Should the Billionaire Romance Hero Still Exist?

No one needs a billion dollars, no one person needs that much money, starts the viral TikTok song by Chaz Cardigan. It’s a fairly straightforward thesis, and even though the original video has since been taken down, the sound persists and has been used by countless other users, with videos like the one I linked to collectively garnering millions of views. Backing up that initial point, the lyrics continue:

A billion is a thousand million,
That’s twenty-one thousand years of work
At minimum wage to make that money
To hoard like you deserve it.
No one makes a billion dollars
Without exploiting workers.

Although this earworm exists as evidence that a platform predominantly skewed toward Gen Z is cool with vilifying the ultrawealthy, the sobering truth remains that as a culture we worship billionaires. It’s not just people who go far out of their way to simp for Elon Musk, either-

-it’s the constant media attention paid to those who make more in a single day than most of us are able to in an entire year. To be absurdly rich, at least in North America, is to achieve celebrity status, and the news cycle reacts accordingly. While the lavish praise heaped at the feet of such icons as Warren Buffett can often feel like it borders on infatuation, things truly cross that line when we consider the genre of billionaire romance. The name really says it all: the category exists to portray fictional billionaires as the desirable objects of readers’ affections.

Earlier this month Lydia Kiesling of The New York Times wrote an excellent piece covering the dangers of the rags-to-riches narrative, especially as it pertains to billionaires. Her work doesn’t spend much time on damning facts like how Bill Gates’ mother working with the CEO of IBM was a definite contributing factor to his absurd financial success, but instead draws our obsession with the story all the way back to Ragged Dick, an 1868 bildungsroman that follows the meteoric rise of a young teenage bootblack. After discussing the merits of memoirs written by the uberwealthy, she notes that “The only kind of book for which ‘billionaire’ is an explicit category is the romance novel.”

Kiesling smartly highlights pop culture phenomenon Fifty Shades of Grey as “[playing] an outsize role in the destructive, hypercapitalist consolidation of Amazon’s algorithm-based book business.” It’s no mystery that E.L. James’s blockbuster book left an indelible mark on publishing, but the reality is that the genre existed long before the rejigged Twilight fanfiction was published in 2011. Romance titles that contain the term (ex. The _____ and the Billionaire) can be found as far back as 2008 and earlier, and Alison Doherty over at BookRiot plainly states the reason for its popularity:

We live in a capitalist society. And money—especially the idea of being so rich that you don’t even have to think about money—is sexy. There, I said it.

A quick glance at Amazon reveals just how large the market is for books that star a hero (that’s romance parlance for the male lead) whose net worth is ten digits or more.

At the time of this writing One Bossy Proposal, as seen above, is #8 in the Kindle store. Brutal Vows and Baby for the Bosshole are #12 and #14, respectively. Their presence shouldn’t be terribly surprising given that, according to Glamor, the billion dollar romance industry’s novels “consistently out-perform all other genres.” Even with that in mind, it’s notable that billionaire romance appears so high on the list, even beating out other books underneath the larger romance umbrella.

In exploring the narrative of how people are able to catapult themselves out of poverty, Kiesling arrives at the conclusion that the truth mirrored in billionaire romance is that the actual rags-to-riches tales are only made possible by an existing affluent benefactor. The easiest way to go from nobody to somebody is for a man of means to take you along for the ride. Though I don’t disagree with her, what I’m more interested in is the sustainability of the genre. Given the state of the world we live in, how much longer can we continue to frame billionaires as ethical, moral individuals, let alone acceptable romantic partners?

If you’ve been following current events to even the scantest degree you may know that Elon Musk recently put in a bid of $44 billion dollars to buy Twitter. You may also be aware of the fact that in late October of last year the SpaceX founder also promised to donate 2% of his wealth to “solve world hunger” provided that the UN World Food Programme could outline a solution-

-to which WFP director David Beasley responded with a plan to use the amount to “avert famine in 2022.” While Musk did end up donating $5.74 billion to an unnamed charity, the aforementioned organization released a statement announcing that they did not end up receiving a cheque for any amount. The offer to purchase the social media platform being over seven times the cost of helping to save countless human lives was not lost on many.

Just so that I’m not harping on the “African American” entrepreneur, it’s worth calling attention to such antics as Amazon founder Jeffrey Bezos thanking employees for paying for his suborbital space flight. The same employees who were provided with a tiny booth on the warehouse floor in which to engage in “Mindful Practice” instead of, you know, better wages and mental health benefits. How about billionaire #16 Jim Walton, whose father founded Walmart, where as of 2019 the average full-time hourly worker only makes around $25K/year. These two incidences are just drops in a bucket overflowing with news stories about the gross imbalances present between those at the bottom and those at the very top. No one makes a billion dollars / Without exploiting workers.

The most shocking news to me in researching this post is that according to Nielsen’s Romance Book Buyer Report in 2015, the average romance book buyer was getting younger, with an average age of 42. The Romance Writers of America commissioned their own study in 2017, where they found that the age of the average romance reader was 35-39 years old. That same study revealed that frequent readers skewed even younger than that. That said, what’s the younger generation’s impressions of billionaire romance?

We don’t have to take the widespread reach of Chaz Cardigan’s ditty alone as proof that Zoomers are growing increasingly disenchanted by the (mostly) men and women who are worth more than the GDP of some countries. According to the Pew Research Center 50% of those ages 18-29 believe that billionaires are a bad thing for the United States. Only 11% thought they were a benefit. Given that The Avengers came out in 2008, it’s interesting to consider that Tony Stark’s iconic self-description might not be as well-received today as it was back then-

The bad rap surrounding their heroes may not be entirely lost on romance authors, with Kiesling highlighting that even Christian Grey of the 50 Shades trilogy truly desired to help the less fortunate. She posits that more than just lauding the already prosperous, billionaire romance serves to whitewash those in the highest tax bracket:

Ultimately, these books are rehabilitory projects for billionaires, laundering their exploitative politics and recasting them as mildly edgy sex — not to mention putting hot young faces on a class of men that is in reality mostly approaching or past retirement age, for an audience of women who often have far less economic power.

Countless billionaire romances will have their dashing, moneyed leading men as the heads of charitable foundations, building schools or using their wealth to clothe and feed the poor. At the end of the day, however, no matter their myriad good deeds, they remain billionaires. They continue to hold on to such a vast amount of wealth that, it would take 31,629 years, give or take a few months, to earn it with a minimum wage job. That’s after I redid the math with the current District of Columbia minimum wage of $15.20/hour. That’s thirty-one thousand years of work still fits the meter, I’m happy to say.

Oh, it’s also worth noting that billionaires in real life use charitable donations as a means to avoid paying the taxes that they should.

From what I know about Gen Z, I can’t see them falling for these attempts to make the ultrarich out to be sympathetic figures, and that’s not even taking into account the fact that so many such heroes are positioned as broody, closed-off alpha males (Zoomers are also more in tune with issues mental health). With each additional headline detailing the growing net worth of those who already have so much more than they could ever need, it’s hard enough to believe that the older readers won’t also begin to develop a sour taste in their mouths when confronted with yet another steely-eyed oil baron or media magnate.

In a world where inequality is only ever growing I don’t think it’s possible to continue to view the people who can change the world for the better and choose not to as heroes or heroines or even good people. Whether or not romance publishers will clue into that is another story entirely.

DISCLAIMER: I have been employed by Harlequin Enterprises ULC for the past four years, and for professional reasons have opted not to include any work published by my employer, or any of its subsidiaries, in this post.