theory -> billion dollar heroes
Within today’s market-driven society, the correlation between an individual’s financial status and the commercial success of their biographical works reveals fascinating insights into what our culture values and celebrates. An examination of biography sales data demonstrates a significant relationship between net worth and reader interest, creating a self-reinforcing cycle that elevates business titans to cultural hero status while relegating many substantive contributors to relative obscurity. The publishing industry demonstrates clear preferences for subjects with substantial wealth, particularly those in the business world. Biographies of billionaires consistently outperform those of equally or more societally impactful individuals in scientific, academic, or social justice realms. This disparity manifests not just in sales figures but in the sheer volume of works dedicated to wealthy business figures compared to their counterparts in other fields.
Warren Buffett, with a current (2025) net worth of approximately $150 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, represents perhaps the most striking example of how extreme wealth correlates with biographical interest. The publishing phenomenon surrounding Buffett is unprecedented for a non-political figure. There are currently 47 books in print that simply have Buffett’s name in the title, a distinction that is matched only by major political figures and the Dalai Lama. One of those books sold 700000 copies in the first week at $35 a copy — that is about twice as much as the average for a 200 pages paperback ($9.99-$18.99). If you sell billionaires as modern heroes, you might as well charge a premium.
The sales disparity between biographies of business figures and those of other significant contributors suggests that in our market-oriented society, billionaires have assumed the cultural position once occupied by religious figures, political leaders, and military heroes. Within a capitalist framework that measures value primarily through market performance, biography sales provide perhaps the clearest quantitative metric of cultural heroism. By this measure, today’s most celebrated figures are unquestionably those who have accumulated vast personal wealth, particularly through business innovation and financial acumen.
Techbroligarchy
As many other Gen-Z neologisms, “broligarchy” might sound too silly to be taken seriously — not exactly a word you would expect to hear from economists or social scientists. Yet it has made its way from twitter and 4chan posts in 2009 to the mainstream press articles in 2024, and 2025 finally saw it mentioned in scientific journals like GreenLeft and Counterpunch. Intuitively, it is not difficult to see why it became