“Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commissions or revenue from some articles through these links.”
“I know what it’s like to have a family member ruin your life,” says Henry Muck in the premiere of the third season of the HBO drama industrywhich follows the merciless and chaotic lives of the bankers at Pierpoint – a London bank where the only thing worse than a bad deal is making an enemy. Henry consoles Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela), a banker at Pierpoint whose father, a publishing magnate, has just disappeared in an embezzlement scandal. Now the paparazzi are following Yasmin’s every move. The tabloids portray her as a party girl heiress, even though her fortune has been reduced to her now-toxic surname.
Henry is a new character in the series, played by game of Thrones hot Kit Harington. At first he seems like a classic narcissistic billionaire, an old-money Nepo baby of monstrous proportions who has built an image for himself as a “man of the people.” (Or at least a man who will bring cheap, clean energy to the people as CEO of energy startup Lumi.) His corporate headquarters looks like something out of a former BuzzFeed employee’s therapy diary: bright colors and a soft play area for adults, beds for burnout-prone employees to sleep in, and a “jacket-free rule” to reinforce anti-corporate sentiment—all designed to soften the impact of his tyrannical tantrums. But his scene with Yasmin is meant to make the audience wonder if he’s a total asshole. In fact, standing there—shirtless and sweaty, mid-workout, panting in tiny shorts—we’re meant to find him hot, too.
Henry belongs to a demographic that is suddenly taking up more time on our screens: the hot billionaire. We first see the handsome but totally useless CEO get into a strangely arousing fight in the aforementioned soft play area. A few episodes later, he leaves a pool in a Ice Cold Angels— a coded moment sure to spark a million gay awakenings. In the real world, billionaires may not be sex symbols in Hollywood, but it still feels like they’re getting more airtime than ever before. When they’re not launching rockets into space, they’re running for president or getting radicalized on the social media apps they own. These men — because, yes, they’re almost exclusively men — are even more keen on attention than money. They’re not just terribly rich, they’re often just plain awful, which makes television’s thirst for billionaire villains even more baffling.
It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when billionaires began to appear more frequently on our screens. Both television and cinema have been involved for years with themes such as “Eat the Rich!”, from HBO’s The White Lotus to Netflix Knife out franchise. But on TV right now, it’s all about a certain type of rich guy who has another superpower: being good-looking.
This may have started in 2015, when the long-awaited Fifty shades of grey The film adaptation – based on EL James’ record-breaking erotic novel series – has finally hit theaters. The film trilogy was universally panned by critics but grossed over a billion dollars at the box office. Some would say the franchise’s lasting legacy is the normalization of fetishism in mainstream culture, or the introduction of the magic of the Dakota Johnson press tour to the world. (Or maybe it’s Rita Ora’s iconically awful wig… and her “American” accent.) What is often ignored, however, is how explicitly the appeal of Christian Grey – a handsome and disturbed sadomasochist – is intertwined with his billionaire status. In fact, the way his wealth was portrayed drew criticism from BDSM groups, who said the story conflates the practice with financial abuse.
One year later Billions— a series about hedge fund manager Bobby “Axe” Axelrod, played by Damian Lewis — premiered on Showtime. As the arrogant and handsome manager of Axe Capital, Bobby built a rags-to-riches image, but his wealth was also based on shady dealings and bribery. Next came Consequence. In 2017, the HBO series introduced us to a string of billionaires as the Roy siblings vied for the affections of the family patriarch, media mogul Logan Roy. Fans developed a “weird crush” on Kendall and Roman Roy, but in the final season, we met the final boss of the hot billionaires: Lukas Matsson, played by Alexander Skarsgård. The hoodie-loving CEO of the Swedish streaming service was unreliable, short-tempered, and also sexually creepy. (He confessed to sending bags of his blood to Ebba, his communications director.)
Last The morning show– the Apple TV drama that loosely follows the real-life news agenda, starring Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon – presented us with Paul Marks, a tech CEO played by Jon Hamm. (The actor was PeopleIn 2008, he was named “Sexiest Man Alive,” which raises the question: Why only 2008?) In the third season, Marks woos news anchor Alex Levy (Aniston) while attempting a hostile takeover of her news company, UBA. Given his space travels and expansion into the media world, it’s impossible not to connect Marks with the real CEO of SpaceX and X (formerly Twitter), Elon Musk.
The morning showThe Musk-inspired billionaire—one who, spoiler alert, turns out to be evil!—represents the fact that billionaires are much more visible in our culture today. Not only are there more billionaires statistically than ever before, but there are also more billionaires CelebritiesDonald Trump used his status as a television star to launch his political career before becoming the first billionaire president – truly breaking the barriers for the 0.0001 percent.
Trump represents the “old guard” of billionaires, while those of the new wave, like Mark Zuckerberg or Musk, are younger and have made their fortunes in the technology industry. Therefore, they seem to want to appear cool to us, whether it is Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ makeover after his divorce or Zuckerberg’s changing hairstyles. And it is not enough for these men to donate to political causes or to set up a charitable foundation: they want heard. Anytime. Constantly.
On Monday, Trump sat down for a conversation with Musk. The erroneous chat was streamed live on X, the platform Musk owns, where he has since bragged about the “billions” of views he claims to have received. The discussion was a reminder that while billionaires have been around for quite some time, the phenomenon of opening your phone and seeing their propaganda while watching PopCrave is relatively new.
Since we are in daily contact with the richest men in the world, we also get front row tickets when they collapse: industryMuch to the dismay of the bankers at Pierpoint, Henry deviates from the guidelines and starts giving quotes to journalists when Lumi’s shares go public. (Who needs a press officer, right?) In ConsequenceThere was similar chaos when Matsson – who was also loosely based on Musk – started posting Nazi references on Twitter in the middle of Kendall’s business presentation. There are real parallels here with Musk’s frequent sharing of misinformation or that bizarre moment in 2023 when he and Zuckerberg publicly challenged each other to a “cage fight.”
With the exception of Shiv Roy (who is actually more of a Nepo baby), TV’s hot billionaire canon seems to be dominated by male characters. Perhaps that’s because female billionaires in the real world generally don’t vie for attention in the same way. Aside from Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, whose journey from the cover of Forbes to prison was dramatized on Hulus The dropoutthe billionaire women most famous in our culture right now are much more accomplished. The public profiles that Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian and Oprah Winfrey have cultivated don’t seem so undignified and chaotic. They are busy selling out local tours, building shapewear and media empires and inventing iconic phrases like “Have you been quiet or have you been silenced?”
In comparison, male billionaires have a messiah complex, such as WeWork CEO Adam Neumann, whose cult-like mission to “raise the world’s consciousness” through eye-catching office spaces was portrayed on the show “Apple TV+.” We crashedstarring Jared Leto. If one of the lessons of the hot billionaire archetype is that self-proclaimed masterminds like Neumann aren’t actually that smart, then perhaps their female counterparts appear smarter in comparison because they have to be. Society doesn’t give them credit for being geniuses.
In industrywe gradually get to see behind Henry’s facade. (We also learn about his sexual preferences, which on TV seem to be a prerequisite for being a billionaire.) In the second episode, over dinner with Yasmin, we learn that he is desperate to prove his worth. He remembers something his late father always said: “If you’re born with a silver spoon in your mouth, people think you’re an idiot.” He doesn’t do much to disprove that impression, either. There’s a distinct sense that Lumi – his “big idea” – is too good to be true. And in an age of extreme wealth inequality, his belief that people like him somehow exist for the benefit of us all – and that their wealth trickles down to the little people – seems like an outlandish fantasy.
Of course, there’s another reason why hot billionaires like Henry Muck currently dominate our screens: Simply put, viewers like to see good-looking people. Staggeringly rich and attention-seeking men are now a staple of discourse, so if we’re watching dramatized versions of them, they might as well be good-looking. Given our collective fetishization of money and attention, we can be sure we’ll obsess over those who have both (and give them their own quirks, too). But it’s too simplistic to assume that TV shows want us to just lust after their bank accounts and jawlines and then be done with them. Perhaps the superficial truth is that we need to imagine getting into bed with these men to see them for who they really are.
You might also like
