He was the cultural referent, the ubiquitous synonym for "rich guy" in just about any situation. In a lot of ways, too, he did typify the upper classes of his time: gaudy, seedy, showy, somewhere on the border between old money and new—not to mention the border between two entirely different eras.

The '90s Donald Trump of 2021—with Donald Trump himself transformed into something else entirely—is obviously Jeff Bezos. The times have changed, and so the cultural ubiquity is less about off-the-rack suits and Home Alone cameos and more about guillotines and lizard people. When we talk about the Rich Guy™? now it's as a soulless capitalist, an object of burning populist rage rather than lighthearted ridicule. Any given Rich Guy is a reflection of his moment, and every moment has one (at least since the name Rockefeller entered the public consciousness).

In between, when I was growing up, the role was filled by Bill Gates. It was the start of the new millennium, and the age of computers with it—computers as a dominant force in society, that is. The keys to the kingdom no longer belonged to the sons of rich men with monomaniacal devotion to (and keen talents for constructing) their personal brands; they belonged to the nerds. Every boy with a brain was told to stick to the books so he could grow up to be Bill Gates. In a moment when power relied not on brute force, nor on charm, nor any of the other traditional means of building social capital, but on cold, hard, left-brain acuity, Bill Gates was king.

And he loved it. This isn't much of a secret. For a bespectacled programmer who is something less than an Adonis, the Microsoft founder has always harbored a remarkable love for the limelight and the cameras, relishing the public attention his cultural-economic status guaranteed. That may, in part, be why in 2008—13 years into his streak as richest man in the world—Gates left full-time work at Microsoft to devote his primary attention to philanthropy. Trips to Africa with lots of cameras make for great PR.