A little over a year ago, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone renewed their deal with Paramount after a contentious negotiation that held up production of the 2025 season. That $1.5bn agreement raised questions about whether Paramount, newly owned by David Ellison, would really offer the creators creative freedom – or was the billionaire class solidifying its hold over a comedy series as cover to meddle in other divisions, like CBS News? The deal also made Parker and Stone likely billionaires themselves.
Between this renewal and their co-ownership of the South Park intellectual property, they each have an estimated net worth of over $1bn. The second episode of the show’s 29th season examines life from either side of the billionaire/regular people divide. On one hand, Parker and Stone are unsparing of their corporate benefactors, depicting billionaires as tiny, sentient penises with high-pitched voices who are addicted to sharing their stupid opinions on podcasts and social media in their miniature city called Billionaire Weenietown.
On the other hand, Parker and Stone aren’t exactly taking shots from outside Weenietown. Though they were certainly famous before becoming billionaires, they were still outside that world. Being a billionaire is a very different sort of outsider status no matter how much dumber Elon Musk is than you.
Keep that in mind when Parker and Stone shrug off the existence of billionaires as no big deal. You can’t accuse them of not giving voice to anti-billionaire sentiment, though. This episode starts with Butters using a school presentation on “My Happy Place” as an opportunity to rant about the datacentre that has sprung up in his back yard, sapping electricity and interrupting his actual happy place: calmly watching Dr Pimple Popper videos online.
Butters isn’t just using “my back yard” rhetoric to refer to events in South Park, er, South America. Billionaire Weenietown has literally sprung up in his back yard, and his parents aren’t remotely concerned. Instead, they blindly use billionaire-backed AI to redesign their home and fret that Butters has been made “libtarded” by the measles vaccination he was given as a child.
Many scenes are devoted to the billionaire weenies themselves – rendered with horrifying live-action puppetry and animation, a nice (well, kind of repulsive) callback to Parker and Stone’s fondness for crude (in both senses of the word) mixed media. The problem, the weenies’ leader insists, is not the preponderance of billionaires, which supposedly have been around for ages. (Technically true, though misleading; the billionaire class is growing, and for much of the past century there were as few as a dozen, compared to thousands now.) The real problem is that the billionaires have been ignoring the time-tested strategy of laying low and keeping quiet as they amass wealth. Parker and Stone zero in on the particularly 21st-century compulsion that the rich and powerful have, aided by the internet, to think of themselves as deep thinkers and incredibly cool.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
