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.

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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.

But in our hypermodern world, Veblen’s techniques no longer work very well. Conspicuous leisure is taboo in a hyper-capitalist world where money never sleeps; the rich are often now busier than the poor. And market-inspired values have made us too rational to be impressed by conspicuous waste. Musk looks foolish for paying $44 billion to purchase Twitter and instituting a series of changes that caused a 71% drop in value.

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Most notably, conspicuous consumption doesn’t help billionaires stand out with personal lifestyle choices such as accessories, vehicles, and vacations. There are no watches or handbags 1,000-times more expensive than what basic millionaires already pay. The priciest car today costs $30 million, not $300 million. As it stands, it’s almost impossible for billionaires to achieve Veblen-like distinction through buying consumer goods. Even with fortress-like mansions, giant yachts, great artworks, and private jets they can’t begin to display the full extent of their wealth. And so their visible choices aren’t more distinct than other influential millionaires.

And where we do glimpse into billionaire taste, much of it tends to be underwhelming. They often appear in gossip magazines looking just like us. Bezos arrives at fancy parties dressed like a mid-tier invite. Zuckerberg wears a uniform of generic grey T-shirts — and posts videos of his training in mixed martial arts. Musk spends his time trolling liberals on X.

But perhaps billionaires are wisely limiting their own public expenditure in order to divert attention from their vast fortunes. Populist economics have taken over both political parties in the US, and there is a growing call for a new economic paradigm to curb extreme income inequality. In her new book, Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth, philosopher Ingrid Robeyns argues that the mere existence of billionaires creates severe distortions in democratic society. One example is that the prodigious success of Mark Zuckerberg and Evan Spiegel convinced many Millennials that if they engaged in never-ending hustle, they too could achieve such riches. Even the most pro-capitalist youth, however, would likely draw a line between the right to enjoy one’s billions earned in entrepreneurial success and dollars inherited from a purple birth. The best way to keep money in the family is to disappear from public view.

This all suggests that there is a long-term incentive for Right-wing billionaires to stay uncool. Their stiffness and geekiness obscures their broader social influence and helps build alliances with other groups who also feel excluded from urban professional class tastes. Precisely because they are not cultural elites, billionaires can win over lower-income groups, who, rationally, would benefit from the redistribution of their wealth. And they can cast themselves as saviours in the Right-wing war against urban and educated “elites”. Former President Donald Trump’s crassness — a preference for steaks well done, ornate apartment design, and Stormy Daniels — embodies what his less wealthy supporters understand as his inherent opposition to their enemies in the professional classes. Business Insider’s Savannah Bradley recently made a similar point about billionaire singer Taylor Swift: she dresses in outmoded ways to better connect with her outmoded audience.

As billionaires are small in number, they need to assemble broader coalitions of anti-liberals in order to stop populist movements from passing more progressive economic policies and regulations of their businesses. In this, their failure to be stylish is an immense help. Every time we mock billionaires’ dance moves and try-hard leather jackets, we may be further obfuscating their vast influence in American life.

Under Preston’s fair pen Maxwell is a clever, vulgar, frightened polyglot. In his heyday he was perceived as cartoonish — so inhuman that a guest at one of his parties at Headington Hall went through his cupboards looking for insights into his character. She told Preston she wouldn’t normally do this but it was Maxwell so who cares? (She found rows of salad cream.) His story is irresistible because it is barely believable. One reviewer called it “entertaining”.

Is it though? It is true Maxwell’s life was novelistic. He was a man of infinite possibility because he did not know who he was, and he could not bear to ask. He was a plutocrat who lived in a rented house. He was a sexual exploiter cuckolded by an employee. He was a father who appeared to hate his children. He styled himself, preposterously, as an English country squire and endured typical British snobbery for his trouble. (The Observer compared to him a Petticoat Lane market trader. The Sun called him a peasant.) He invented modern British scientific publishing but had fake book spines in his study. He was the first British passenger to fly one million miles, but he could not go home.

I do not find this story irresistible, or even very strange, but then I am a Jew. To me, Maxwell’s story is a fairly ordinary tale of Holocaust trauma, if not to Preston (but who wants to believe their subject is a type?). It is the story of a man who hated himself so much for survival he could not, for 40 years, admit to his Jewishness, or to his childhood name. It is possible he even forgot he was once called Ludvik Hoch. One of Maxwell’s sisters, Sylvia, was saved by the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who rescued her from a Budapest station as she was about to be sent to Auschwitz. He gave her, along with other Jewish children, Swedish citizenship, and she later came to England. Towards the end of Maxwell’s life Sylvia asked him why he called himself Jan Hoch. Maxwell replied it was his name. No, said Sylvia, he was named Ludvik. According to Preston’s account Maxwell looked “astonished” and asked: “Was I?”

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He was born in what is now Ukraine, in 1923. “I remember how cold I was,” he said, “how hungry I was and how much I loved my mother.” His mother was adoring and his father abusive: Stalin’s family dynamic, precisely, one designed to cultivate suspicion in a child. He said he was once so hungry he ate a dog but that may not be true. He was not a reliable narrator. He was ever shifting. Perhaps that was why he became so fat. I wonder if he subconsciously sought to anchor himself to something, to anything, to this earth.

He was 16 when he left his family. He ended up fighting for the British against the Nazis. By the time the war was over his parents and all by two of his siblings were dead, some in Auschwitz, others en route. He had had nine brothers and sisters — he was the eldest son — and, with his non-Jewish wife Betty, he would have nine sons and daughters, as if to recover the lost family. Betty says he sank to his knees by a pool when they visited Auschwitz, pulled out some sodden splintered bones, and wept.

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As Preston calmly relates, Maxwell’s criminality went far beyond the Man Who Saved the Mirror robbing its pension fund and treating his employees like serfs. (He particularly enjoyed tormenting the well-connected because they knew their place in the world.) That is the least of it. He was a killer. As a British soldier, he shot German civilians — he shot a mayor in the head in the town square — and German soldiers trying to surrender. (He could not understand why other British soldiers objected.) He robbed their corpses. His wife Betty, in her anguished memoir, said that even in the ecstatic early days of their marriage his own lips “depicted death and carnage”. He carried it with him to England, to the House of Commons — he was a much-mocked and talkative Labour MP — and to a publishing empire.

He gathered a robe of success around him, but it did not fit him. He learnt to stop changing his name after his bank manager told him he would close the account if he did not stop. (He had four different names before the age of 23.) He found it impossible to be intimate and walked around his parties with a PA system, so his voice would boom from nowhere. He had no friends, only employees. His most treasured possession was his passport, which was normal for Jews of his generation: the right passport could save your life. When he appeared on Desert Island Discs, he asked his family to choose the music. Who doesn’t have music? A man who either cannot hear it or feels he does not deserve it.

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He returned to Judaism and Betty thought that this, and his growing belief that he betrayed his family by marrying a non-Jew, destroyed their marriage. She said everything changed when they visited Slatinské Doly, the town of his birth, to a hero’s welcome, though the inhabitants could, or would, not save his family. He didn’t divorce her, but he verbally abused her, ignored her and lived in a ludicrous London penthouse alone. In reply, Betty became a skilled historian of the Holocaust. It was an attempt to understand him. It didn’t work. He would say: “I know what loneliness is like.”

He deserved to be lonely, but when I read the exhausting lies, I wonder if Maxwell was a thief because he believed he had nothing. In the most revealing passage Preston writes: “He took the logo of Mirror Group Newspapers — a roaring lion — from the Hollywood studio MGM; the names of the headquarters, Maxwell House, from a brand of instant coffee; and the name of his parent company, MCC, from the Marylebone Cricket”. Once, he pretended to have been in a military hospital with Ronald Reagan, a memory he stole from the Reagan film The Hasty Heart. Another time, preposterously, he pretended to be Scottish. All this is material to those who found him ridiculous, but it is, again, a normal reaction, if to be yourself meant death.

He was not, then, a mysterious person, but another rational product of Nazism. Even so, the mystery endures. Myths fly around his death. Did he commit suicide as his financial crimes came close to exposure? (Did he lock his bedroom door behind him, so the absence would not be discovered?) Was he murdered by the Israelis, who sent a Mossad assassin to a yacht in the ocean, only to give him a state funeral days later? (Anti-Jewish conspiracy theories bookend his life. They give it structure.) Did he fake his own death; does a fake Robert Maxwell lie in a Jerusalem grave? It doesn’t matter. You can argue that Maxwell was dead in every meaningful sense by 1945. That is not the story of every Holocaust survivor, but it is his. The rest, through scornful laughter or not, is detritus.

But distance isn’t the only cause of class conflict — sometimes proximity is the problem. Adjacent classes can be all too familiar with each other’s habits, breeding not just contempt but also resentment. As we read this month, even reasonably well-off Londoners, living in £800,000 flats, come to see being denied access to a sky pool as a form of “apartheid” — which might seem somewhat hyperbolic to people who live in parts of the country where £800,000 is a lot (or indeed to people who lived under apartheid).

And much of the class tension throughout history has been not between rich and poor, but between class neighbours, those on the very next rung of the hierarchy. For instance, there has always been tension between the working class who actually work and their non-working neighbours. Then there’s the often vicious war of words between the intelligentsia and the petty bourgeoisie — divergent tendencies within the middle class but with very different worldviews. The former may control “the arts”, but the latter have the Daily Mail.

Finally, at the top of the pile, there’s the clash between “old money” and “new money”, which has long been a staple of English literature. The rise and fall of fortunes was an obsession of 19th century authors, but the definitive showdown comes in a 20th century novel, The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald. Newly out of copyright, the great American novel of the 1920s East Coast elite has become the most popular book about class in our own age, and yet it is telling just how alien its ruling elite are compared to ours.

Published in 1925, Gatsby was not at first a roaring success. Indeed, it didn’t acquire its classic status until after Fitzgerald’s premature death in 1940. In our own time, however, it exerts a grip on the popular imagination. In particular, it has formed our double image of who we think the rich are: the snobby, aristocratic elites versus flashy, free-spending social climbers.

The novel’s main setting is Long Island, New York — where the two classes live side-by-side — or very nearly. The nouveaux riches live in the village of “West Egg” — which is across the bay from “East Egg”, the exclusive abode of the establishment. Of course, in a young country like the US old money is never that old, and compared to Europe, the whole of America is West Egg. Nevertheless, it takes only two generations to give old money its defining feature: which is that it is passed down from one generation to the next.

Inheriting wealth means not having to work for it — and that is, or rather was, the ultimate signifier of class. To be unmarked by the sun — and the labour that others perform from dawn to dusk — is what made the rich look rich. In old portraits, the wealthy and powerful are pale and soft, and were careful to present themselves as such. No tanning or toning for them.

New money, by contrast, is earned not inherited — and earning involves working, which is what peasants do.

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Therefore when Jay Gatsby arrives on Long Island, it is not to work, but to play. In throwing the most lavish parties, in serving the finest wines, he isn’t just displaying his wealth, he is emulating the establishment by entering into what was once exclusive to them: a life of leisure.

Our conception of the rich as idle is deep-seated. Karl Marx divided the world between capital and labour — the owners and the earners — and he was neither the first nor the last to do so. In recent decades, this view of capitalism has made a comeback, alongside growing inequality. In his 2014 bestseller, Capital in the 21st Century, Thomas Piketty argued that returns to capital, if left unchecked, will outstrip earned incomes and thus swallow up an ever larger share of the economy. As a result, those without wealth will find themselves at ever greater disadvantage.

It’s certainly true that younger people today are less likely to own their homes than their parents’ generation were at the same age. Furthermore, their employment opportunities are more concentrated in fewer, pricier locations. Thus, every month, they lose what’s left of their salaries (after tax and loan repayments) to their landlords.

To rub it in, the media — and social media — are saturated with images of rich and famous showing off their luxurious lifestyles. Is it any wonder then that the world of The Great Gatsby seems as relevant to us today as it ever was?

That’s especially true given that contemporary inequality has an inherited component. A comparison of different countries shows a correlation between income inequality and intergenerational social immobility — i.e. the more unequal a society, the lower its social mobility. It’s a relationship that economists call the “Great Gatsby Curve”.

But do we really live in the world that Fitzgerald so vividly portrayed? Other economists, while deeply concerned about rising inequality, challenge the idea that the capitalist system can be neatly divided between owners and earners. Foremost among them is Branko Milanovic. He shows that Americans in the richest 10% of the population for wealth are increasingly likely to be those in richest 10% for wages too. Since 1980, the proportion of top decile of wage earners who are also in the top decile for capital income has roughly doubled from nearly 15% to almost 30%. Milanovic calls this phenomenon homoploutia, from the Greek words for “same” and “wealth”.

Homoploutia appears to go hand-in-hand with another long-term trend, which is the tendency of the rich to work longer hours than they used to — longer hours, on average, than the rest of the population. Therefore the idea of the idle rich is increasingly out of date.

We can see this reflected in high-status lifestyle choices — to the extent that leisure is acknowledged at all it is within a “work hard, play hard” ethos. Even if your job doesn’t involve physical exertion and actual sweat, you can make up for it in the gym. You must make up for it, in fact, to avoid a low-status belly. Meanwhile gluttony is just as frowned upon as sloth. By all means show off what you eat, but unlike the groaning boards of yore, it had better be lean, green and healthy — not fat, brown and greasy.

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Having a big house does retain its prestige — some things will never go out of style — but we see dramatic changes in home fashions too. In his diaries, Alan Clark once referred to Michael Heseltine as someone “who bought all his own furniture” — an old money insult directed at a self-made man (although Clark’s inheritance had only come from the thread industry in 19th-century Lanarkshire). The irony is that, today, those who do inherit antiques no longer want them. This can be seen in the long-term decline in the price for so called ‘brown furniture’ — rejected by the cultural elites in favour of the modern and minimalist.

The stately homes of the past are now owned by the National Trust and visited by pensioners, while the high status homes of the present look like open plan offices. That’s not just a preference for space and light — it’s a reflection of the centrality of work in the lives of today’s rich.

So does that mean that the inequality of the 2020s is less harmful than the inequality of the 1920s?

Writing for CapX, economist Ben Ramanauskas argues that the incomes of the working wealthy are primarily derived “not from physical or financial capital but rather from human capital” i.e. “they earn their wealth by using their skills adding value to their firms.”

That sounds good, doesn’t it? Much more equitable than old-style aristocrats counting the profits from land their ancestors probably stole anyway. Except that human capital can be hoarded as easily as physical or financial capital. The “old money” class did it through snobbery and restricted admission to elite institutions; today’s ruling class is more subtle in its tactics, preserving an illusion of meritocracy, but still gating-off access to opportunity through rocketing tuition fees, unpaid internships and sky high rents. New social codes, like the ability to navigate the minefields of wokeness, constitute a further barrier to outsiders.

It’s become fashionable to argue that we should shift the burden of taxation from income to wealth, and you can find advocates for it on the Right as well as the Left. The logic is that wealth is idle while (earned) income is the reward for effort. Therefore, by taxing the former, we can produce a more equal society without compromising incentives for hard work.

It’s a nice theory and there’s much to be said for it — especially the taxation of rising land values. However, its incentive framework rather depends on the wealth owners and income earners being different groups of people. In a state of growing homoploutia that is increasingly not the case. Furthermore, categories like ‘income’ and ‘wealth’ are not quite as distinct as they’re cracked up to be. If you can afford the right lawyers and accountants, they are headings that can be juggled with to produce the most tax efficient outcomes.

Wealth without income is fragile. It is like a dead tree: it may be taller and thicker than its neighbours, but without fresh life things won’t stay that way. Storms rip away branches, with no new growth to compensate for the loss. Parasites feed upon the heartwood, with nothing to resist them. Before long, the whole tree comes crashing down, never to rise again.

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Traditional family fortunes rarely persist. Sooner or later, old money sells out to new money or disappears altogether. And thus, the argument goes, we might as well let the taxman do the job before some feckless inheritor does. But in a modern economy, wealth does not just sit around waiting to be harvested like so much dead wood. It is under increasingly active management — just as the rich have become more active themselves. For cash-strapped governments, the idle rich are a disappearing resource.

The idea of taxing owners more, and earners less, promises a lot more than it can deliver. Instead of placing so much weight on this shaky distinction, policy makers would do much better to consider what capital is used for.

Is it being used to invest in breakthrough technology or to finance share buybacks? Is it funding new enterprise or inflating property prices? Are the super rich incentivised to increase economic productivity and social usefulness, or merely to cement their own social position? If it’s the latter — and we might have a sneaking suspicion it is — then they may as well spend their time sitting around drinking vermouths for all the difference it makes.