From Super Bowls to Super Busts: How Robert Kraft Became the World’s Favorite Billionaire Punch Line

Robert Kraft: Portrait of a Billionaire in the Age of Globalized Schadenfreude

By the time the news of Robert Kraft’s alleged misadventure at a Florida strip-mall spa reached the breakfast tables of Singapore, the story had already been translated into seven languages, meme-ified in four alphabets, and turned into a cautionary haiku on Japanese Twitter. That’s globalization for you: even a 78-year-old American billionaire can’t get an allegedly illicit massage without becoming an international punch line. Somewhere in Davos, a Swiss banker quietly added “spa visit” to the risk column in the next PowerPoint about U.S. soft power.

For those who have spent the past decade under a rock—or under a deflated football—Kraft is the man who parlayed paper-packaging riches into six Super Bowl rings with the New England Patriots, plus one Champions League title with the football club most Americans still call “the London Foxes.” In other words, he is the rare titan who can brag at the same cocktail party about Tom Brady and association football, which is a bit like claiming credit for both the Manhattan Project and the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The world’s reaction to his legal hiccup, however, suggests the planet is less impressed by hardware than by humanity’s enduring talent for self-sabotage.

From Brussels to Buenos Aires, the episode has been folded into the broader morality play about American decline. European broadsheets framed it as proof that even the Masters of the Universe can’t resist bargain-basement temptation—“€79 hand relief in a strip mall: the true discount rate of empire,” snickered Le Monde. Meanwhile, Chinese state media ran explainers on why American elites keep ending up in sex-scandal perp walks, helpfully illustrating the piece with a graphic of Liberty holding a red-light district coupon. In Russia, where Kraft once showed Vladimir Putin his Super Bowl ring and never saw it again, commentators noted with barely concealed glee that the oligarch who lost jewelry to the Kremlin has now misplaced something less tangible: dignity.

The geopolitical optics are exquisite. At the very moment the United States is trying to convince allies it still stands for rules-based order, one of its most recognizable sports moguls is accused of subverting a modest county ordinance against human trafficking. Diplomats in Geneva must envy the simplicity of nuclear non-proliferation talks after watching prosecutors parse whether a “table shower” constitutes a legal gray zone. If soft power is the ability to get others to want what you want, Kraft has inadvertently upgraded the Chinese model: authoritarian efficiency plus decent massages, no hidden cameras.

In fairness, Kraft is hardly the first billionaire to discover that global fame is a perverse accelerant for private vice. Silvio Berlusconi’s bunga-bunga soirées once kept Eurozone summits on hold, and the late Jeffrey Epstein flew financiers and princes on a private jet nicknamed the “Lolita Express.” The difference now is velocity. A grainy police affidavit in Jupiter, Florida, ricochets across encrypted apps in Riyadh trading rooms and Mumbai call centers before Kraft’s lawyers can finish their first cappuccino. The world has become a giant panopticon with Wi-Fi; shame travels at fiber-optic speed.

What does it all mean? For one, the Kraft affair is a reminder that the 21st-century scandal is no longer about what you did but how quickly the planet can monetize your embarrassment. Every CCTV still is a potential NFT; every groveling apology, a future TED talk. More darkly, the episode spotlights the transactional loneliness of the ultra-rich: men who can buy stadiums but apparently not affection without a police evidence locker afterward. It’s as if Midas finally realized everything he touched turned not to gold, but to content.

And so the story will fade, as these things do, replaced by the next billionaire’s self-inflicted wound. Kraft will write checks, the NFL will wring its hands, and somewhere a teenager in Lagos will retweet the mugshot with the caption “GOAT problems.” The world keeps spinning, cruel, connected, and endlessly amused. After all, if you can’t laugh at the absurdities of power, you might have to admit they’re running the asylum—and where’s the fun in that?