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. “Nobody’s pissed off except for me!” Butters roars; relatable, honestly.
The other South Park kids are largely absent from this go-round, and even Butters flits in and out of his own episode. 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.
As such, the lead weenie must go over the guidelines: flying private jets everywhere, buying huge yachts for the purposes of doing drugs, and spending big on sex workers are all permissible. Going on Joe Rogan’s podcast to talk about peptides, however, is banned, as is using social media to feed Covid conspiracies or pick fights with Mark Ruffalo and Macklemore. But some billionaires just refuse to listen, no matter how many times they’re reminded of how constitutionally unequipped they are to be cool.
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The episode’s philosophy eventually circles back to a treasured tenet of South Park, tellingly repeated by a billionaire weenie in this episode: “All you need to do is learn to shut up.” Isn’t that more or less Parker and Stone’s advice to everyone about everything?
Indeed, that’s more or less what Butters learns to do by episode’s end. Yes, he does strike a deal to attract the billionaire infestation by putting out a podcast mic and asking for opinions (great gag), vacuuming a bunch of them up, and shuttling them over to Nashville, hoping that they bother another city instead. But his renewed sense of calm at episode’s end, enhanced by the regained ability to watch his YouTube show, does feel kind of like another Parker/Stone lesson about how ultimately, getting worked up over anything is dumb and pointless. Why is Butters repentant about getting angry about this stuff when it helped him get results, however half-arsed?
Still, it’s hard to begrudge Parker and Stone their cynicism when they’re offering some solid running gags. Once again, adults want to wait until November because “that’s when Grand Theft Auto 6 comes out”, but are moved to act because the datacentres’ electricity usage threatens their ability to play it. They continually take swings at podcasters, who obviously annoy them way more than datacentres or AI does. Butters’ dad, for example, spends the entire episode on a tangent about how his wife refused to heed nonsensical warnings about vaccines: “You never listen to a single podcast I say!” he screams.
As for AI, well, apparently the South Park guys feel like it has its uses, resources be damned. The episode closes with an AI-generated image of Donald Trump trudging into a bathroom stall, pulling down his semi-soiled pants, and then watching as his own billionaire penis detaches from his body and flies away. It’s a wonderfully crude and spiteful postscript – so long as you remember that it’s two funnier, smarter billionaires taking shots at a guy who is, in a sense, one of their own.
