Why TV Can’t Stop Crushing on the Hot Billionaire

“I know what it’s like having a family member ruin your life,” says Henry Muck in the third-season premiere of HBO drama Industry, which follows the cutthroat and chaotic lives of financiers working at Pierpoint—a London-based bank where the only thing worse than making a bad trade is making an enemy. Henry is consoling Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela), a Pierpoint banker whose publishing magnate father has just disappeared amid an embezzlement scandal. Now, the paparazzi are stalking Yasmin’s every move. The tabloids are portraying her as a party-girl heiress, when all that she has left in the way of fortune is her now-toxic last name.

Henry is a new character in the show, played by Game of Thrones hottie Kit Harington. Initially, he comes off as a classic billionaire narcissist, an old-money nepo baby of outrageous proportions who has constructed an image as a “man of the people.” (Or at least, a man who will bring cheap, clean energy to the people as the CEO of energy startup Lumi.) His company HQ looks like something out of a former BuzzFeed employee’s therapy journal: bright colors and an adult soft-play area, beds where burnout-destined workers can sleep, and a “no jacket policy” to reinforce the anti-corporate vibe—all of which is intended to offset the impact of his tyrannical temper tantrums. But in his scene with Yasmin, the audience is meant to question whether he might not be a total asshole. Actually, as he stands there—shirtless and sweaty, midway through a workout, panting in tiny shorts—we’re supposed to think he’s hot, too.

Henry is part of a demographic that is suddenly taking up more time on our screens: the hot billionaire. We first see the handsome but totally useless CEO getting into a strangely arousing fight in the aforementioned soft-play area. A few episodes later, he exits a pool in a Cruel Intentions–coded moment that is sure to spark a million gay awakenings. In the real world, billionaires might not be Hollywood sex symbols, but it feels like they're getting more air time than ever regardless. If they’re not sending rockets into space, they’re running for president, or getting radicalized on the very social media apps they own. These men—because, yes, they are almost exclusively men—pursue attention even more than money. They’re not just awfully rich, they’re often straight-up awful, which makes TV’s thirst for billion-dollar baddies even more confusing.

It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment that billionaires started appearing on our screens more regularly. Both TV and film have been similarly fixated with “eat the rich!” themes for years now, from HBO’s The White Lotus to Netflix’s Knives Out franchise. But TV is currently preoccupied with a specific type of rich guy who possesses another superpower: handsomeness.

Kit Harington and Marisa Abela in season three of Industry

This might have started in 2015, when the long-awaited Fifty Shades of Grey film adaptation—based on E.L. James’s record-shattering erotic novel series—finally hit theaters. The trilogy of films was universally panned by critics, but raked in over $1 billion at the box office. Some might say the lasting legacy of the franchise is normalizing kink in mainstream culture, or introducing the magic of the Dakota Johnson press tour to the world. (Or maybe it’s Rita Ora’s iconically dreadful wig … and “American” accent.) But what’s often ignored is how the allure of Christian Grey—a gorgeous and damaged sadomasochist—is so explicitly interwoven with his billionaire status. In fact, the way his wealth was portrayed drew criticism from BDSM groups, who said the story conflated the practice with financial abuse.

A year later, Billions—a series that followed hedge fund manager Bobby “Axe” Axelrod, played by Damian Lewis—premiered on Showtime. As the arrogant and attractive manager of Axe Capital, Bobby carved out an image for himself as a “rags to riches” success story, but his wealth was also built on dodgy dealings and bribery. Next came Succession. In 2017, the HBO series introduced us to a variety of billionaires as the Roy siblings jostled for the favor of the family patriarch, media mogul Logan Roy. Fans developed a “weird crush” on both Kendall and Roman Roy, but in the final season we met the final boss of hot billionaires: Lukas Matsson, played by Alexander Skarsgård. The hoodie-loving Swedish streaming service CEO was untrustworthy, short-tempered, and sexually creepy, too. (He confessed to sending Ebba, his head of comms, bags of his blood.)

Most recently, The Morning Show—the Apple TV drama that loosely follows the real-life news agenda, starring Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon—gave us Paul Marks, a tech CEO played by Jon Hamm. (The actor was named People’s “Sexiest Man Alive” in 2008, which raises the question: Why only 2008?) In the third season, Marks is courting news anchor Alex Levy (Aniston) while attempting a hostile takeover of her news company, UBA. Between his space travel and branching out into the media space, it’s impossible not to connect Marks with real-life SpaceX and X (formerly Twitter) CEO Elon Musk.

The Morning Show’s Musk-inspired billionaire—one who, spoiler alert, turns out to be evil!—feels representative of the fact that billionaires are now much more visible in our culture. Not only are there statistically more billionaires than ever, but there are more billionaire celebrities. Donald Trump famously used his status as a television star to launch his political career, before becoming the first billionaire president—truly shattering barriers for the 0.0001 percent.

Trump represents the “old guard” of billionaires, whereas those of the new wave, like Mark Zuckerberg or Musk, are younger and have made their fortunes in tech. As a result, they seem to want us to think they’re cool, whether that means Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s post-divorce makeover, or Zuckerberg’s evolving hairstyles. And it’s not enough for these men to donate to political causes, or set up a charity foundation: They want to be heard. At all times. Constantly.

Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan promoting Fifty Shades of Grey

On Monday, Trump sat down for a conversation with Musk. The glitchy chat was live-streamed on X, the platform Musk owns, where he has since boasted about the “billions” of views it’s supposedly receiving. The discussion was a reminder that while billionaires have existed for quite some time, the phenomenon of opening your phone and seeing their propaganda as you’re looking at PopCrave is relatively new.

Our daily exposure to the world’s richest men also means we get front-row tickets to their meltdowns: In Industry, much to the dismay of the bankers at Pierpoint, Henry goes off book and starts giving quotes to journalists as Lumi’s stock goes public. (Who needs a press officer, right?) In Succession, there was similar disarray when Matsson—who was also loosely based on Musk—started posting Nazi references on Twitter in the middle of Kendall’s business pitch. There are real-life parallels here with, say, Musk’s frequent sharing of disinformation, or that bizarre moment in 2023 when he and Zuckerberg were publicly challenging each other to a “cage fight.”

With the exception of Shiv Roy (who is really more of a nepo baby, anyway), TV’s hot billionaire canon seems to be dominated by male characters. Maybe this is because in the real world, female billionaires are generally not courting attention in the same way. Apart from Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, whose journey from the cover of Forbes to jail was dramatized on Hulu’s The Dropout, the female billionaires with the most prominence in our culture right now are much more savvy. The public profiles that Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian, and Oprah Winfrey have cultivated don’t feel so undignified and chaotic. They’re busy selling out area tours, creating shapewear and media empires, and inventing iconic phrases like “Were you silent, or were you silenced?”

Oprah Winfrey, maybe the most famous female face of the billionaires club

By comparison, there is a messiah complex to male billionaires, like WeWork CEO Adam Neumann, whose cultlike mission to “elevate the world’s consciousness” via gimmicky office spaces was portrayed in Apple TV+’s WeCrashed, starring Jared Leto. If one of the takeaways from the hot billionaire archetype is that self-styled masterminds like Neumann are actually not that smart, then their female counterparts might seem more shrewd by comparison because they have to be. Society doesn’t give them the presumption of genius.

In Industry, we gradually get to peek beyond Henry’s facade. (We also learn about his sexual kinks, which seem to be a requirement of being a billionaire on TV.) In the second episode, over dinner with Yasmin, we learn he is desperately trying to prove his worth. He remembers something his late father used to say: “When you’re born with a silver spoon in your mouth, people are going to assume you’re an idiot.” He doesn’t do much to disprove that impression, either. There is a distinct feeling that Lumi—his “big idea”—is too good to be true. And at a time of extreme wealth disparity, his belief that people like him somehow exist for the benefit of all of us—and that their wealth trickles down to the little folk—seems like an outlandish fantasy.

Of course, there’s another reason that hot billionaires like Henry Muck are dominating our screens right now: To put it simply, viewers like to watch good-looking people. Dizzyingly wealthy and attention-seeking men are a standard part of the discourse now, so if we’re going to watch dramatized versions of them, they might as well be easy on the eyes. Given our collective fetishization of money and attention, you better believe we’re going to obsess over those who have both (and give them some kinks of their own, too). But it’s overly simplistic to assume TV shows want us to merely thirst over their bank balances and jawlines, then be done with them. Maybe the truth is that we have to imagine ourselves getting into bed with these men to see them for what they really are.