Witnessing an entitled brat get punished for their terrible behavior can be one of the most satisfying feelings out there. Karma was swift and brutal, and made for some entertainingly outrageous meltdowns from these spoiled people. Content has been edited for clarity.
Secret Agendas
“There’s a kid I went to school with (let’s call him Saul) who has parents in politics. At one point his father was a senator. His family was super rich, but they also extended fully loaded bank accounts to their kids to spend money for whatever. Naturally, Saul was always super conceited. He got along well with guys, but Saul treated women so poorly. He referred to girls as objects and generally talked down to them. He did not respect relationships between other people and considered them doomed to fail at any moment.
Enter Alan, my friend who got a very serious girlfriend in high school. Saul was determined to ruin their relationship by wooing this girl with his money and status. The girl seemingly let him win her over, but in reality she was in it with her current boyfriend to get as much of his money as possible. She made him think she was cheating on her boyfriend with him, and this really got Saul going. He never actually slept with her, and at most he got a kiss on the cheek.
After 3 months of going on lavish dates to insanely expensive restaurants, doing luxury activities, and also buying gifts for her, Saul starts telling her she has to leave my other friend and be with him. Saul now wants to hook up with this girl and outright tells her that’s what he wants. This girl tells him to buy her a car, and she’ll ‘dump Alan’s sorry butt.’
Now in the real world this would never be possible, but since Saul has a maxed out bank account and access to funds in his name, he takes this girl to a BMW dealership and buys her a car. They end up putting the title in her name and he gifts it to her. Within the next week, this girl skips town entirely and my friends and I never saw her again. We have no idea if she went and sold the car or drove away with it and moved somewhere else. She even left her boyfriend.
Saul ended up thinking this would be a small consequence at first, but when his parents found out what happened, they pulled everything. They went from fully spoiling to disowning this kid. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but Saul spent some time homeless after he finished college. The biggest dose of reality imaginable. I think he’s working in sales now and has a decent life. He moved out of state, so all I ever see about him is through social media.”
Caught In The Act
“When I was a teenager, my sister and I saw through our windows that there were two guys getting into her car. We ran downstairs as fast as possible and caught them in the act. One managed to run away, but the other one froze and didn’t run away. He couldn’t have been much older than me. My sister called the cops, and the kid kept looking at us while trying to find a way to escape. My sister said, ‘Run if you want. My brother will catch you.’
The cops came, and so did his parents. His mom drove an amazingly expensive car, and the lady looked furious and sad. She was dressed really nice and looked like she was pretty successful. As soon as she got out, she began yelling, ‘Why?! We give you everything! You have everything! Why would you try to steal?! Don’t we give you enough?!’
The kid just seemed to shrink and get smaller. I don’t get it. What a loser. I hope he turned his life around and began to be around better people.”
Sinister Sloth
“When I was little, my dad owned an exotic pet shop in Texas. A college girl comes in and tells him that she needs a sloth so her sorority can win a contest they were having to get the weirdest animal. My dad says, ‘No, you don’t want a sloth, it will destroy everything.’
But she insisted and said her daddy owned the city and would have him shut down if he didn’t get her the sloth. So he told her to come back the next day. He then talked to a lawyer and they drew up a long agreement, saying he wasn’t responsible for any damages, blah blah blah, and made her sign it. He told her if she brought the sloth back, she’d have to pay shipping for it back to Brazil or wherever it came from. So the sloth comes in and the girls come get it, and they’re so excited because they’re gonna win.
The next day, she comes in crying. It had shredded her clothes, carpets, wallpaper, beds, furniture, everything. She tried to get my dad’s shop to pay for the damages, tried not to pay the shipping going back, but she’d signed the contract. She tried to use her daddy about that, too, and mine said he could come down and see a copy of the agreement if he wanted. Didn’t work out too well for her.”
Ultimate Karma
“I went to college with a spoiled, self-proclaimed ‘rich kid’ freshman year, who was hit with the realization that while his family may have been seen as wealthy in his poor hometown, he was barely even considered above middle class compared to the people here. Note that I went to a public school on scholarship. This guy was just the perfect mix of clueless/delusional, with so much condescension.
We’re maybe 3 or 4 days into classes and he’s doing his usual routine of striking up a typical freshman dorm conversation (what’s your name, where are you from, what are you studying, etc) solely as an opportunity to brag about how rich is family is. In other words, acting like a complete and utter condescending snob a week into freshman year while everyone’s just trying to make friends
While most of the freshmen (myself included) are busy trying to make friends and adjust to college life, he’s busy humble-bragging to anyone who will listen about his family’s wealth.
In short, the ‘rich’ kid finds out about the meaning of the ‘big fish in a small pond’ analogy the hard way, and is pretty much the butt of ‘my parents are so rich’ jokes the rest of the year. He manages to pretty much alienate an entire floor of freshmen less than a week into college and is publicly humiliated by ‘actual’ rich kids. All because he decided go into college bragging about the same stuff he probably got away with in his small town in high school.
He stumbles across some ‘actual’ extremely wealthy kids (the ‘multiple expensive vacation homes and full time staff at their mansion’ kind of rich) and tries pulling this on them by one-upping them at every turn in their conversation.
It takes less than 2 minutes for them to realize he’s either delusional or a complete fraud, and they pretty much start tearing into him for everything. For bragging about being rich when he came from one of the poorest towns in the state, for acting like some privileged snob and looking down on other people when he’s an in-state student attending a PUBLIC school of all places. They were asking him why he’s wearing $15 button up shirts from Kohls and $20 jeans if he’s as rich as he claims etc.
The kicker at the end is the ‘rich kid’ tries mentioning his dad’s job at a large pharmaceutical company as a final bragging point, while saying he probably made way more than their fathers. Note: this would be a job that would probably pay something like $150,000 in salary (definitely not bad, but definitely not ‘rich’). One of the other guys nearly collapses a lung laughing at him because his own dad recently stepped down/retired as one of the senior VP’s of the same company.”
Party Hard
“My mom was the doctor of one of the cleaning ladies at one of my rich classmate’s house. On a Saturday, this girl threw a big party at her house while her parents were away. The other rich cool kids were invited (and I was not). She promised that the party would be decadent. On Sunday, photos started to appear on Facebook: everyone was wasted, everyone was kissing everyone, preservatives were thrown on the lawn, and you could see a lot of vomit and broken things on the background. Some kid decided to ‘cook’ noodles in the jacuzzi and broke it by emptying seemingly every pack of ramen noodles in it. It was definitely a big, big mess. The girl replied to every picture with, ‘Haha yeah, good luck to the maids.’
On Monday, she went back to school, and instead of being her arrogant self, she was real quiet and went home immediately after class, without saying anything.
When my mom went home that night, she told me she had a great story for me about this girl. Remember her awful comment about the ‘maids’? Well the cleaning lady came to the house for her usual shift on Sunday morning and saw the mess. Rich Girl barely wakes up from her hangover and tells her to clean it all up. Cleaning lady refuses, and rich girls says, ‘If you don’t, my parents will fire you.’
So the cleaning lady takes very detailed pictures of the house and sends them to the girl’s parents. 10 minutes later, the rich girl’s phone is ringing, and her parents yell at her that she is a disgrace and needs to clean everything. She won’t have any money, a cellphone, or a computer until the end of high school (which was one and a half years away). They also apologize profusely to the cleaning lady. So she’s crying, and asks the cleaning lady to help her because she can’t do it.
The cleaning lady refuses and leaves, letting the rich girl clean everything by herself. She then told my mother that the parents came to her apartment during the evening, apologizing again, calling their daughter an ‘ungrateful brat’, and gave her a raise immediately. Apparently, the jacuzzi was unusable for four months.”
“Her World Came Apart”
“My wife was evicted from her dorm in college, dropped from her classes for non-payment, and had her car repossessed. Her dad was a CEO of a fairly large company, and he had an income north of $1 million per year in the late 90s. The company was being bought out, and the board members all stood to make a ton of money each. They did background checks on everyone and found out that her dad lied about his experience and education. He did not have an MBA from Stanford. He did not have any college degree. He did not play in the NFL. He was not a decorated war hero. So they fired him quickly, so they could split his slice of the buyout amongst themselves.
He never told his wife or daughter. He continued to run up debt and live the same lifestyle while being unemployed. He forged my mother-in-law’s name on all sorts of loan and credit applications. Then one day, he left them high and dry for a wealthy woman he had been having an affair with. He filed bankruptcy and managed, somehow, to get away pretty clean while leaving most of the debt in my mother-in-law’s lap. My wife was completely ignorant of everything going on, and her father said he was still paying for everything. Her world came apart and he ghosted her for years.
She gathered her composure and enrolled in community college. That is where we met. I taught her how to live a pretty decent life as a poor person. I had tons of experience being poor. Nearly two decades later, we are both making good money and have a family of our own. She learned a lot from that experience and has even reconciled with her dad. We keep him at an arm’s length, since he is a narcissist and a pathological liar, but at least she has a relationship with her father.”
Home Run!
“It’s not just one person, but a whole community. We live in a VERY rich school system, with loads of big money parents and their arrogant ‘do you know who my dad is’ type of kids. I’m one of the few who isn’t like that. Now, our baseball team has a team A and a team B, one which plays in an upper league, and one that plays in a lower league. Me and a few of my friends, who had all played since we were little, played team B, like we always do. But this year, our A team was filled with the richest brats, all of whom had $700 equipment, and bragged about how good they were. We won our league, and team A placed in the bottom of theirs. Now, to feel good about themselves (at least I assume), they scheduled an exhibition match with us. We got badly trash talked during the whole pregame, about how all of our regular metal bats didn’t even COMPARE to their beautiful wooden ones, with their names carved in and everything like that. Our coach told us not to hold back.
We didn’t. Fast-forward four innings, and it’s a forfeit from their coach, with a score of 13-0. They’ve gotten 2 people on base, but other than that, it’s been shutout pitching. We had stellar batting all around, and BOY, did we feel good about that retribution.”
Welll That Was A Smart Idea
“I had a brother-in-law (since gone due to his divorce). His parents were wealthy from the dad’s dad. So, grandpa was the original maker of the money. The brother-in-law was a lazy nothing with a weak hand shake and no ambition, except to put an hour or two per week into his own ‘work’ and act as if that was enough, while his mom and dad funded his ‘passions’ (including his expensive house and car). Keep in mind, this guy is 40-something at the time, and has a prestigious law degree, which he does not use. He has no savings, no property. Can’t hammer a nail. And would probably drown in heavy rain. So, his mom and dad got the idea to open a big business using grandpa’s money, which they had inherited.
They put about $15M into it to create it from scratch, which I believe 80-90% of their entire fortune. It went belly up within 6 months. They lost it all to the banks. Now, I have nothing against his mom and dad, except for the fact that when we all got together, they relentlessly bragged about the Ivy League educations of their children. Okay, I take it back. They were so pretentious. However, when they lost their assets, and the brother-in-law started to experience debt via credit card, he completely freaked out.
He said, ‘I never realized how hard it is to get money.’
Which I thought was an odd way to phrase it. ‘Get money’ instead of ‘earn money’. Yet he did nothing for a long time. He moved debt around from credit card to credit card. Now, he has moved off and is practicing law. So at least he is, theoretically, not a parasite any more (although he IS a lawyer).”
Late Night Justice
“I was in Boy Scouts when I was younger, and we decided to go on a 60-mile canoe trip one week during the summer. There was this one kid in our troop, whose dad was essentially a CEO-for-hire. They lived in a million dollar house, and this kid was the basketball star of the high school we went to. He also was so mean, and thought the whole world should go out of their way to give him what he wants.
One night, this kid wakes up in the middle of the night because he has to take a dump. He went about 50 yards away from camp, squatted down, relieved himself, and realized he hadn’t grabbed any toilet paper to wipe with. Luckily, there were these nice big, shiny leaves in front of him, so he used them to wipe and clean up. He then went back to sleep.
Just a couple of hours later, he woke up with a terrible itchy rash all up his butt. It turns out he has wiped with poison ivy. The Scout Leaders (one of them was his dad) has to evacuate him out and get him to a hospital, because he was having an internal reaction to the poison ivy. The rest of us were laughing our heads off the rest of the trip about it, because he had always been a nasty bully to the rest of us.
Needless to say, that kid soon became the quiet kid until he graduated from high school.”
No Money Could Buy What She Wanted
“I attended a very small middle school where most of the students were rich. There was one girl in particular who was dropped off every morning in her parents’ Range Rover or huge Cadillac. She was the first to have the first Juicy Couture Sidekick phone (we were all so jealous), and she had many Louis Vitton and Coach bags. She would always scrunch her nose when other classmates brought lunches that weren’t pasta salads or sandwiches. She’d make it KNOWN that she was always chosen first for sports games and made those chosen last feel terrible, and would hand out invites to her exclusive birthday parties to just her friends in front of the entire class.
Anyway, in the area we lived, there’s an exclusive all-girls high school that was notorious for being very selective with their students. Naturally, she wanted to get in super badly. Probably because she thought she was smart enough, but also because her parents expected her to. Four girls in our class (including me) took an extensive entrance exam, and it turned out that we all got in except her! She lost her mind. She legitimately sulked in class and cried when our teacher made an announcement to congratulate us. I heard rumors that her parents tried to pay her way in, but she ended up just going to another school, so I’m not too sure how legit that rumor was.
Guess money can buy a lot of things, but not brains!”
Did He Get Redemption?
“I was walking to my car, wondering why my dad was being such a prick and wouldn’t give me money to go have fun. I was walking over, in my clothes which my dad bought for me, wearing my one-a-day contacts that my Dad buys every 6 months. I looked at my $14,000 car that I don’t pay insurance or maintenance or even gas for, and as I got in, looking at my $300 phone, I really saw my life and all my privilege. I realized I had become a spoiled brat. All these possessions, and still in my head I was making my dad out to be the enemy.
I thought about all the money my dad had invested into my future. He gives and works and toils, and if he could read my mind he would cry, because all I had were bad thoughts about how terrible my dad was for not giving me what I want. He didn’t have to read my mind though, to see me walk in the house every day, pass him by on the sofa, without even a glance, and lock myself in my room. How could it have come to this?
I felt truly humbled that day. I went back to the house and gave my dad a big hug. Then we spent the rest of the day watching TV. That was what he wanted all along, just my company, I could finally give to him, without my mind being in another room. After that day, I made an effort to never think bad thoughts about my dad again, and I made an effort to treat him like a friend, and not an inconvenience of my life.
That was back when I was 19, now at 25, I just hope I’ve redeemed myself.”
Celebrity Gone Wild
“I saw Justin Bieber throw a massive fit and end up not getting what he wanted. We have quarterly team building exercises at my company, where you basically go and play mini golf or some other activity capped at $25/person. Sometime between 2009 and 2011, my group just decided to go for a fancy lunch in Downtown Portland. After lunch, we took one of our coworkers to the semi-famous Nike store, which was a couple of blocks away. Turns out that was the day Justin Bieber happened to show up.
When he and his entourage arrived, he said something somewhat loudly along the lines of, ‘You all are going to have to leave for a bit, because I’m here to do some shopping.’
Some of his people acted like they were going to politely force the already-present customers out of the store, so Bieber could shop alone. But the Nike employees even more politely told him that was not possible. At that point, Bieber lost it. I mean he threw a total tantrum because they wouldn’t shut down the store for him. The tantrum didn’t work, and he and his folks left in a huff. He was so lame in person.”
Political Chaos
“A kid from my high school came from a well-known family that was very involved in politics. He slacked off in school and was mostly a condescending idiot for years. After graduation, he didn’t really do anything, but eventually decided to run for office, as he had the same name as his father. He won easily, because people didn’t realize it was the kid.
As a state rep, he posted on Facebook about ‘Enjoying his women battered rather than plain’, and asking to join the black caucus because he like hip hop. He also dropped a loaded weapon on the floor in the middle of a session, after fighting for the right to carry a weapon in the state house as a ‘responsible weapon owner’. He kept getting elected despite these issues, because his family was well-connected, and he had a dedicated following from some political groups.
After 6 years in office, he gets busted for inappropriate behavior with a minor over the internet. When they arrest him for that, they also discover he’s been dealing narcotics. The worst part is that his family is actually super nice and genuinely made the community a better place, but now they have to deal with all the issues from him. He was an apple that fell very far from the tree.”
On Another Planet
“For a couple of years in high school, I went to this super expensive American private school in Switzerland. The company my dad worked for paid for almost all the tuition, so it was an amazing opportunity for me. Most of the kids in this school were international students from extremely wealthy families. One of these kids, who I will call The Prince, was somewhere in the line of Saudi succession, but honestly, he was like 1,455th in line for the throne. Not a real contender for King, but his family was rich. Like rich in a way that most of us can’t even imagine.
This school had some rules, like you couldn’t have a car as a student, even if you were old enough to get a license in Switzerland. This rule was a real buzz kill for The Prince, but he made it through the year somehow. Over the summer after his junior year, he drove back to the school from Geneva in his Lamborghini, probably just because he could do it outside the school year. On his way up the mountain (the road is like an endless series of hairpin turns), he managed to flip his Lamborghini into vineyard while trying to navigate one of those narrow turns. His parents, furious at what he had done, decided to punish him by replacing his Lamborghini with a Porsche. And The Prince was beyond angry. He complained about it bitterly when the school year started up again. The rest of us kind of just looked at each other in amazement. Same planet, different worlds I guess.”
“Tears Of Disbelief”
“Tears of disbelief when seeing poverty for the first time. The first day of our missionary work, my mission team drove into Tijuana, Mexico. We were high school students and had spent the first few days in LA ‘prepping’, and most of the team still had this idea that we would spend 5 days in a poor area, save everyone, and then go home with something amazing for our college applications.
Krista was this witch whose parents were insanely wealthy. All the parties were at her house, since they had a pool. Her mom used to buy her 6 or 7 prom dresses and then return the ones she didn’t like because it was ‘easier’ than shopping. So we’re crammed into this passenger van and the border crossing into Mexico is fine, but soon as we get to our neighborhood, and Krista sees scrap wood with tarps making up the homes and children playing half clothed in streets made of dirt. When she realizes that the ‘water’ coming down from the single bathroom isn’t water, after a child happily hands her a gift (his favorite rock), she breaks.
She just completely broke down into tears and disbelief because her entire life had been sheltered from the reality of anything but the rich and spoiled. I wish I could say it changed her into a better person, but she remained a spoiled and self-centered witch until I purposefully lost touch with her family. The real world can hit a rich kid, but they can ignore the pain if they just focus hard enough on the car that Daddy promised to buy them.”
Such Awful Taste
“All throughout high school, for alphabetical reasons, my locker was right next to the son of the owner of a 200-store chain of convenience stores in our region. He was incredibly socially inept. I felt bad for him. We developed kind of a weird little friendship, where we only ever talked at our lockers, but we had these little two-minute deep conversations. Mostly focused on him getting bullied, and me advising him to just chill out and stop running his mouth so much because that was why it was happening. He was obnoxious to classmates and teachers alike, and he reveled in it. He’d brag about his family’s money and just generally play the part of a spoiled rich kid, almost like he felt like he had to. He liked being hated and envied to some extent, but he also hated being an outcast.
He did listen when I told him about the stuff that was bothering me (I was shy and felt ignored and excluded all the time). There was absolutely a kernel of a good human being in him. He was actually an important person to me in a way. I never told anyone else about that stuff back then.
His behavior came back to bite him the week after a recent school massacre. He decided to purchase and wear a black trench coat to school in the style of the violent perpetrators. After a few days of him wearing that throughout the day, just to be awful, he got cornered by some kids and absolutely pummeled. They broke his nose, he so messed up. He’d been basically asking for it, so I’m not sure what he expected.
Well, I just found a news article about his dad from ten years ago, saying that he was working at a bank (there were a few lines about the dad’s family/kids), but it doesn’t say what he does there. I don’t recall where he went to college or even if he was a good student. I think he was reasonably bright, social issues aside.”
Connections Weren’t Enough
“A friend of mine from college, whose parents were rich enough to have a multimillion dollar home in America and in Europe, used to make fun of me for saying I was happy to go to whatever medical school I could get into. I ended up getting into my state school, and she responded by saying that she could get into that school in a second, because her mom has connections in the admissions department. She would never bother applying there because it’s not even a good school. She also made the same claim that her mom could get her in to a specific top 20 ranked school.
All through college, she had this attitude with me about how even though I was doing better than her in classes, I was going to go to whatever school would take me, and she was going to go to her dream school because that’s just how the world works. I checked up on her on Facebook this year. She’s not exactly at her dream school. It turns out she is at her state medical school, which is actually significantly lower ranked than the one she was making fun of me for attending. I don’t want to say I was hoping she wouldn’t get in anywhere, because that’s a little harsh, but I was happy to see her get put in her place.”
So Much Karma
“Between marrying in to a wealthy family and being employed at a manufacturer that hires 18-year-olds, I’ve got plenty of these to share.
Sister-in-law: Didn’t file income taxes for 3 years, thought that people only did that for the refund. Since she didn’t need the money, she didn’t file.
Brother-in-law: Spent 4 years at Stanford and received a Bachelor’s in Latin American Studies. It’s been almost a year and not only does he not have a job, but doesn’t even know where to look for one where his degree applies (and won’t listen to advice about it, either).
Co-worker: This was his 2nd job, his first being a position at his father’s company. I told him to make sure he comes back from his 10-minute break on time, since he’s new, and that people would be paying attention to his times. His response was, ‘I got 15-minute breaks at my old job.’ He was fired the next week for constantly coming back late.
Other coworker: 1st job, only working there because parents are tired of him lounging around the house. If he wants to continue being part of the trust, he’s got to work. I saw him on his phone (strict no phone policy at work). I walk over and tell him that if I’m 100 feet away and can see him, then anyone walking by can see him, so cut it out. Nope. Apparently his supervisor tried to reason with him too, but still, nope. What can you do? He’s a good worker, so you want to try to resolve this. Solution? No idle time. Now he gets to do the work of two people instead of coasting by while appeasing the family.”
Slap Across The Face Moment
“Now I wouldn’t say I’m a spoiled rich kid, but when I was little I never really wanted for anything. I got to be picky with food, the clothes I wanted, and the stuff I wanted if I complained about it enough). And every time my mom would say ‘When I was your age…’ but I was little, so this meant nothing to me.
But, then we took a two-week vacation to my mom’s home country in the Philippines when I was 15. I wasn’t completely oblivious. I knew I was extremely lucky with being in a lower/middle middle class family, but when I saw how my cousins lived, that really opened my eyes. When they came to the hotel we were staying at, it was the first time they saw a pool (it was in the upper class of Manila, where all the skyscrapers are). This was one of the many ‘slap across the face’ moments I had for the first week. The other more prominent ones were seeing their bedroom, which was a single bedroom with 4 beds and one window A/C unit. I also saw the neighborhood they lived in for the first time, and the dinner we had while we there. But, how they lived was probably middle class for the Philippines. The gap between the middle class and the upper class is absolutely terrifying there.
Man, after that week I felt like I was the luckiest kid in the whole wide world. Sadly, I don’t think it hit my brother in the same way.”
