The popular caricature of billionaires is largely as you would expect, given the widespread contempt in which they tend to be held. Imagine, for a second, a billionaire in your mind’s eye: unless you frequent the CPAC conference, are employed by the National Review, or unironically follow Elon Musk on Twitter, chances are you’re picturing a greedy tycoon in an expensive suit, possibly brandishing a monocle or, at very least, giving off distinctly Monopoly Guy kind of energy.

If this caricature persists, one reason is that it happens to be very close to the truth. As the 2018 book Billionaires and Stealth Politics found, the typical billionaire is intensely secretive about their politics while doing everything they can (in private) to further what are almost invariably right-wing policies designed to protect and deepen their wealth and power. This activist strategy, at once subtle and sinister, flies in the face of an alternative image of the billionaire popularized by the likes of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates: that of the generous and socially conscientious philanthropist concerned with global poverty, education, and even occasionally prone to suggesting that rich people should pay slightly higher taxes.

The public perception of Gates used to be a lot closer to the former. As Nicole Aschoff writes in her 2015 book The New Prophets of Capital: “The transformation of Gates’s image over the past two decades is remarkable. Gates, the ruthless, greedy monopolist, caricatured by Tim Robbins in the 2001 film Antitrust has been supplanted by the earnest, humble Bill, a ‘worldwide force for good.’”