The summer of 2023 has been somewhat ominous for billionaires and the ultra-rich. In late June, billionaire James Crown – who sat on the boards of both JPMorgan Chase and defense contractor General Dynamics – died suddenly in a racecar accident in Colorado. Orcas have been attacking yachts off the Southern coast of Europe, with the most recent yacht sinking in early May. And of course, billionaires aboard a shoddily made vessel were killed during a June expedition to the wreckage of the Titanic.
Before we even knew the fate of the Oceangate submersible, memes about the Titan vessel and its ultra-wealthy passengers circulated widely on social media. While we can all generally sympathize with Suleman Dawood, the reluctant 19-year-old passenger who was talked into the fatal voyage by his billionaire father, it’s also understandable why people responded to the story by making crass memes with dark and morbid undertones.
Understanding the context of class war meme culture
NBC News reported on the “eat the rich” sentiment of the Oceangate submersible memes that were the most widely shared. A bulk of the most popular memes made light of the fact that the submersible’s ultra-high net worth passengers paid $250,000 apiece to get bolted into an unclassed carbon fiber tube, piloted by a $40 video game controller, made by a man who cavalierly dismissed safety concerns, and plunged to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
“You’re laughing? Billionaires are sitting in their own shit and piss 2 miles underwater in a fleshlight piloted by a 1998 Gravis Gamepad that they paid $250K to be in and you’re laughing?” One meme read, showing the image of someone holding in laughter (the Titan’s passengers in fact died instantaneously in a catastrophic implosion, caused by thousands of tons of pressure crushing the submersible).
The context of the submersible memes is important: Three of the five passengers (Shahzada and Suleman Dawood are heirs to the Dawood Hercules Corporation in Pakistan) were billionaires. This means that every day, people like the Dawoods and private jet dealer Hamish Harding, who was also on board the Titan submersible, could choose to significantly reduce or outright end societal injustices like hunger or homelessness, and every day choose not to, instead opting to spend their wealth on lavish expeditions like viewing the Titanic wreckage. The meme culture surrounding the Titan submersible is ultimately in response to oligarchs who live opulent lifestyles dying in entirely avoidable ways in defiance of the laws of nature.
“It was this luxury cruise that basically risked everything – went way too fast, was way too reckless – and at the end it became a death sentence for those on it. Much like this Titan sub,” Ohio Northern University associate professor Shane Tilton told NBC News, comparing the submersible’s doomed expedition to the maiden voyage of the Titanic, adding that “history is repeating itself, basically.”
Memes and tweets darkly hoping for the deaths of billionaires also circulated in response to space expeditions like Virgin founder Richard Branson’s space flight, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin trip to space.
“Branson wants to bring space to the average person. How about food? Let’s do that one first,” Twitter user Kim Ruxton wrote.
In its 2023 report, Survival of the Richest (PDF link), anti-poverty nonprofit Oxfam International stated that “every billionaire is a policy failure.”
“The very existence of booming billionaires and record profits, while most people face austerity, rising poverty, and a cost-of-living crisis, is evidence of an economic system that fails to deliver for humanity,” stated the report, which was published ahead of the annual summit of heads of state, corporate CEOs, and ultra-high net worth individuals in Davos, Switzerland.
“For too long, governments, international financial institutions, and elites have misled the world with a fictional story about trickle-down economics, in which low tax and high gains for a few would ultimately benefit us all. It is a story without any basis in truth.”
Billionaires going on the offensive in the class war
The last few years have demonstrated that the billionaire class has escalated the class war, rapidly redistributing the diminishing wealth of the working class upward at a breakneck pace while thumbing their noses at us the entire time. In this context, the proliferation of mean-spirited memes is a coping mechanism in response to being squeezed to death.
During the coronavirus pandemic, workers around the world collectively lost $3.7 trillion in earnings, while the world’s billionaires amassed $3.9 trillion in wealth, according to Business Insider. In 2021, the National Low-Income Housing Coalition’s Out of Reach report (PDF link) found that there is no city, county, or state in the entire United States where a minimum wage earner can afford to rent an apartment at fair market rent. That same report also found that nearly half of all American workers don’t earn enough to rent even a one-bedroom apartment. The US government’s paycheck protection program, launched in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, was similarly regressive: In 2022, the National Bureau of Economic Research found that more than 70% of the funds issued went to the richest 20% of the population.
Meanwhile, a leaked Bank of America memo found that the bank privately hoped for conditions to worsen for American workers so they would lose leverage in labor negotiations. In September of 2022, the CEO of Iron Mountain Inc. told investors that he had been secretly hoping for inflation so he could use it as an excuse to jack up prices. In a 2018 research report, Goldman Sachs openly put profit ahead of human life: At the time, the firm was contemplating investments in biotech solutions that could cure diseases, with analysts asking, “is curing patients a sustainable business model?” And while the Wall Street Journal encouraged struggling workers to skip meals in order to save money, Fortune found that American corporations are posting the highest profits on record since 1950.
President Joe Biden is touting “Bidenomics” in terms of low unemployment rates and high private sector job creation as a reason to justify a second term in office, yet purchasing power for everyday Americans remains extremely low. The federal minimum wage has remained stagnant at $7.25 an hour since 2009, which is the longest it's gone unchanged since it was established in 1938. Meanwhile, prices for basic necessities like food, housing, fuel, and electricity have steadily gone up while real wages have remained stagnant since the early 1970s. Between pre-depression housing prices in 1929 and 1932 – regarded as the worst year of the Great Depression – median home prices fell from $6,000 to $3,900, or from $107,338 to $86,576 in May 2023 dollars. In context, the US median home price in 2023 is more than $396,000 according to Statista. This means it’s more than four times as expensive to buy a home now than at the peak of the Great Depression.
Even though the economy is good on paper, the American working class is feeling more squeezed than ever before. This could explain the growing militancy of the working class in the increasingly widespread unionization movement, with approximately 200,000 workers joining labor unions in 2022 alone. Rather than tsk-tsking us for our schadenfreude at billionaires meeting their end in various acts of hubris, mainstream media outlets would do well to understand the anger of the working class before it boils over. The multi-billionaire owner of the Cartier jewelry company once spoke candidly about how the thought of a violent uprising by the poor keeps him awake at night. Hopefully workers will get the gains we’re fighting for before society reaches that point.
Carl Gibson is an independent journalist whose work has been published in CNN, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, the Louisville Courier-Journal, Barron’s, Business Insider, the Independent, and NPR, among others.
