These one or three pet billionaires have done a lot of image building to achieve this. They’re trying to be the “common man’s billionaire” and “just like us”. Musk spent a decade trying to appear like a nerdy engineer and when people started realizing he’s a shitheel, he pivoted to the “the elites are after me, it’s time for us to stop them together” shtick.
In general, the right (and I mean individual people, NOT politicians) hates billionaires almost as much as we do, but wrongly associates them with the left - but while it’s true that some billionaires are left-wing socially, they’re damn near all right-wing economically, because no billionaire is going to want to have less money.
There’s a bit like this in Daredevil. They’ve been tracing some shadowy acts back to Wilson Fisk, a horrible rich man nobody’s heard of. A top journalist is preparing an article on his actions based on circumstantial evidence.
Fisk, reading the situation and retaliating, opens a press conference introducing himself and voluntarily makes his name known to get on people’s good side.
Yeah the big issue is as you said. Ask someone on the right to name a bad billionaire. They will mention musk, bezos, Tim Cook, but probably only hating cook for being woke and money grubbing. The ones who pull the strings hide themselves. Nobody knows who they are they’re just CEO of x y z. There’s 750+ billionaires in the US, 15 in every state on average (though most of them are in cali, Texas, and ny). And they’ve spent a boatload of money getting very smart people to convince everyone they can that the problem is Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris. Tribalism is strong, and unfortunately people just lap it up.
