I felt like I was hearing about billionaires more and more. They seem to be everywhere. Were they?
Yep.
I looked at all of the articles dating back to 2009 using media tracking software mentioning the word billionaire. As you can see from the chart below, the coverage or mention of billionaires is on the rise, growing at a compound annual rate of 10%.
The name Trump and the word billionaire are frequently mentioned together and the former has an outsized presence in the media, hence the jump in mentions during the presidential election year of 2016. Notwithstanding, the growth of billionaires’ popularity in the media is impressive and begs the question, why?
Here are possible reasons:
Billionaires are doing things once reserved for governments. There is no better example of this than space exploration. It’s so expensive that only a government with the ability to tax and run deficits could contemplate such an undertaking. But now we have billionaires competing with each other to dominate space. Mars seems to be within reach, or is at least talked about being in reach, and this makes news.
Billionaires are successfully challenging the government. One of the most reliable pearls of wisdom is you can’t fight the government, what with its endless layers of lawyers and bottomless resources. It turns out you can if you are a billionaire. Anyone willing to spend a few hundred million in legal fees can tie the American jurisprudence system in knots. And all drama makes news, quite a bit of it.
Billionaires are more badly behaved. This is not judgment, but rather an inevitability. Not only are there more and more billionaires, but many are attaining their exalted wealth at, in some cases, their tender years, when perhaps prudence and understatement have not yet surfaced. Interestingly, part of this is tied to the evolution of the capital markets. Just a generation ago it was unimaginable that a venture capital firm would invest billions, sometimes tens of billions in a single enterprise. But now they do, reliably birthing brash new billionaires regularly covered by the media for fathering children in double digits, having histrionic border skirmishes with their neighbors on island properties, committing fraud and in the process, making news.
Interestingly, all of this behavior and the media coverage it provokes do not seem to be painting billionaires in a bad light. Quite the opposite. Analyzing the same media data set shows the sentiment expressed in all this media coverage has turned increasingly neutral, slightly more positive, and less negative. Perhaps, the perception that billionaires do behave badly is becoming the norm – a testament to the old adage that money doesn’t buy character.
