What Ballerina Farm can teach us about money, family, and village building
Money is a tool to help us be with the people we love
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Earlier this week, the IFS blog published my take on the controversy surrounding a popular mom social media influencer who goes by the name Ballerina Farm1. My take — which was not an attack on nor defense of these types of influencers (“trad wives”) — was that a recent article on Ballerina Farm was deeply biased and a poor piece of journalism. You can click over if you care to read the argument.
I felt like when it came to this controversy, I couldn’t use the article as a springboard without first pointing out that the reporting was flawed. But what I really wanted to discuss when I heard Ballerina Farm was in the news is the relationship between money and village building. Specifically, media controversy aside, the family at the heart of the Ballerina Farm brand illustrates a few principles that I try to keep in mind as I make decisions in my own life. First, money opens doors across generations. Second, a primary purpose of money, after survival and basic needs, is to build community. And third, where you live matters.
I’ll explain, but first a caveat that I’m not endorsing or condemning the trad wife trend. I’m not the target audience for that kind of content, and so I only watch it when it’s relevant to my writing. What I’ve seen of Ballerina Farm specifically mostly seems pleasant, though I’m not really someone who closely follows or is interested in influencers.
Alright, so money. The recent controversial article focuses on Hannah and Daniel Neeleman, a youngish couple who moved to rural Utah to run a farm and the Ballerina Farm social media empire. They have eight kids and employ a variety of people. Critically, the article (accurately) points out that Daniel Neeleman is the son of JetBlue founder David Neeleman. Online sources typically put David’s net worth at around $400 million, and while net worth estimates are often way off it’s safe to say he’s quite wealthy.
It’s hard to know exactly how and to what degree this wealth has trickled down to Daniel and Hannah. The article notes that after getting married Daniel took a job in Rio de Janeiro at a family-owned security company, and having a built-in job is in itself a huge benefit. I have no idea how they bought their farm, but because most people without intergenerational wealth typically can’t afford large amounts of land in early adulthood I can only assume there was some sort of family involvement there as well. Whether that involvement included cash, trust funds, loans, or just a lifetime of astute financial guidance is unclear.
But the point is that David Neeleman’s fortune seems to have (somehow) let his son and daughter-in-law choose basically any life they wanted.
It will surprise no one that the children of wealthy people have more opportunities, and this seems to cause quite a bit of resentment. There was an entire “nepo baby” discourse last year wherein social media users and news organizations chronicled which rich and famous people have rich and famous parents. And implicit in all of this conversation was a (relatable) sense of injustice that some people were simply born with more opportunities than others.
But what I don’t understand is why more people don’t see in the Ballerina Farm controversy or the nepo baby discourse a handbook for helping your kids. Put another way — perhaps one that is more gauche but more honest — the lesson I learned from the nepo baby debate is that I want to make my kids nepo babies. If they can start on second or third base, why not?
This is not something that I hear spoken out loud much, but I think it is something most parents want for their kids. It’s why people are pushing their kids into endless extracurriculars and ever more competitive college prep programs. And while most of us will never have a net worth of $400 million a la David Neeleman, I can see in the Ballerina Farm story a case study in the efficacy of generational wealth. Even on a vastly smaller financial scale, there’s a lesson to be learned there.
That brings me to the second point, which is that the purpose of money is to fuel village building. In the Neeleman’s case, it looks like Hannah and Daniel are doing this by having a huge nuclear family.
But there are other paths too. For example, Vox recently profiled a co-living space in Oakland called Radish. It seems cool. But what stood out to me is that many of the participants seem to be high-wage earners in fields like big tech.
The advantage of the Radish participants’ money, then, was not just that it let them roll around in fancy cars or whatever. It’s that it gave them the freedom to choose an unusual and community-oriented living arrangement.
We do a terrible job as a society talking about this. It’d be interesting to ask the Radish folks if their parents or school guidance counselors ever said something like “get a good job so you can live near your friends.” But no one ever said anything like that to me or anybody I know.
I’m using extreme examples here — Ballerina Farm, tech workers — because it’s easy to see the relationship between money and community in those examples. But I think this works at a smaller scale, or at least I hope it does. When my family and I moved back to Salt Lake City in 2018, we bought a house that was about 1,800 square feet. But we quickly learned that the home was too small to host family dinners with our huge extended clan. A year later, when a bigger house (2,700 square feet) across the street hit the market, we moved there in large part because it had a much bigger dining room2.
In other words, the purpose of our money was to create a gathering spot for our family. The purpose of money for the Radish folks was to live next to friends. The purpose of money for the Neelemans is to start a huge family. The purpose of money in all of these cases is to build a better village — and that’s something we should talk more about. I hope that when it comes to my kids, I can persuade them that regardless of their income level, money and the things it buys — houses, cars, access, experiences, etc. — are tools to help us be with the people we love.
And that brings me to the third and final point in this post, which is that location matters. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve watched a fair amount of Ballerina Farm content, and living out on a picturesque farm seems pretty idyllic. But I can’t shake one question: What happens when these kids grow up and want to have a career or life of their own?
The Ballerina Farm property is located in Kamas, Utah, which is not terribly far from Salt Lake City. There’s another, upscale community even closer (Park City, home to the Sundance Film Festival), but overall that area doesn’t have a huge or especially diverse job market.
Maybe the Neelemans have planned for this and are starting a generational farm a la the ranch in the TV show Yellowstone. But I suspect a more likely outcome is that all of their eight kids will eventually have to move away for school and jobs. Even if money is abundant, most people will want to do something with their lives. And if everyone scatters to the ends of the earth, there’s not much village left.
I have no special insight into the Neelemans’ specific plans, but the point is that if I’m interested in living near family or friends, it’s worth considering what opportunities those people will have for a rich (financially or otherwise) life. It’s not a coincidence that the co-living Radish project, after all, is located in Oakland rather than the cheaper and more agricultural valley to the east. And in the end, probably the thing I’m most skeptical about regarding Ballerina Farm is that it’s a farm, run by a family with no apparent farming background at a time when rural communities are hollowing out. How, I keep wondering, does that create a sustainable village?
But I guess time will tell.
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Probably my favorite thing I’ve read on Ballerina Farm is this piece by Mary Harrington that argues Hannah Neeleman isn’t a “trad wife” but rather a “trade wife.” The idea is that as co-CEOs (the Neelemans’ words) of their family, they’re harkening back to an earlier concept of marriage in which couples were bound not just emotionally but also financially via a shared venture. I actually think this is a better model for marriage than what we mostly have today, and I’m intrigued by the idea of the Neelemans as an experiment in bringing it back.
We were fortunate that this happened during the brief real estate dip at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. A year later, we would’ve been priced out. And either way, we feel very fortunate to be able to buy a house at all. I know many others aren’t that lucky, and I will gladly rant endlessly about how we should solve the housing crisis.
Loved both your piece for IFS and this reflection! In the former, this: “More than inadequate reporting, then, the bigger problem with the piece is that it treats sacrifice for the sake of family as unreservedly negative. The implication, the underlying assumption, is that individuals should put themselves first.” This is really true. Something I learned recently is that the word “sacrifice” literally means (from the Latin) “to make sacred.” I thought that was incredibly beautiful—and such a stark contrast to the way we think of it these days (as cringe/oppressive).
This is a great, really interesting piece. As someone whose (upper?) middle class parents spent their life earnings so that I could attend elite schools and then go onto a prestigious law school and white-shoe big law firm, my experience is that money tends to divide families as much as unite them, and most nepo babies are very unhappy. This situation feels like an exception, maybe because Mormons are typically raised with values that keep them away from the usual troublemakers (drugs etc). The happiness curve relative to household income looks like a horseshoe to me, where more isn’t always necessarily better.
I felt from the beginning when reading the Ballerina Farm piece in the Times that there were elements of Mormon culture at hand that an outsider might not even know to watch for—I’m Catholic, and watching the media butcher Catholic history and tradition is just par for the course, but I imagine it’s even worse for Mormons. I’d be interested to read more about your thoughts on that!