspen’s Red Mountain.” He bought it, remodeled it for his family, then sold it because a guy offered him a lot of money. The CEO doesn’t even need the money.

Here’s the opening of the story from “The Waste Management Billionaire Setting Real Estate Records for Fun.”

Waste management billionaire Patrick Dovigi was at his Aspen, Colorado, home when he got an unexpected call from former casino magnate Steve Wynn on New Year’s Day in 2024.

Wynn wanted to buy the house, though it wasn’t on the market. Dovigi paid $72.5 million for the property in 2021, then a record price for the affluent alpine town, and had just finished fixing it up for his young family. “Initially, I said no. I wasn’t interested,” recalled Dovigi.

But Wynn persisted. Four months later, he and financier Thomas Peterffy closed on the 22,000-square-foot house for $108 million—setting a new Aspen record.

Dovigi was in the house about three years. “Fixed it up for his young family.” Then sold it for a profit he didn’t even need. Then he has to move, and I’m acutely aware that moving is hard!

Dovigi insists that he’s building/buying houses to live in:

“He’s always like, ‘This is the place, we’ll never sell it. This is it.’ But then there’s always something else,” Fernanda says. “There’s always other opportunities,” her husband interjects. 

Solomon was right:

And indeed all was vanity and grasping for the wind. (Ecclesiastes 2.11, NKJV)