LUNCH WITH MAX BÜSSER The M.A.D 1 Red
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t had taken 15 years to have lunch with Max Büsser. It’s not that he’s a difficult man to reach, it’s just that we had missed each other in various Cities over that time. I first reached out to Max when I launched Billionaire 500 back in 2005. He had just recently started MB&F and his artwork watch pieces were already starting to make waves and I saw his ideas as being a perfect fit to promote on my web portal, designed for the world’s 500 billionaires, (hence Billionaire 500). Amazing to think that back in 2005 there were only 500 billionaires, where today it’s getting close to 3,000. (Some
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of you might now have a better idea where the title of this magazine comes from as ‘b500’). A simple title nod to my past as founder of the first online portal for billionaires… But I digress… I had been in Geneva when Max was in Dubai, and I’d been in Dubai when Max was in Geneva, and so it went on, until last month the planets aligned…or did they. My original trip to Dubai was planned and then as I reached back out to Max he replied that my dates were the exact dates he would be back in Geneva. (I was starting to get a complex). We finally decided between us, if I could squeeze an extra day in Dubai at the end
of my visit, and he could get back to Dubai a day earlier than planned, those pesky planets would be so confused, it might actually happen! And it did. I had already scoped out Max’s M.A.D Gallery in the vastness of the Dubai Mall, a week or so earlier and which needed a sit down in a very fancy coffee shop close to his gallery, having walked miles in a circle to end up back where I started, 50m from his doorway! (With a total internal floor area of 5.9 million sq ft, The Dubai Mall has 3.77 million sq ft of gross leasable space and over 1,200 retail stores, two anchor department stores and more than 200 food and beverage outlets).
