When the Tesla Model X was new, the popular 90D version cost about $100,000. Thanks to the magic of depreciation, though, the cheapest Model Xs can now be found in the $15,000 range. As far as practical family cars that still run and drive go, a price like that is hard to beat. And if you want an electric three-row family hauler, it’s your only choice south of $20,000. That makes it a tempting buy for people with a limited car budget who have gotten sick of playing gas price roulette. It’s also an incredibly risky purchase and not a gamble most families should take.
Admittedly, I’m no lover of Elon Musk nor fan of many of his actions, so there’s no getting around the fact that I’m biased here. Still, my issue with most families buying super cheap Model Xs has nothing to do with that. My issues with buying a scarily cheap Model X are much more cheap-Model-X specific.
The first potential problem, of course, is that we’re talking about a decade-old vehicle that was originally designed to cost $100,000. On a limited budget, heavily depreciated luxury cars are almost always a bad idea, but since the Model X is electric, there’s no engine, traditional transmission, starter, or alternator that could break on you. So that’s nice. Still, wear items will need to be replaced, and replacement parts can be pricier than you’re used to. Even tires can get expensive fast.
When Tesla revealed the first Model X prototype back in 2012, its target market was still early adopters, not mainstream buyers. Early customers wanted to be on the cutting edge, and they were willing to put up with, shall we say, “quirks” and “annoyances” that early Model S buyers were used to but Honda and Toyota buyers would never have tolerated. With age, those issues can get worse.
Which brings me to the Model X’s party trick — those eye-catching rear doors. First of all, they’re power-operated, and — no matter how fast power doors open or close — if you’re used to only needing three seconds to pop open a car door, grab whatever you need, and then close the door again, waiting on power-operated doors can be annoying. The same issue applies to minivans with power-sliding rear doors, so it isn’t a Tesla-specific problem; but, if you’re considering a cheap Model X, it’s still worth noting.
I’m also not sure if you remember, but Tesla kept delaying the production Model X, and while the so-called “falcon wing” doors may not have been the only problem causing the delay, getting the doors to work correctly clearly caused at least some issues. In 2016, Tesla ended up suing the supplier, eventually settling the lawsuit. The weird doors on the production version allegedly worked well enough to sell, but when our friends at Consumer Reports bought a Model X to test, it ran into frequent problems with the doors and highlighted a few other notable flaws:
But beyond the brag-worthy magic, the all-wheel-drive Model X 90D largely disappoints. The rear doors are prone to pausing and stopping. The second-row seats can’t be folded, limiting cargo-carrying ability. The big windshield is neat but not tinted enough to offset the brightness of a sunny day, and wind noise is excessive.
If the doors were having problems when the Model X was new and still clobbering four-year-olds in 2023, do you really want to deal with decade-old, out-of-warranty “falcon wing” doors and all the potential risks that come with them? In a car Tesla already canceled? Especially with owners still posting online about Tesla’s service centers failing to fix broken doors? It’s one thing if we’re talking about a sports car, but most parents need their three-row family haulers to work, and you’re playing a dangerous game if you decide that technically-not-a-minivan you buy should be a scarily cheap Model X. Even if that means you have to wait to go electric until you can afford a different family hauler, longterm, that’s probably the smarter move.

PhotoAlto | Sigrid Olsson | Getty
Financial advisors increasingly want to add the super-rich to their client lists. Not only do ultra-high net worth households offer a level of cachet to financial advisors, but there’s also growing demand for advice from this client segment, according to experts.
There were about 442,000 households with $20 million or more in financial assets as of 2024, according to the latest data from Cerulli Associates, a consulting and market research firm. They represent about 0.3% of the U.S. population.
Those households collectively held $22.5 trillion of investable assets, accounting for nearly 25% of such wealth across all U.S. households — up substantially from a 10% share in 2010, according to Cerulli.
“High net worth is the holy grail in many ways” for financial advisors, said Vlad Golyk, a partner at McKinsey & Co., who leads the consulting firm’s wealth management practice in North America.
“The money is sticky, and there’s prestige as well,” he said.
However, not all financial advisors are well suited to work with ultra-high net worth households, experts said.
These clients — generally, those with investible assets totaling roughly $20 million to $30 million or more — have specific financial needs that require expertise beyond that typically suited to the average investor, experts said.
“It’s a different job,” Golyk said.
The No. 1 question: Am I an ‘outlier’?
There’s one big question that extremely wealthy households should ask prospective financial advisors to gauge whether they should hire them, experts said.
“The first question has to be: ‘This is what my financial picture looks like. What services do you have, and what experience do you have working with clients like me?'” said Chayce Horton, an associate director in the wealth management practice at Cerulli Associates, a consulting and market research firm.
The operative words here are “like me,” because households and their needs can vary a lot in the ultra-high net worth market, Horton said.
For example, you might be a family with a significant manufacturing business, or a 35-year-old engineer with $35 million in stock options in a company that’s about to go public — both of which are “complex, individualized situations,” he said.
Similarly, Golyk said uber-rich clients don’t want to be an “outlier” among a financial advisory firm’s other clients.
In other words, they should strive not to be the firm’s biggest or smallest client, Golyk said.
Services that advisors to the ultra-wealthy offer
Ultimately, the bulk of services an advisor will offer to ultra-wealthy clients exist outside of a traditional portfolio management context, Horton said.
Generally, the extremely rich need advisors who can oversee complex financial issues and intergenerational wealth. Services typically entail tax, estate and trust planning; and business advisory and philanthropic services, experts said.
The family governance piece is a biggie, experts said.
It’s important to find an advisory firm that can serve multiple generations simultaneously, Horton said.
That expertise goes beyond the technical, financial and administrative aspects of estate and tax planning, management of trusts, and overseeing wealth across generations — and also includes serving as “mediator or family therapist,” Horton said.
For example, parents may have $50 million that their children may or may not know about, and that younger generation may or may not be inheriting the money, he said. That family might need to know the options for establishing a family trust, how to structure things most tax-efficiently and, once decided, how to communicate that with the children, he said. Or, in another scenario, how would a wealthy entrepreneur with a family business pass on leadership responsibilities across generations?
These are emotional situations for advisors to handle, Horton said.
Firms don’t necessarily need to offer all these services in-house — they can outsource certain functions — but the end result must be “seamless” for the client, Golyk said.
Two more important questions to ask a prospective advisor are:
How do you implement tax and estate planning? Wealth transfer is where a lot of value-add is for ultra-high net worth advisors, and this question gives insight into whether advisors understand how to approach this complicated issue, Golyk said.
What is your succession plan? Prospective clients are probably meeting with a senior advisor who leads a team. However, families are likely hiring an institution for the next 30 years or more — so this specific advisor may no longer be there years down the road, Golyk said.
The reaction to certain questions offers as much insight as the answer, he said. The best advisors answer all these questions, while those who get defensive probably aren’t best for you, he said.
“I’d want to know overall that this is a highly professional team who serves clients like me, helping with complex structuring and transferring of assets, and they think ahead about my kids, grandkids and generational entities — and they take care of all of it,” Golyk said. “That’s what I want to walk away with.”

The chicken cutlet is having a moment.
TikTok and Instagram reels are full of nonnas (and zias and zios) in kitchens frying up platters of the thinly pounded breasts coated in seasoned breadcrumbs. Witness Nonna Pia break egg yolks into a bowl with age-spotted hands, while her grandson narrates loudly in the background. A million people liked it. Focus in on the bubbling hot oil, the thin breast, and the breadcrumbs crackling in the heat, going gold, then amber, then done. The cutlet has never been more famous or loved.
I watch them all. And I keep waiting for something that never comes. My own nonna didn’t make only cutlets. She fried medallions of zucchini from the garden. She rolled eggplant into little meatballs and fried those too. On holidays there was more—cannoli shells, fried. Zucchini flowers in the spring. Fried ricotta with honey in the summer. The cutlet is delicious. But in Italian cooking, it’s hardly the whole story.
Those nephews and nieces filming Nonna in the kitchen might feel as if they are branching away from stereotypes by showing an Italian culinary tradition other than Sunday pasta, but in reality, they are merely scratching the surface of a proud legacy that goes far deeper. Behold and bow down to fritti, the Italian art of frying. Picture a paper cone filled with battered crunchy seafood in Naples, a mountainous rice ball in Palermo, a puff of fried dough dusted with sugar in Florence. Making fritti means knowing what oil to use, how hot to get it, and what each ingredient needs to reach its crispy apotheosis. It is not a recipe. It is a discipline.
To understand what’s at stake, you have to go back to Naples in the 1880s. Naples, one could argue, is the deep-frying capital of the world, and also the city from which so many of Italy’s sons and daughters decamped to America.
“About 90 percent of the food in Naples was street food,” says Simone Cinotto, professor of contemporary history at the University of Gastronomic Sciences, in Pollenzo, and the author of The Italian American Table. “The city was overpopulated. The houses were small and cramped. You had to be middle class and up to enjoy domestic meals at home.”
And much of that street food was fried. Think cauliflower, zucchini blossoms, dough, seafood, vegetables, all pulled from the bottom of the day’s market crates and tossed into the fryer for the masses. “If you were poor, you got produce at the end of the day, before refrigeration—overripe melons, zucchini, eggplant. It cost less,” Cinotto says. “Frying made it palatable. That’s where the tradition came from.”
Italians didn’t invent frying. The Egyptians were frying dough centuries before Rome existed. But Romans took the technique and ran with it. They fried vegetables in cooked honey, or in a mixture of garum, olive oil, and wine, then poured the cooking liquid back over the dish to keep it soft. (Crunchiness wasn’t yet the point.) By the Middle Ages, frying in animal fat became a prerogative of the wealthy. But then, once lard and cheaper oil were available to everyone else, frying became a staple of cooking and never left. Pizza fritta, the Neapolitan classic, is said to have been invented at the end of World War II for citizens who could no longer afford an oven-baked Margherita.
But in most of the U.S., Italian American families are not making fritto misto—a natty jumble of vegetables and fish or whatever the market had left—at home, or even supplì, Rome’s molten-centered fried rice balls, or carciofi alla giudia, the ancient dish of Jewish-Roman fried artichoke.
“You’re missing out on a lot if you’re not frying things,” says Domenica Marchetti, an Italian American food writer and the author of eight cookbooks on Italian home cooking. Marchetti grew up eating her mother’s panzerotti—fried half-moons of dough stuffed with ricotta, prosciutto, mortadella, and salami—alongside fried zucchini, batter-fried baby artichokes, and pizza fritta popped with sea salt at the beach in Abruzzo.
“Even in Italy, the tradition of frying is less than it used to be,” Marchetti says. “Young people are more concerned about it [for health reasons]. They don’t do it as much as their mothers or grandmothers.”
Health-conscious millennials aside, Italy is a land that still takes frying seriously. This is the country whose national fried-food competition runs on the slogan that in love, victory belongs to whoever fries (“In amore, vince chi frigge”). Region by region, generation by generation, the Italian fried-food repertoire is staggering: pizza fritta and cuoppo di mare (a paper cone filled with fried fish, or sometimes cuoppo di terra, with vegetables, mozzarella, and arancini) in Naples, carciofi alla giudia in Rome, coccoli (small balls of fried dough) in Florence, gnocco fritto in Emilia-Romagna, olive ascolane in the Marche, panzerotti in Puglia, arancini in Sicily (whose origins trace to the island’s Arab rule), seadas in Sardinia, fritto misto anywhere there’s a coast.
And in Italian fashion, the names of Italian fried foods are poetic, often onomatopoeic. Mozzarella in carrozza (“mozzarella in a carriage”). Arancini (“little oranges”). Cartellate (rose-shaped honey pastries). Supplì got its name, legend has it, when Napoleon’s troops bit into a Roman rice ball and exclaimed “Surprise!” at the molten mozzarella inside; the word got mangled through Roman dialect into supprisa, supprì, and finally supplì, as the writer Marianna Cerini has traced in the magazine Italy Segreta. Italy is also a land that loves a fried dessert—think cannoli, zeppole, bombolini, sfinci, cassatelle.
So why, with all of this, did Italian Americans end up with just the cutlet? Ask an Italian American what their nonna fried, and the answer is almost always the same. Zeppole, maybe. But mostly cutlets. Fabrizio Piazzolla, an owner of the Roman friggitoria Supplizio, has one theory about that. And it makes me pause to ponder what in the future will carry down to further generations and why.
“Food has become such a polished, Instagrammable affair,” Piazzolla told Italy Segreta. “Fritti are the opposite. They’re not picture-perfect or complicated. They’re just good.”
In other words, a delicious pile of fritto misto looks like a pile of little fried things. It does not have a cross section to zoom in on and make mouths water virtually. The cutlet, on the other hand, has a money shot. That crackling crust, that pounded-thin reveal, a squeeze of lemon juice splashing onto it.
The cutlet also won out here because it was the one fried thing the immigrants who arrived in this country could keep making. Frying as the Neapolitans had done it, in a vat of hot oil all day in a friggitoria big enough to feed a city block, required money, space, and equipment that an East Harlem or Little Italy tenement did not have. A coal stove and a small pan with a few inches of oil could produce a cutlet. It could not produce a cuoppo.
The cutlet has another thing going for it: The crust itself was an act of thrift. “It’s Depression food, a cheap cut of protein made savory by what would otherwise have gone in the trash,” says Ian MacAllen, the author of Red Sauce: How Italian Food Became American.
Progressive-era reformers and home economists, sent into immigrant neighborhoods to teach women how to feed their children the American way, described Italian cooking the way they always described the cooking of poor immigrant women: oily, greasy, suspect, Cinotto adds.
The second generation understood the assignment. “If Italian Americans were on the path of becoming 100 percent American,” Cinotto says, “they had to relinquish some things.” What they gave up—the fried artichokes, the rice balls, the fried dough and zucchini blossoms, the fritto misto—is a sad casualty of the Italian culinary diaspora. Spaghetti and meatballs and chicken Parmesan are delicious but one-note meals. A cuoppo filled with salty, briny sardines, cardoons, and mozzarella, squeezed with lemon and orange, is a whole symphony.
Many of these foods can still be had, of course, but not from Nonna at home. Fried calamari has become a default (and often sad, rubbery) American appetizer. Cannoli, with their fried shells, are still available at Italian bakeries, filled to order, placed in that little box with the telltale string. Zeppole are mass-produced and dusted with powdered sugar at the Feast of San Gennaro every September. There are Sicilian American bakeries in Brooklyn and the Bronx where sfingi and cassatelle still surface around certain Italian holidays.
But Marchetti sees something else at work. Americans’ ambivalence about fat itself has frayed our relationship with fried food.
“We have such a fraught relationship in this country with frying,” Marchetti says. “Look at the popularity of the air fryer. People want to fry, but they don’t want to fry in fat. An air fryer isn’t really a fryer.”
My mother was a fryer. Not just cutlets. She’d slice zucchini and eggplant from the garden, salt them, drop them unadorned in a small sauté pan of hot oil, and serve them alongside our Sunday pasta. On Sunday nights, she’d pop open a canister of Pillsbury biscuit dough, cut the fat discs in two, fry them, and send me to the living room with a bowl of sugar to dip them in. We had instant zeppole and watched 60 Minutes.
I know that the cutlet is not the enemy. But it is a placeholder for a tradition that is richer, more layered and delicious than a million TikTok likes will ever suggest. Nonna remembers. We just need to ask her more questions.

Starbucks has more than 2,000 stores across South Korea, including one that overlooks a North Korean village, one in a century-old traditional street market and one that sits on the 99th floor of a glass skyscraper. In a first, they all closed early on Monday.
But the 3 p.m. closure that did not mean extra time off for its 24,000 or so baristas, supervisors and corporate employees. Instead, they all had to do training on historical awareness and cultural sensitivity. It was damage control for a marketing debacle.
Last month, Starbucks unveiled a new line of tumblers that it called “Tank Day.” The campaign began on the anniversary of a massacre in 1980, when South Korea was a military dictatorship and used tanks to crack down on pro-democracy protesters in the southern city of Gwangju.
The backlash to the Starbucks promotion was immediate. South Korea had a brush with martial law less than 18 months ago and the criticism was fierce. Shinsegae Group, the conglomerate that owns Starbucks Korea, took down the ad, issued an apology and fired the Starbucks Korea chief executive. Later, it said that employees had used artificial intelligence to come up with the wording for the promotion and were not aware of the context. The training on Monday was supposed to be the fix.
“Starbucks is trying to demonstrate its commitment to change and their sincerity to consumers and the public by taking the measures of closing stores to train all employees,” said Jongwoo Lee, a professor of marketing at Namseoul University. “Ultimately, the core focus here is restoring a damaged brand image.”
Starting last week, Starbucks had put up signs about the shorter schedule. At about 2:40 p.m. on Monday, baristas at a store at Seoul Station, a busy transportation hub, started telling customers about the early closing. Ten minutes later, workers began closing the window shutters and only accepted takeout orders. At 2:58 p.m., they announced they were closed.
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President Donald Trump has pulled fringe tech figures out of the shadows and into the corridors of power, inspiring others in those circles to seek similar influence.
Author and Silicon Valley reporter Jonathan Weber joined The Daily Beast Podcast to explain why so many tech oligarchs are drawn to the 80-year-old president, arguing that it all comes down to ideas and ambitions that have become mainstream under Trump.
“Certain longstanding right-wing figures like Thiel and David Sacks … were suddenly vaulted to the top echelons of power,” Weber said.
Sacks, 54, served as President Donald Trump’s Special Advisor on AI and Crypto before moving on to co-chair the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
During his time in the role, the South African entrepreneur—whose net worth is estimated between $2 billion and $3.1 billion—also promoted his podcast All-In. The show, which he co-hosts with fellow Silicon Valley venture capitalists Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, and David Friedberg, covers topics including economics, investment, technology, and current affairs.
“He’s a longtime right-winger,” Weber said, adding that Sacks was once co-editor of The Stanford Review—an independent, conservative-libertarian campus newspaper—while attending college.
After Stanford, Sacks co-authored a book with Thiel—both of whom later became part of the so-called “PayPal Mafia”—criticizing political correctness, speech codes, and declining academic standards in higher education.
Thiel, 58, whose net worth is estimated at $27.6 billion, has reportedly left the U.S. for Argentina this year to live in a $12 million mansion, citing concerns about the country’s direction under the president he helped put in office—specifically, fears of nuclear war and an artificial-intelligence takeover.
Still, the German-American entrepreneur was one of the first tech oligarchs to support Trump, later becoming a key figure on technology matters and donating $1.25 million to Trump’s first presidential campaign.
Though the support of Thiel and Sacks, given their longstanding political views, is not surprising, Weber explained that there is a difference regarding Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, 42, and his support for Trump and the MAGA movement.
“Zuckerberg in particular is a guy who lacks a real moral center of his own, so he kind of shifts with the wind,” Weber said, adding: “He was a big liberal when it was fashionable to be that, and now he’s a sort of chain-wearing martial arts dude and Trump supporter.”
Zuckerberg has been cozying up to Trump since the start of his second term, attending his inauguration alongside other big-name billionaires with a combined net worth of $1.35 trillion.
According to a Financial Times investigation, the CEO has since undergone a major shift in style, with Meta staff reportedly calling him “MAGA Mark.”
“It’s a strange thing to see,” Weber said. “What it looks like is just somebody shifting to whatever supports their business interests and their financial interests and their power,” he added.
The Daily Beast has reached out to Zuckerberg, Thiel, and Sacks’ representatives for comment.