King of the dorks. Arun Sharma/Hindustan Times/Getty Images
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“A million dollars isn’t cool,” Sean Parker explains to a jejune Mark Zuckerberg in the 2010 film The Social Network. “You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.” This single line of dialogue portended a major shift in global culture. “Cool” first emerged in the black community as an aesthetic disposition of calm detachment and disobedience. By the 21st century, the term had broadened out to include the accumulation of capital in the three-comma range. Today, a billion dollars serves as the most powerful status symbol for claiming membership in the ultra-elite.
According to Forbes’s 2023 list, 2,640 people on earth are billionaires. This number has near doubled in the past decade. The top individuals are familiar faces — Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk — but the vast majority of billionaires are unknowns. Tetra Pak-heir Finn Rausing ($8.6 billion) is a niche figure by any measure. But still these billionaires wield extraordinary influence over the world’s economy, politics, and technology: from the Koch brothers’ heavy lobbying against climate action to the elevation of Right-wing speech on X after Musk’s acquisition. Adrienne LaFrance recently argued in The Atlantic that tech company CEOs use their clout to push policies under an ideology she labels “authoritarian technocracy”.
A billion dollars surely buys influence and fame, but does it make all billionaires cool? In other words, can billionaires directly shape the culture by inspiring mass imitation of their particular lifestyle choices? The classic theories of 19th-century sociologists Gabriel Tarde and Georg Simmel posit that culture “trickles down” from the top of society to the classes below. Yet this is not our reality today. Judging by the aesthetics spread by luxury fashion brands, Hollywood films and advertising, the “creative classes” — with celebrities as their elite segment — still seem to wield the most power in shaping mainstream tastes.
Why aren’t billionaires cool, then? “Trickle-down” theories of society require a well-established aristocratic or upper class of people who inhabit a rarefied world, but this doesn’t describe the current billionaire class very well. Instead, the term “billionaire” is best understood as the highest marker of success inside separate worlds of business, technology and entertainment, and each billionaire tends to socialise with like-minded people in their own milieu. There are only occasional crossovers. The Allen & Co. Sun Valley Conference may be called a “summer camp for billionaires” but mere millionaires also attend.
In the past, the upper class more or less meant Old Money, and these families conspired to block the social elevation of New Money. Today, the billionaire class is a mix of “self-made” individuals and those born into oligarchic families. This discrepancy in backgrounds leads to varied tastes and dispositions. Unlike Bezos, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page, who grew up middle class, the heirs of super-rich parents only know a life of mansions, preparatory schools and private jets. Political views also diverge wildly: Peter Thiel on the libertarian Right, George Soros on the liberal Left.
These inconsistencies blur the public’s understanding of billionaires as a unified class that can guide tastes. This is compounded by the fact that so many billionaires are, in recent parlance, “swagless”. Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates will never live down the video of their lumbering on-stage dancing during the Windows 95 launch. A few billionaires, including Jay-Z and Oprah, built their business empires on the love and respect of mass audiences long before their rise to the Forbes list. But the process doesn’t work in reverse: uncool people who become billionaires remain mostly uncool.
Another important factor is that the billion-dollar range of wealth may be so extreme as to cripple previous ways the rich achieved social influence. In his 1899 work The Theory of the Leisure Class, economist Thorstein Veblen published the canonical model of how wealth influences cultural values. Since raw wealth alone can’t bring esteem, the rich must convert their assets into three types of inimitable display: conspicuous waste, conspicuous leisure, and conspicuous consumption. These actions lead to certain preferences — for silver tableware or fancy cars — that set the standards for the rest of society.
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SubscribeZuckerberg might be rich, but he will never be cool. He has the world’s worst haircut for a start.
And Jack Dorsey (the previous owner of Twitter) who eats once a day and takes *only* cold showers could hardly offer anything appealing in terms of lifestyle 😉
First generation fortunes are usually made by the tasteless and uncool. If the third generation is still in possession, then they get style, sometimes the the second generation too, but that depends on getting a decent education
Um, Musk doesn’t spend his time trolling on X. He builds rockets, satellites, and vehicles.
Silly article.
Agreed. Nothing to learn from this vapid piece of writing.
Lots of tech founders are Autists or part of the Broad Autism Phenotype. Temple Grandin once said that while the Yackity-yaks (neurotypicals) were sitting around the fire talking, an Autist was fighting out how to knap flint. If you think advancing technology is not cool, then go back to your yacking about inane social concerns. We Autists are going to the stars.
The rest of us hope you’ll be happy there.
Thanks, we will do our best to be happy.
This is an odd essay, apparently in search of a rationale for disdain of the ultra-successful.
Not a good piece.
Agree. The topic lends itself nicely to significantly more profound and insighful thoughts, but, well, here we are…
‘Zuckerberg wears a uniform of generic grey T-shirts — and posts videos of his training in mixed martial arts. ‘
The most noticeable aspect of Zuckerberg’s appearance is that distinctly uncool haircut of his which irritates the hell out of me for some unknown reason and makes him look like a gormless overgrown school boy. I wouldn’t be seen dead with someone with that kind of hairstyle, billionaire or not. But I suppose, being a billionaire, he doesn’t need to care about what people think of his haircut.
“I wouldn’t be seen dead with someone with that kind of hairstyle…” I hope you’re joking! What’s wrong with it? I guess you must fancy yourself “cool-affiliated.”
It looks like his mom put a pudding bowl on his head, and trimmed round the edges.
He looks moonish
Zuckerberg is obsessed with the Roman Empire’s Cesar. . The statues and busts show the close-cropped hair that Zuckerberg copies.
The only very rich person who rivalled Zuckerberg in the “bad haircut” stakes was Bernie Ecclestone, although I admit I haven’t seen him recently.
“Musk looks foolish for paying $44 billion to purchase Twitter and instituting a series of changes that caused a 71% drop in value.”
No. He looks like a risk-taker who took a gamble that is still playing out. To some, like me, he also looks like a hero, who used his wealth to promote free speech. The chattering class on the sidelines will always celebrate every opportunity to throw stones at men and women of action who actually do things.