Lots of ink has been spilt over the billionaire. He is ruining the planet. The government. Your specific life as an under- or unemployed worker. Less important but still annoying, he may be ruining television. Because shows like Apple TV’s Your Friends and Neighbors, argues Inkoo Kang at The New Yorker, purport to satirize wealth even as they glamorize its trappings.

All the buzz has got me thinking. Where did the billionaire first appear in fiction? And why is he so sticky on the page?

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I attempt to sketch the archetype.

Let us say that the billionaire, or his acolytes in the two comma club, attends decadent ages. He’s distinctly a new money creature, appearing after the identification of capitalism and Marxism as economic structures. Why? Because he’s not just rich. Nor is he privileged by divine right, like a land-owning Englishman in 1813. Intrinsic to the billionaire’s project is an inability to stop at “enough.” Greed is good and more is more for this cat.

Writing about Jesse Armstrong’s Mountainhead, in The Guardian, Danny Leigh observed a common thread among the world-eating types who populate the film. While the planet burns around them, the “oligarchs” in this 90-minute satire all display “a willful [sic] positivity about their own effect on the world.” This too feels key. In other words, the billionaire both designs and inhabits delusions of grandeur. He must, to rationalize his wealth.

The billionaire is, finally, forged in spite. Like the current leader of the America Party, he wants to be a member of a club, a family, or a government—but can’t seem to figure out why his money’s no good.

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Archetypically, this is the man as he walks among us. (Or more accurately, glares down from a helicopter, up from a secret bunker, or out from the windows of Barad-dûr.) But where do we find him in prose?

When you’re disgustingly wealthy, your days don’t have to be touched by banal oppressors, like the office or public transportation.

I think the billionaire—who you’ll infer by now I’ve collapsed into the general phenomenon of ultra-wealthy sadistic people—first appeared in Anglo fictions from the 19th and 20th centuries. Novels concerning the upper crust come to mind. Like the Gilded Age concoctions of Edith Wharton and Henry James.

Wharton is my favorite chronicler of what we could call the billionaire’s psyche. With characters like Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence, she gets at the spiritual decay unchecked hoarding engenders. (Just as often, she unpacks the lunacy that comes from striving for extreme wealth.) It’s Wharton’s ability to underline the irony of a billionaire’s predicament that lets us invest in the likes of Archer, who may be rich, but pays a hefty spiritual tax to stay that way.

This kind of soft satire also puts me in mind of Dorothy West, who excellently sent up a nascent Black bourgeoisie in novels like The Wedding. A common thread between West and Wharton is a wry sense of humor. Perspective is ever-present in these portraits of a tenuous new class.

Into the twentieth century, we find more drama for the b-boy. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote high-stakes noirs about the compulsive rich. Gatsby the cipher is another symbol of the hollowing effects of the wealth pursuit. But to our striver narrator, Nick, he’s a pathetic figure. His hoarding mindset finally costs him his life.

The best kind of billionaire fiction is then 1) a little silly, because, perspective, and 2) mostly about what money can’t buy.

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As Sophie Gilbert noted in a recent piece for The Atlantic, when the billionaire’s plight is rendered without that ironic casing, it can be hard to take seriously—to the detriment of drama.

Writing about recent television shows like HBO’s And Just Like That, Gilbert observed that it’s hard to manufacture interest—let alone empathy—for protagonists who’re “pickled in a state of extreme privilege where nothing can touch them.” Pickled being the operative word.

It’s true. When you’re disgustingly wealthy, your days don’t have to be touched by banal oppressors, like the office or public transportation. And that’s a lot of external conflict eliminated right off the bat.

Meanwhile, the bees in your Gilded Age bonnet will lack relatability. Which, even if it remains a pretty stupid metric for fathoming a character’s “goodness,” just makes another investment hurdle when it comes to us poor consumers. It’s hard to invest in a drama when the stakes are something like—to use two recent examples from HBO—the predominance of rats in a townhouse backyard. Or the success of a second opera house.

Television being a visual medium, internal turmoil like the sort Fitzgerald and Wharton and West explored is much harder to render. But this doesn’t exactly capture why some onscreen billionaires work better than others. Irony turns out to be crucial to the portrait. Which is arguably what these recent shows all lack.

HBO’s The Gilded Age fails where Wharton wins because that opera house is not a symbol of spiritual anomie. It’s really just an opera house. That is really just a rat, on Carrie’s foot. The culprit is tone, that slippery thing. Because billionaires—real or imagined—don’t compel when we don’t get a wink of perspective.

To use a positive TV example, Succession, Jesse Armstrong’s blockbusting satirical drama on the Murdoch family, is successful exactly because it’s so rich with irony. This is a world made of Archers and Gatsbys, vexed dopes who don’t understand their inner weather. But we’re never asked to invest in the characters’ petty dramas, wholesale.

Not for nothing either does Succession borrow a dramatic template—Shakespeare’s King Lear—that comes with immediate psychological stakes. Drama and humor and pathos comes from the gap between what the billionaire believes her money can buy (everything) and what it can’t (brother’s respect, Dad’s love, immortality).

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So we’ve cased some of the billionaire’s first avatars. But where is he in contemporary literature? These days we can find him (less interestingly, to this vulgar Marxist) serving as fantasy fulfillment, Prince Charming style. Here he is, being oh-so-gently-lampooned in the Crazy Rich Asians franchise.

We can find him as a 2D super-villain, in my kind of propaganda. And plenty of other books have picked up where the Gilded Age writers left off, mapping the uniquely cracked psychologies of the ultra-wealthy. Novels by Gary Shteyngart, Emma Cline, and Taffy Brodesser-Akner come to mind. But I struggle to think of recent novel portraits that successfully satirize the billionaire while forcing investment in his spiritual plight, as Wharton did.

In 2023, Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood included a very convincing Elon Musk avatar (Muskatar?). But he’s designed to leave you cold, and does. Which begs a return to an earlier eddy. Can we care about the billionaire? And if we can’t, what purpose can he serve a story in 2025?

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Kang notes in her survey that given present organizing conditions, it’s hard to take pleasure in a bumbling super-villain, like the sorts we see in Mountainhead. Because satire’s been sapped of power. “At a time when terms like ‘inequality’ and ‘one-per-center’ have become buzzwords,” she writes, “exposing the panoply of ways that money can warp relationships seems less like daring social commentary than like preaching to a choir that craves both moral superiority and stuff.“

This points to another problem with the archetype. How harsh can a satire be, after all, if everyone secretly wants to be its object?

In a recent newsletter, the labor historian and author Hamilton Nolan issued a challenge to consumers and creators that might help us shake this villain, in both art and life.

One of the most pernicious barriers to our ability to bring about a better world is our natural tendency to anchor ourselves in the existing state of the world. Rather than establishing first principles and using those to guide us to our destination, we often fall into the trap of just starting with current reality and then riffing.

Maybe the problem with billionaires is, wanting everything for nothing and getting it isn’t novel, interesting, or constructive given the current reality. And a character who always gets what they want is the kiss of death for any fiction. Flat.

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