The Brits have the royal family to obsess over. Here in the US we consciously advocate for a meritocracy, however, we are agog at the antics of the billionaire class.
Having enough of the "superrich" to constitute a class is a relatively recent phenomenon. I can remember when Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and a few others were the only billionaires in the world. With the recent run up of stock prices, there are literally hundreds of billionaires around the world. You can argue they are a class above the merely wealthy. These are people who travel in private jets. They have legions of yes men who will take care of their every whim.
The public for the most part believes these wealthy people can do no wrong, unless caught in the act like the recent fall of crypto king Sam Bankman Fried. We unconsciously attribute super human powers to the billionaires as if the act of making money has put them beyond the ken of us mere mortals.
We did the same thing in the era which gave us John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and many others. We woke from the Gilded Age when Teddy Roosevelt started treating them like they were our fellow citizens. What will it take to shake off the current idolization of wealth in America?
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