For the super-rich, 2021 has been casting lots of shade—from the Sackler family’s weaseling out of any accountability for opioid deaths to the Pandora Papers’ exposure of billionaires’ offshore and domestic tax havens. We had reminders of how America’s richest families keep that “super” before the “rich”—like with tax loopholes allowing them to pass vast sums of wealth down to their heirs by avoiding capital gains taxes. We also learned from the New York Times that in the homes of the wealthy, many basic kitchen appliances are now being hidden within bespoke cabinets, and only the initiated know where. (For instance, a regular person could not find the fridge chez Cher.)

And yet after Democrats failed to get the votes for a corporate income tax hike to pay for President Biden’s infrastructure and social spending bill, they are also unlikely to pass a proposed billionaires’ tax that would make the super-rich pay annual capital gains taxes on the value appreciation of their humungous assets. That’s a shame since there are more billionaires than ever in the United States: 719 in 2021, an increase of almost 17% over 2020.

However appealing, the populist talking point that Americans have finally had enough of billionaires is all myth. That’s primarily because being pro-billionaire is the one place where two parties that hate each other can peacefully coexist. It’s also because of the endurance of a more formidable myth about money and power in Anglo-American culture. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in This Side of Paradise (1920): “The idea that to make a man work you’ve got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We’ve done that for so long that we’ve forgotten there’s any other way.”

For a few weeks at the start of the year, the short squeeze of ailing video game retailer GameStop pitted regular-Joe online stock buyers against the hedge fund millionaires who’d been short-selling GameStop under the assumption that the chain would fail. When this caused huge losses for short-sellers, Robinhood, the app the buyers were using, halted GameStop sales, claiming that it couldn’t post sufficient collateral. Wall Street cried market manipulation, dozens of lawsuits were filed, and the House Committee on Financial Services held a hearing. The “plebes unite” vibe of Roaring Kitty (Keith Gill) on the subreddit r/WallStreetBets fizzled out to nothing.

While the poor are invisible to middle-class eyes (as Orwell said, “We despise beggars because what they do is not profitable”), the minute that one of them strikes it rich, we can’t stop looking. Of all the freedoms that the MAGA world claims to have been denied by the Democratic establishment, the one most fundamental to their existence is believing that that seismic minute of transformation will be theirs. They don’t want coastal elites raining on their parade of magical thinking. And they can be strangely democratic toward individuals within the oppressed groups they normally despise—minorities, the foreign-born, drug dealers and sex workers—when these people suddenly hit the jackpot. We don’t care how ill-gotten the gain, because the clock starts ticking once a person (usually male) absorbs that capital into the bloodstream of his family.

This sentiment also applies when the rich are caught cheating. As long as they’re able to hold on to big money or have a pipeline after they’ve been sprung, we don’t shun them like we did 40 years ago. The friendship of Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg could be based on anything, but resuming the money hustle after having done their time has to be a significant factor.

It’s probably fitting that The Crown once again won a slew of Emmys in September, because our mythologizing of billionaires originated in Britain’s class system. Europe had no shortage of monarchies in the second millennium, but there was only one Shakespeare—whether an individual or a collective branding enterprise. Shakespeare didn’t just tell compelling stories about the often dumb exploits of the British crown; he gave the principals poetic, almost otherworldly language. Since Shakespeare, the smartest and wittiest British writers have made people with power and money sound not just intelligent but masters of words.

The Crown is much like The Sopranos in that both are about the workings of families that are powerful only within a circumscribed milieu. The Royals have no actual political power, and the Jersey Mafia at the end of the millennium was slipping into niche extortion and petty larceny. In both series, people do very bad things—and often make things worse when they try to fix a problem. At their opposing ends of the class spectrum, the characters are fallible and human, watching their worlds become smaller and smaller. The HBO series Succession is also about a family whose members do very bad things, but that’s about all it has in common with these two icons of prestige TV. That’s because running a global enterprise with a valuation in the trillions makes a family powerful in a boundless way. It has nothing to do with national borders or national identity.

As fitting as it is that The Crown swept the Emmys, it’s likewise fitting in this billionaire season that Succession’s showrunner, Jesse Armstrong, is a Brit, because this series follows the Shakespeare formula of patronage to the letter: the more powerful you are, the greater your Wildean wit and verbal acuity (in addition to your style and panache). You could argue that these elements are crucial for a show to be worth watching, in the way that Bond villains have to be brilliant cartoons. But you could also argue that going full Shakespeare on families like the Murdochs and Maxwells only maintains pernicious propaganda. In the 1980s, Dallas and Dynasty were meant to be melodramatic soap operas we could laugh at. But not Succession. It is meant to be watched while taking notes.

Rebecca Mead’s New Yorker profile of Armstrong describes the lengths to which he goes to make billionaire families sound rapaciously witty—hiring la crème de la crème of writers not to put words in his characters’ mouths but to tease out what he thinks actual billionaires would say. His hunger for structure beneath incomprehensible wealth is like a National Geographic filmmaker’s hunger for images of a snow leopard. There’s something almost reverent in his ideas of what makes someone authentically super-rich. It’s as if you had the perfect vocabulary for the sartorial élan of the late Charlie Watts and wanted desperately to use it on Rupert Murdoch. I suppose you could do that, but most of us know that many of the super-rich are dull, shallow, saggy old men in track suits, and above all favor the repartee of a blunt instrument.

Even in late Victorian Britain, satirists shied away from going full Shakespeare in dramatizing the orbit of greed around the super-rich. The Way We Live Now (1875), Anthony Trollope’s satirical novel about shady financiers and the society people who kowtow to them, is often invoked to talk about the 2008 recession. The story concerns the super-rich Augustus Melmotte, a foreign financier in league with an American, and his ruthless, capital-fueled rise to Parliamentary power. No one knows how Melmotte made his fortune, but that doesn’t stop London bluebloods from accepting the intruder. As the American, Mr. Fisker, says: “You regular John Bull Englishmen are so full of scruples that you lose as much of life as should serve to make an additional fortune.”

But while everyone seems to be fantasizing about getting rich quick, London is still a society where ethics and morals prevail. When the music of the financial con stops, the bluebloods drop Melmotte like a hot potato. Trollope’s novel was not popular, and that may be because Melmotte retains some kind of dignity as an antihero. Or maybe it’s because the author takes a lighthearted tone in presenting everyone as corruptible. According to his autobiography, Trollope wrote the novel because he feared that people would be “taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable.” A public sentiment of denial has shown him to be 100% correct.

Of course, the bloodline dynasties in The Crown and Succession are just one part of the billionaire pie. Almost half of the 400 richest Americans in the Forbes 400 in 2021 made that money in either technology or finance and investments. Silicon Valley and Wall Street are minting millionaires almost daily, and those millionaires have nowhere to go but up.

Sometimes I think Silicon Valley’s most visible imprint on our era is the esthetics of esthetic indifference: a billion shades of gray. Steve Jobs and his obsession with design gave the illusion that this innovator class had some degree of taste—a taste for restraint perhaps. But many a tech millionaire since the millennium has been a twentysomething knowing or caring nothing about art and design. Unlike in the Gilded Age, this cohort of the suddenly rich don’t look to artists or designers for guidance on what kind of home to have, how to decorate it, and how to dress. They know the exact vehicles and gadgets they want; they know the accoutrements of 24/7 wellness. For the rest, they just go with the gray minimalism of a tech device.

Of course any budding billionaire wants a dramatic location for his real estate, and if it’s not a new build it cannot look moved-in-to. His minimalist house must be big enough to always appear empty. He leaves his house empty not because he doesn’t like knickknacks but because he’s probably 23. He may have some design people give the place a Buddhist temple vibe, but underlying his fear of esthetic possession is a greater fear of being framed by any choice that might be shown to be bad. And when the twentysomething millionaire becomes a billionaire at 30, all he can do is double down on his previous indifference by making the empty even bigger.

It almost makes sense that what the tech bros put in everyone’s heads is occupiable space, all ready for the algorithm to move fast and break things. And it’s strange how the visuals of haphazard fortune have dictated the esthetics of not just the very rich but the entire nation. You’ll have people who’ve struggled for decades to buy a house, and when they finally get there, their guiding principle of design is a 23-year-old guy with more money than the patience to spend it. The look of wealth in Succession is all Silicon Valley, which is odd since Rupert Murdoch, like Trump, built his empire in the Reagan-Thatcher age of gilded stuff. Trump’s virulent denial of every post-1989 design trend is almost refreshing in a world the color of concrete.

And finally there’s Wall Street, the reliable old school where money is made out of money. There’s never anything new to say about Wall Street titans, but it’s always instructive to remember their bitterness at the rest of us for not loving them enough. Back in 2010, Max Abelson wrote an article about aggrieved Wall Street executives and their animosity toward President Obama for not shielding them from the public’s “language of villainy and populism.” “We’ve been ostracized,” a senior executive told Abelson. “I went to jury duty about a year ago, and when I said I’m in investment banking, the people in the jury room were making ugh sounds, and I’m like, fuck you. I’m proud of what I do. And I think this firm did a lot to get the recovery going. Somewhere ranked below a pimp and well operator is not right.”

Eleven years on, public rancor at fat cats is less severe, money has superseded social class as a way to determine what we envy in one another, and speculation in crypto has given a lot of everyday investors the promise of astronomic wealth. Still, I don’t think it has sunk into the American psyche how the global billionaire class is not on the scale of “more and more” that our brains have evolved to process. Even the most unimaginative American will tell you exactly what and in what order they would buy if they instantly became a billionaire. But they don’t understand the cultural place and mindset inhabited by those who accumulate or inherit those billions.

There is a deliberate ideology among the most vocal in this class that places themselves and their beneficiaries above the social contract. In 2009, the billionaire Peter Thiel said claimed that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” and “there are no truly free places left in our world.” (Why are people with tremendous wealth so obsessed with things being “free”?) Not every billionaire is like Thiel, but you’d never know it. Wealth at a certain level becomes an arms race: As long as you have a nuclear weapon, you can’t opt out. It’s hard to tell if Americans are now more fascinated than repulsed by billionaires, or if we have we normalized the absurdity of their excess possession of the world’s bounty to the extent that we no longer judge them one way or the other. As Trollope suggests in The Way We Live Now: “In social life we hardly stop to consider how much of that daring spirit which gives mastery comes from hardness of heart rather than from high purpose, or true courage.” §