2023: the year of the billionaire villain

"It was all so easy. I just took what I wanted, and it was mine. I said what I wanted, and people got it for me. I did what I wanted, and nobody stopped me," says Robert Lemoine, the almost unimaginably evil billionaire villain of Eleanor Catton's kaleidoscopic novel "Birnam Wood," about a radical agriculture collective that gets involved with the wrong funder. 

At least in popular culture, those barricades might be coming down. 2023 was the year that Artificial Intelligence took off, with ChatGPT upending college classrooms and serving as a punchline in Republican debates and Open AI founder Sam Altman drawing increased scrutiny from regulators and critics. 

Why it's fun to hate on billionaires now

Ire against billionaires is on the rise, especially with young people frustrated with the status quo, nearly 60% of whom believe that the existence of billionaires is "getting in the way of personal dreams," according to a 2022 Harris poll. 

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And especially since Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world according to many sources, bought the social media platform Twitter in 2022, there has been a notable uptick in negative portrayals of the superrich, often in the ripped-from-the-headlines style that was once practiced exclusively by "Law & Order." These TV billionaires are shadowy, self-involved and often in the grip of delusions of grandeur, either frittering away their money on passion projects like space travel or bent on manipulating the news environment for their own ends. They use their riches not to solve problems for everyone but to solve problems for themselves or engage in bitter, pointless rivalries while the masses fight over scraps. 

TV loves a billionaire

2023 saw the bitter conclusion of Max's critical darling "Succession," about a family of billionaire media scions jockeying with one another and various hangers-on, investors and politicians for control of a Fox News-like media empire. "Succession" is distinguished in this milieu with having the most billionaire antiheroes in any single program, from the eldest son Connor and his quixotic quest for the presidency to the ambitious but hopelessly flawed Kendall, whose many efforts to gain control of the company from his father, Logan, were consistently unmoored from any philosophy of public good or even a personal ideology. He just wants it because it feels good; he thinks that is what billionaire jerks are supposed to do. But the sharpest critique of luxury-class greed was delivered by Logan's brother Ewan at the former's funeral, when he said that the late mogul "fed that dark flame in men, the hard, mean, hard-relenting flame that keeps their heart warm while another grows cold."

In the third season of the Apple TV+ drama "The Morning Show" (which The Ringer's Prestige TV podcast memorably called "the best bad TV show of the last 10 years"), the CEO of the ailing, fictional network UBN identifies Paul Marks, a Musk-like billionaire who runs a smoke-and-mirrors space exploration company called Hyperion, as the business' potential savior and tries to sell the company to him. Played by the great Jon Hamm, Marks is a master manipulator, who uses a relationship with UBN royalty Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston) to obscure his plans to sell off the network for parts to pay Hyperion's debt. Everything about Marks, from his ugly personal past to his outer-space hijinx and unformed interest in a media property, feels like it is drawn directly from Musk — except that Hamm can't really help being dapper and charming, whereas Musk sports a rizz deficit on his best days.

But "The Morning Show" is hardly alone. FX's "A Murder at the End of the World" also revolves around the machinations of reclusive billionaire Andy Ronson (Clive Owen), who brings a group of visionaries including amateur sleuth Darby Hart (Emma Corrin) to his absurd Icelandic retreat to plot the future of humanity. Ronson is both overbearing and brittle, with a heavy dose of the end-of-days paranoia that seems to consume the superrich. As viewers begin to suspect he has intel about an impending climate disaster, we see his robots building underground bunkers for the wealthy. It's a plot point that also shows up unexpectedly toward the end of the 2023 Netflix adaptation of Rumaan Alam's novel "Leave the World Behind."

Billionaires are indeed a laughing matter. Sometimes. 

The billionaire class also received the occasional comedic treatment this year. In one episode of Max's "The Other Two," which depicts the hapless siblings of a pop star named Chase Dreams, Brooke (Helene Yorke) goes on a date with a billionaire, who invites her over just to watch him spelunk on his indoor climbing wall and marvel at his greatness and then literally takes her to space. Soured on the prospect of dating someone that rich, she finds a mere millionaire, who becomes a billionaire halfway through their date when his app is sold and morphs instantaneously into a Bezos-like weirdo replete with botoxed lips and megalomania. And on the fifth season of FX's "Fargo," Jennifer Jason Leigh chews scenery to bits as a Koch-like billionaire named Lorraine Lyon who manipulates Minnesota's politics like a puppeteer, has her daughter-in-law illegally committed and says things like, "The police. I mean, why do we need you? Except as a tool to keep a certain element in line. To separate those who have money, class, intellect from those who don't." 

The narrative thread that connects these disparate stories is about how the ultrarich have so much money that they are flailing about trying to spend it. They pour cash into dopey schemes like private space travel, employ coteries of henchmen to do their bidding and run roughshod over anyone who stands in their paths. But what makes them such easy targets today is their ostentatious wealth set against a backdrop of slow-moving global calamity, like the three tech overlords in Naomi Alderman's novel "The Future," who use AI to predict the end of the world and, crucially, have the technology give them enough heads-up to get to their lavishly appointed bunkers to ride through the apocalypse. 

Billionaires embody our worsening fears of apocalyptic demise, whether brought by climate change, AI run amok or incipient authoritarianism. But their status as punching bags is always in conflict with envy, yearning and even admiration. Proof: The same Harris survey that depicted heightened anger among millennials and Gen Z respondents about the influence of billionaires, 60% said they want to become a billionaire, and "look up" to those who have attained that rarified status. 

That combustible contradiction alone should ensure that billionaire villains will be front and center in pop culture for years.