The Battle for Nantucket

It has long been a playground for the wealthy, but even billionaires abided by an old-school code of conduct. Now a new cohort has arrived, and the vibe is anything but low-key.

- WILLIAM D. COHAN

Nantucket has always been part fantasyland, part economic miracle. That’s as true today as it was in the 18th century, in the years before the American Revolution, when the island was the equivalent of Silicon Valley. It was at the cutting edge of the technology of the day: harvesting and manufacturing whale oil.

Thirty miles off the southern coast of Massachusetts, with an average elevation of around 30 feet, Nantucket is also essentially a 48-square-mile pile of sand that’s busily eroding into the Atlantic Ocean.

Whether it’s that ephemeral quality, or the fact that the island’s overlords long ago decreed that its quaintness be preserved in perpetuity, or that a 1,300-foot extension of the airport’s main runway in 1970 made it possible for private jets to come and go with ease, Nantucket remains a playground for the rich and powerful. Billionaires such as Eric Schmidt, David Rubinstein, Charles Schwab, and Charles Johnson have long called it their summer home, as have generations of New England bluebloods. The pandemic brought more people to the island, surprising even the most crowd-weary locals, including another influx of East Coast billionaires, who, like so many before them, discovered Nantucket’s beauty, how easy it is to get there (by private jet, at least), and the fact that it has, as Nick Carraway put it in The Great Gatsby, a “consoling proximity of millionaires.”