Billionaires, the editors of n+1 noted not too long ago, “barely constitute a coherent object of thought.” They’re difficult to categorize, difficult to predict, and in the case of many, difficult to learn much about. And yet for all their mystery, they play an outsize role in our political, economic, and cultural lives. If we can’t beat them—and the deck is stacked heavily against us—the least we can do is try to understand them as best we can.
In my debut novel, Ways and Means, a finance student at NYU takes a job with a mysterious fracking billionaire who’s on a mission—so he claims—to uplift America’s aggrieved underclass. At first, the protagonist is enchanted by his salary and his access to a man of untold wealth: after all, he’d like nothing more than to be a billionaire himself. But when he discovers the truth of his boss’s project, he’s forced to confront the often-malevolent ambitions of the country’s ruling class, and to reconsider his own desperation to be part of it.
As I was working on Ways and Means, I looked to novels and works of nonfiction that shed light on billionaires, a group of people who much prefer to remain in the shadows. Here are some of the most dazzling and damning.
Billionaires make their presence known in every corner of our lives, but never as insidiously as when they use their wealth to influence politics. Schulman’s book tracks how the billionaire Koch brothers became the puppet masters of the Republican Party and altered the landscape of American politics irrevocably.
Catton’s novel pits a nominally anti-capitalist agricultural collective against a mysterious billionaire who’s made his fortune off drones and who hopes to multiply his wealth by plundering rare-earth metals. The novel derives its comedy from the relationship between the collective and the billionaire, who become uneasy bedfellows, and raises critical questions about the compromises even absolutist progressives must make as they navigate a world built on private property and free enterprise.
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
Billionaires can only exist in a rigidly stratified society, and few books have examined society’s economic, racial, and social hierarchies as trenchantly as Wilkerson’s Caste. As Wilkerson writes, “The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.”
Franzen’s fifth novel hinges on a Dickensian secret, gradually revealed to readers but kept from its protagonist almost until the very end. Pip Tyler, after a childhood of deprivation and a young adulthood of menial jobs and spectacular student debt, learns that she is in fact the scion of a meatpacking billionaire. Pip’s mother’s determination and ultimate failure to keep this secret dramatizes on one of Franzen’s central points—in a world of inextricably interconnected capital, our efforts to cleanse ourselves of dirty money are always in vain.
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe
Keefe’s investigation of the Sacklers—the billionaire pharmaceutical family at the heart of the opioid crisis—shows with scathing clarity the degree to which oligarchs prioritize profits over people, even those who are purportedly in the business of care.
Benjamin Rask, the protagonist of Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, may not be a billionaire in the time period in which the book is set, but if he lived today he would be refueling his jet at the same private airstrip as Ken Griffin. In detailing how Rask accumulates his fortune—essentially, by shorting the market at the onset of the Great Depression, and thereby accelerating the national downturn—Diaz shows how the wealth of the few is often built on the ruin of the many.
Sun’s recent memoir details her time working as an assistant to the billionaire founder of a hedge fund and her difficult decision to give up the job, along with its attendant financial rewards, for the sake of her mental health. Though Sun’s story is personal, it’s possible to see her as a stand-in for the wider hoi polloi: whose life isn’t, in one way or another, spent in the grueling service of those with deeper pockets?
The Book of Ayn by Lexi Freiman
Billionaires are not featured in Freiman’s 2023 novel, but the woman many of them look to as their spiritual and intellectual grandmother—libertarian icon Ayn Rand—does. After her writing career is derailed, the protagonist makes a study of Rand’s fiction and philosophy, first embracing and then ultimately rejecting a creed of rampant self-interest that many real-world oligarchs take their cues from.
Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon by Michael Lewis
Lewis’s book about the rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, may initially seem to offer its readers a welcome helping of schadenfreude: once a billionaire many times over, Bankman-Fried is now strapped for cash and facing prison. But Lewis’s account offers just as much a lesson in how easily consumers and investors can be duped into enriching someone else at their own expense, and if the history of finance offers any indication, it will surely happen again.
The Book of Numbers by Joshua Cohen
Cohen’s 2015 novel is about many things—Silicon Valley, language, surveillance, religion—but at its heart it’s about a failed novelist who agrees to ghostwrite the memoirs of a tech billionaire. In this way the book poses a question that writers and readers alike would be wise to consider: in what ways does art challenge the billionaire class, and in what ways does it abet its secretive ends?
