“Prepare to have your mind blown.”
The glamorous billionaire owner of the WSL, Dirk Ziff, who was honoured alongside his wife Natasha as “Waterpersons of the Year” at the Waterman’s Ball in 2018, has been revealed as the co-owner of the world’s greatest collection of twentieth-century guitars.
For decades, Ziff and his pal Perry Margouleff, amassed a collection of nearly six hundred guitars, including axes from Keith Richards, Neil Young, Les Paul and Chet Atkins and which includes Leo Fender’s first proto of the Telecaster.
The secretive trove, long rumoured in guitar circles but unknown even to experts, has been donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art where it will form a permanent exhibition, opening spring 2027.
Margouleff, a studio owner and restorer, and Ziff, the billionaire surf league owner, had been collecting since the eighties, their shared obsession sparked at a 1983 birthday party.
One night in 1983, at a birthday party at Tortilla Flats, in the West Village, Margouleff was introduced to a teen-age guitar player who wanted to buy a Marshall amp. Margouleff sold him one, and they started hanging out.The teen was Dirk Ziff, one of three sons of William Ziff, the chairman and owner of Ziff Davis, the magazine publisher.
The company sold off its hobbyist and travel titles in 1984, and its computer magazines ten years later, when it became clear that the sons didn’t want to run the business. The sons, led by Dirk, allocated the proceeds to an array of investments, including in the burgeoning hedge-fund sector. It was, as they say, a good trade. Dirk Ziff is now worth almost seven billion dollars, according to Forbes.
As it happens, Ziff had also seen the Who perform “Tommy,” in 1970, at the Metropolitan Opera House, with his father and his uncle. He was six. As the lights went down, his uncle said, “Prepare to have your mind blown.” It was. (At the warehouse, Margouleff showed me the red SG that Pete Townshend smashed up that night.) Ziff got his first guitar at Manny’s: a Japanese copy of a Sunburst Les Paul, for ninety-nine bucks. As a student at Trinity, a private high school on the Upper West Side, he played in a few rock bands when it seemed as if every other kid in Manhattan was swapping Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin riffs. Before long, Ziff had serious chops, and ideas about becoming a professional musician. But after college, with the family fortune to look after, he embarked on a Wall Street career.
And, unlike the League, where Ziff turned a once moderately hip sport into a gluten-free vanilla cone only suitable for fifty-year-old-plus bourgeois white gals, when it comes to guitars he’s focused on their art and legacy.
The gift is one of the largest in the museum’s history and the Met’s gonna display the collection alongside other cultural artefacts, elevating the ol six-string as a cultural icon.
Also of note is Ziff is a wildly talented guitar player, doin’ session work for Carly Simon at one point.
Dirk Ziff, of course, will long be remembered for his speech at the Waterman’s Ball where he eviscerated BeachGrit and all who follow it, delivering an olive branch festooned with barbs.
Some of you are here in this canyon. Journalists, and other influential voices who unload on social media. I wonder if some of you get up every day and stir the milk into your coffee, thinking about what you can write that day that might humiliate the WSL. It goes way beyond constructive criticism, which we all need and which the WSL frequently deserves, and into the realm of foul spirited attack, which I think we can all agree we have enough of right now in this country.
“I have a message to the haters, and it is simple. Be tough. Call us out. Keep us honest. Tell us what we need to improve.
“But don’t pretend you don’t know that when you go beyond constructive criticism and cynically try to rally negative sentiment towards the WSL, when you try to take us down, you are not just going after us. You are going after Kelly Slater. You are trying to take down Lakey Peterson. You are going after the dreams of Caroline Marks and Griffin Colapinto. You are undermining the hopes of every kid who lives with salt in their hair, dreaming of being a world champion one day.
“And I ask you: Why? It seems pretty obvious that if the WSL keeps growing in popularity, and surfing takes its rightful place among the great and elite competitive sports, everyone connected with our sport, and certainly all the members of SIMA, will prosper, except maybe a few grumpy locals who have to deal with some new faces in the lineup. So…why not work together?
As well as the World Surf League and the guitars, Dirk Ziff also co-owns Cherokee Plantation, a “Spanish-moss draped monument to selective southern hospitality” in South Carolina that Forbes also calls “the most expensive–and the snootiest–private club in America.”
Cherokee Plantation was built in 1690 as part of a land grant to Joseph Blake, who cultivated rice amongst other things. His son Daniel inherited the property and, “as slave owners go” was considered “a pretty swell guy” who “despised affectation and looked with perfect contempt upon all snobbery.”
He built a church on his property, enjoyed by his 559 slaves, as well as providing clothing and moderate working hours.
