Billionaire fatigue: When ridicule is all we have left

Business Times

16-06-2025

JUN 6 will go down in my personal history as the first time in 2025 that the news made me smile.
Like countless other non-billionaires that day, I had watched, my glee and eyebrows reaching increasing heights, as two billionaires slagged each other off on social media in an intermittently all-caps brawl that culminated gloriously in a since-deleted post name-checking a paedophile.
Even as our incredulity about how billionaires conduct themselves has soared this year, our regard for them has never been lower, it seems.
There is no study to prove this (no billionaire will fund it), but a new movie, Mountainhead – by Jesse Armstrong of Succession fame – savagely encapsulates our growing contempt for the three-comma club.
The film, released last month, revolves around four wealthy friends who are holed up together at a mountain retreat as the world descends into chaos caused by artificial intelligence-generated disinformation being spread through one of the quartet's social media platforms.
As these desperately fallible men plot to salvage and exploit the situation, they unravel – both individually and collectively. Watching that is half the fun.
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The other half is guessing which real-life billionaires the characters are composite depictions of. Armstrong leaves plenty of clues to this end, the characters' dialogue littered with phrases like 'first principles' and 'steel-manning your argument' serving as the obnoxious and frequently used shibboleths of a rather specific circle of tech brotherhood. (First principles prevent me from naming any names.)
Somewhere between the earthbound Occupy Wall Street movement and some billionaires' space-bound ambitions, our attitude towards the disproportionately rich and powerful has curdled from envious emulation into resentful derision.
'We're a hundred per cent in the Age of the Pathetic Billionaire,' The New Yorker's Alexandra Schwartz said in a discussion of Mountainhead on the publication's Critics at Large podcast, earlier this month.
'I think that our class of billionaires…some of them…care very much about how the public sees them,' Schwartz said.
'And to win certain kinds of public approval, they try to pass themselves off as cool. I think the yearning to be seen as cool, which is itself a fundamentally pathetic quality, is only more pathetic when you're one of the richest people in the world.'
If appearing cool has indeed been the intent of our most visible billionaires, I cannot think of a more unsuccessful campaign since Napoleon's invasion of Russia. Instead, the chattering classes are doubled over at the profound un-coolness of a billionaire face-planting outside his own space capsule, or of one pasty plutocrat challenging another to a cage fight.
But if our laughter sounds like it has a tinny, hollow ring to it, you aren't imagining it. It is our remaining refuge – ridicule as an ineffectual coping mechanism while we helplessly watch the uber-wealthy influence election outcomes, gut government departments and manipulate the lens through which we, well, helplessly watch.
There was a time when we were sick and tired of all this venality. Now, we're just tired.
In Mountainhead, the tech bros ultimately redistribute their wealth – but only among themselves – before going their separate ways, having learnt nothing. At least Napoleon knew when he had overreached. Our real-life billionaires seem convinced that they are just getting started. They might provide plenty of fodder for laughter along the way, but the joke will be on us.