My two cents....

I have an AMEX Biz Cent and disagree with tangfish. First, the business centurion is 50% points back on ANY travel (coach, a friend's ticket, etc) is pretty amazing. Second, $1000/year on Saks offsets $1000 of the $5000/year cost. Third, if you are assigned a team depending on spend, you have your own dedicated group to help you directly with concierge. TPG has a guy named "Ray" which I've never discovered, but my team is pretty crafty on travel requests and basically waste of time things that I don't want to waste my time on (rental car price comparisons, etc). Lounge access is awesome, but you get that with platinum also.

Now, reading through a bit of last year's thread and this year's thread...the spend levels you all are suggesting are pretty low to get an invite and I also disagree that they're looking at segmenting $10mil spend. If you're spending over $10mil/year, you have a local dedicated AMEX team even with a green card. That team can push your chances into Centurion greatly.

I don't know anything about the personal centurion, but I can imagine that $1mm/year is probably no where near enough. On the business side I can tell you that they don't care if you're using it to buy a ferrari, fly a private jet, or any of the other crazy stuff I just read on here. They just want you to have a business that spend a lot of money on stuff.

I have friends that make a lot more money than me in the service business, but simply don't qualify for the Centurion card because their businesses don't spend enough money. Some of those friends have net worths of well over $100mm.

Also, if you do have an assigned local AMEX team, build your relationship with them. Make sure you're working to see which of your vendors you may be paying checks to could also take AMEX. That team can help determine that for you with a few clicks.

Also, business or personal...some of you say you're spending $100k-$150k/year on the card. Even if you're wasting your money at gucci and LV, AMEX doesn't care about that.

That's not going to do it. The card is for big spenders.

Spend millions and they'll start looking.