This article introduces the Special Issue Mobile Elites: Sojourners, Dwellers and Homecomers, in which five articles look into the hidden frictions and social and emotional costs involved in privileged forms of mobility. Such existentially oriented aspects of globalization are still relatively underresearched. It is argued that cultural studies hold a responsibility to carry out ethnographically oriented analyses of mobile elite groups in order to unveil the complexities of life trajectories commonly associated with social as well as economic success. The article outlines an epistemological platform for carrying out such analyses, combining the new mobilities paradigm with social field theory and social phenomenology. Based on the empirical analyses presented in the Special Issue, the article also introduces three ‘registers of ambiguity and negotiation’: ambiguities of moral geographies, ambiguities of re-embedding and ambiguities of flow-architectures.