Koos Bekker’s Newt estate encompasses luxury hotels, pubs and high street business, with local concerns including flooding

When South African billionaire Koos Bekker bought an old country estate in a sleepy corner of Somerset to turn it into a luxury hotel, residents thought it was a sign their area was on the up.

Walking through his peaceful manicured gardens, which feature a maze of apple trees twisted into perfect shapes using the espalier method, it’s easy to feel that all is well in this quiet, picturesque pocket of England.

TaxWatch contradicts claims about David Reuben’s departure and questions stories of super-rich exodus

• Apparent exodus of super-rich suggests UK is no longer billionaires’ playground

When the Sunday Times broke the news that David Reuben, one of the richest men in the UK, had apparently fled to the tax haven of Monaco, there was much pearl clutching. Reuben had moved from his Holland Park house in London to live full-time in the principality.

Labour’s tax regime was blamed and there were said to be fears there would be a cascading effect across the economy, with wealth draining from the UK. It was reported that he had probably left because of potential taxes on wealth in the upcoming budget.

If recent complaints are believed, London and the UK are no longer welcoming for ultra-high net worth individuals

London was once globally renowned as the “billionaires’ playground”, where the world’s super-rich could relax in the Georgian townhouses of Mayfair undisturbed by the grasping hand of the state.

But if recent complaints by fleeing ultra-high net worth individuals are to be believed, the city is no longer as welcoming for those who consider themselves to be Britain’s most-persecuted minority.

For decades, the capital’s house prices raced ahead of the national average – but now they are falling in prime areas

An elegant Georgian facade, a full-width balcony and an exclusive address in South Kensington just steps from the Natural History Museum and the V&A. Yet the listing price of this west London flat at Queen’s Gate Gardens has dropped by nearly £1m since last year, to £4.4m.

It is far from an isolated case. A nearby house originally listed at £20m was slashed to £14m this year, says a local estate agent. In neighbouring Notting Hill, a stucco-fronted property that came to market two years ago at £16m is now being offered for less than £14m, they said.

The 1938 mansion, Casa Encantada, once belonged to Conrad Hilton and was sold at foreclosure auction

Tech billionaire Peter Thiel has been revealed as the new owner of a storied Bel-Air estate that quietly sold in July for a staggering $130m.

The 1938 mansion, Casa Encantada, was sold at an open-air foreclosure auction in Pomona, with the name of the buyer kept under wraps for months. The winning bid is now revealed to have come from a limited liability company linked to the venture capitalist and PayPal and Palantir co-founder, according to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the buyer’s identity.

Analysis has shown the costs of daily essentials soaring in recent years, thanks in part to climate shocks, wars and geopolitical tensions

François Perrodo is what is known in motorsport as a gentleman driver. In June, he raced at Le Mans, earning a podium place. At the end of August he was back behind the wheel at the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps. This time he won.

Gentleman drivers are wealthy individuals who fund their own participation. The FIA governing body caps costs to keep racing accessible to such enthusiasts. But for self-confessed petrolhead Perrodo, it is well within his means.

While global billionaires and multinational companies have been lured to its shores, many islanders feel left behind and priced out, with food bank use increasing

On a late Friday afternoon on the Channel Island of Jersey, tourists and locals are flocking to St Helier’s waterfront where the town’s sprawling beach has emerged at low tide.

In one direction, they face the calm waters of St Aubin’s Bay, ringed by a seaside promenade and punctuated with a tidal island hosting the 16th century Elizabeth Castle.

Coming midterm elections are starting to be framed not as right versus left but instead the ‘well-fed versus the fed-up’

Brian Leeland, a 79-year-old Democratic voter in Detroit, had enough. Frustrated by the way the US media covers this febrile political era, from Donald Trump’s Washington to political campaigns across the country, he contacted the Guardian.

“Your decision to frame the race here as a simple progressive versus establishment choice is overly simplistic verging on lazy,” he wrote to this reporter, after our coverage of progressive Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign in the Democratic US Senate primary in Michigan. “As an electorate, we are not binary for the convenience of the media.”

Number of private jets has surged in recent years, but they do not pay commensurate portion of fees to FAA operations

A new report has put a spotlight on the rapid expansion of private jet travel in the US, revealing that owners are not paying their fair share of aviation tax despite the average owner’s wealth being $190m and private jets being up to 14 times more polluting than commercial flights.

The Institute for Policy Studies’ new report, High Flyers 2026, examines the growing use of private aircraft, the public infrastructure supporting them and the tax policies benefiting private jet owners.

In a new book, writers Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have created a term to define the era we are living in: End Times Fascism. A response to the climate crisis, the rise of the far-right and advancing AI technology, they spell out how the damage being wrought by the super-rich is becoming normalized. Klein and Taylor join Carter Sherman to talk about the recent events that have made us all feel like we’re hurtling towards the apocalypse, and how we can fight back through ‘hereness’.

End Times Fascism And The Fight For The Living World is out now.

General secretaries say union funding is ‘cleanest money in politics’ and different to that from wealthy individual donors

• UK politics live – latest updates

Trade unions have stopped short of backing a cap on political donations but called for further action on big money in politics, in a joint statement after Reform UK was given an unprecedented £72m from two donors.

General secretaries have been split on a call for unions to back a specific cap on individual donors to political parties while protecting trade union donations, which the TUC said were the “cleanest money in politics” because it came from workers’ subscriptions.

The billionaire and the party have developed a symbiotic relationship to spread their far-right views both in Germany and the US

The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party rattled European politics this week after a convincing victory in a German state election, which placed it only a few seats away from forming the country’s first state-level far right government since the second world war.

Elon Musk was thrilled.

PM has so far declined to insert curbs on UK-based donors, despite £72m donations from billionaires to Reform UK

Trade unions, MPs and donors have urged the government to look again at party funding rules, after Reform UK insisted £72m in donations from two crypto billionaires was within the law.

Andy Burnham, a previous backer of caps on domestic donations, has so far declined to insert any curbs in the elections bill that would apply to UK-based donors.

The subversive bacchanal for San Francisco’s eccentric underground is ageing out amid an influx of the super-rich

Burning Man, the infamous arts festival in the Nevada desert, turned 40 this year, and it’s showing some distinct signs of middle age.

It’s not just the tech billionaires who show up to party, the chartered flights straight to the desert or the HBO documentary about behind-the-scenes power struggles. The tens of thousands of people who assemble each year to create a tent city in the wilderness appear to be growing older, and it doesn’t seem that they’re being replaced by as many younger “burners”, as festival participants are called.

Ben Delo was convicted in US for failing to implement adequate anti-money laundering controls but pardoned by Trump

Reform UK has been given a record £36m donation by Ben Delo, a British cryptocurrency billionaire convicted in the US for failing to implement adequate anti-money laundering controls.

The businessman, who has moved back to the UK from Hong Kong, is now the biggest UK political donor by far, dwarfing the £15m contribution to Reform UK from Thailand-based Christopher Harborne.

Hedge fund tycoon is latest financier to exit amid fears among super-rich over tax rises

• Business live – latest updates

The hedge fund billionaire Chris Rokos is poised to leave the UK, the latest in a string of high-profile exits among Britain’s super-rich.

The founder of Rokos Capital Management is preparing to move his residency to Greece, and will open an office in Athens as part of the move, according to Bloomberg.

Luna Wedler ist erst 26 Jahre alt, aber bereits ein alter Hase im Filmgeschäft. Derzeit erhält sie einen Preis nach dem anderen. Was macht die Schauspielerin aus der Schweiz aus? Eine Begegnung in Starnberg.

Hui Ka Yan also forfeits all his personal property and the company he set up is given hefty fines

• Business live – latest updates

The founder of Evergrande, one of China’s largest property developers, has been sentenced to life in prison and had all of his personal property confiscated.

Hui Ka Yan, 67 and once named by Forbes as China’s richest man, with a net worth of $42.5bn (£31.2bn) in 2017, pleaded guilty in April to eight charges.

It’s simple, says the SpaceX boss – according to something called the ‘Kardashev scale’, we just have to move energy production ‘off-planet’

Next time the weather gives the UK 61 days without rain and we wonder idly if this is the end, there is a term we may whistle up to soothe us. Like murmuring the rosary, or putting our fingers in our ears and humming, this phrase is to be mumbled on repeat – “the Kardashev scale, the Kardashev scale” – a buzzy concept in tech, much favoured by Elon Musk, and precisely the thing we’ve been waiting for. The Kardashev scale is the answer both to our impending doom and our anxiety around it – and if we decide to believe in it, we won’t have to give the climate crisis a single thought until the last drip falls from the tap.

This is the idea and it’s a familiar one to anyone who has watched tech billionaires take intractable, commonplace crises and decide that, among the measures and proposals in play, the vital missing ingredient so far has been them. Do you remember when Jeff Bezos, rather than doing something quotidian and loserish like funding public education by ensuring Amazon pays the same tax rate as regular Americans, decided instead to reinvent preschools?

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist