If You Hate Billionaires, Stop Fixating on "Undeserving" Billionaires

if you think they're all bad, "deserves" has nothing to do with it

This post contains spoilers for the recent film Glass Onion.

I watched the new Rian Johnson movie Glass Onion, the sequel to his runaway hit Knives Out. My girlfriend liked it quite a bit, but I didn’t. I thought the characters were all such broad caricatures that it deadened its obvious satirical pretensions, the mystery wasn’t much to speak of, and the ending made no sense. All of the glass smashing seemed like a parody of impotent rage that has no effect, but we’re meant to find it rousing. We’re also meant to feel sure that Edward Norton’s billionaire character is about to lose everything, but… why? Because someone’s willing to testify that they saw a napkin? What? And the physical evidence of crimes on the island was just torched for no particular reason. This guy has access to billionaire resources, like billionaire lawyers. And we just assume he’s done for? It’s an entirely unconvincing and forced cheery ending.

I do want to briefly make a point about IRL billionaires. Norton’s character, Miles Bron, is a thinly-veiled Elon Musk stand-in. And Johnson goes out of his way to demonstrate that Bron is in fact entirely incompetent, that despite his branding as a genius he’s an actively stupid person. Indeed, Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc just comes out and says so, which is a running theme in the movie - whenever Johnson wants to hit someone over the head with something, he just makes Craig say it. Glass Onion really wants you to know that Miles Bron is an undeserving billionaire, which is also true of many leftists and Musk; they think it’s really important that you understand that he doesn’t actually deserve his billions. Cries of “all of your companies are failing” and allegations that he inherited his position rather than earning it are ubiquitous.

To which I would immediately ask, if his companies were succeeding and his position earned, would that make him the good billionaire?

For me, the answer is obviously no. The problem with billionaires is not the health of their companies or the source of their wealth. The problem is that the same system that produces billionaires produces sprawling inequality and entrenched poverty. The problem with billionaires, in other words, is their structural class position. The relentless fixation on where Musk got his wealth, what he does with it, and whether he deserves it is mostly a sideshow, in very basic and traditional leftist terms. As long as there are billionaires, there is no such thing as equal political power between all people; as long as there are billionaires, there can be no minimally-equitable economic system. It’s not that you can't have better or worse billionaires at all, it's that fixating on the notion of undeserving billionaires undermines the deeper critique. Such ideas were, as I’ve suggested, very common lefty perspectives until very recently. But since Musk has become the Big Bad, it’s become socially convenient to forget this older wisdom and insist that Musk is extra bad because he’s not actually intelligent and his business empire is supposedly failing. As in all other debates among the left-of-center in 2022, what matters most is dunking. You don’t get digital reinforcement for explaining that Musk is ultimately little better or worse than any other billionaire.

A far more radical critique by Rian Johnson would have been if he had a billionaire character who was brilliant and deserving and had a heart of gold and showed him ultimately to be a malign force anyway. Of course, he's a filmmaker and must put artistic concerns first. But the kind of discipline of argument I'm talking about has become rare among average left-leaning people in purely political debates. Once upon a time, I’d assume the average leftist would understand the wisdom of what I’m saying. I don’t anymore.