Eccentric Millionaire

When we said the rich and famous can have unusual fans, this isn't what we meant.

"I can do anything I like. I'm eccentric. Rowr! Rowr!"

— Donald Sinclair, Rat Race

The rich guy who believes in having fun with his cash, buying rich parties, helicopters, trips to the Titanic, or whatever expensive weirdness he might think of. This guy is definitely more fun than the standard tightwad image that accompanies most millionaires, though it's hardly uncommon for them to come off as impolite or grating with how their eccentricity presents itself (which usually proves irrelevant for their interactions with other people when they have that much money).

He also might just be an excuse for the main characters to be able to spend their time doing something besides earning money, since this guy is keeping them fed. When the writers of a comedy aren't in the mood to come up with a unique premise, he may also have set up a bet/challenge/goofy will/whatever for a huge amount of cash; hilarity ensues of course. Bonus points if someone drops the stock phrase, "You can't be crazy if you're rich, having money means you're just eccentric."

Compare with Uncle Pennybags, which is equally nice but not that of an overspender. Compare/contrast Upper-Class Twit, Rich Bitch, Spoiled Brat, and Gentleman Snarker. May be a Socialite, as well as Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense. On the other hand, they may be a Bunny-Ears Lawyer who's genuinely competent at what they do despite their quirks. They could be based on real-life tycoons, turning them either into the Trumplica, Mr. Alt Disney or the Howard Hughes Homage. See also the Tech Bro, which forms the basis for many more "modern" occurrences of this trope, often adopting the frequently-bizarre habits of real tech moguls.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• Honey, Sunako's aunt in The Wallflower who spends her time globe-trotting in a helicopter and schmoozing at parties. She also wants her dark niece to turn into a lady, and gives the job to four Bishōnen in exchange for free rent in a mansion... if they succeed.
• Lory Takarada, from Skip Beat!, seems to believe that you couldn't enter in any building without a parade imported from the Rio de Janeiro's Carnival and dressing like the lovechild of Charirman Kaga and Walter Mercado. Pray he doesn't hear that you're planning a party, because he'll bring you the same design team who decorated Willy Wonka's factory. Well, he is the president of a big talent agency, so his eccentricities can be slightly handwaved, but still...
• To a certain degree, Gary Oak from Pokémon: The Series. He is fairly rich, due to Professor Oak's research, and would easily qualify seeing as he not only spends all of his money buying cruise tickets, a week at the spa, a sports car most people would dream about and his faithful busty cheerleaders. He's ten, for Christ's sake.
  • Not to mention, spending your fortune on travelling across the world searching for pets (in a nutshell) is...pretty wacko in itself.
• Ouran High School Host Club: The Club itself, but hell, the entire freaking Ouran Academy. When Haruhi says "Rich Bastards" she isn't kidding!
• Love Live! Sunshine!! features Mari Ohara, the teenage heiress to a world-class hotel chain. Drama CDs show that she can and will, if not stopped, bring home stray sea creatures as pets and treat them to high-quality, expensive diets, and aside from that, the anime shows that she has so much time and money on her hands that she (a high school student) created her own stew out of expensive ingredients she procured around the world. Also she bought the director's position at her own school, which she still studies at as a third-year student.
  Kanan: Rich people are crazy.

Comic Books

• Bruce Wayne has a reputation as a Millionaire Playboy who does all kinds of strange things with his money, but his real eccentricity is that he is the superhero, Batman.
• Surprisingly, Marvel's Hercules. After his death, Namora and Venus go about trying to put all his affairs in order, and discover he owns everything from pleasure resorts to a hospital/orphanage for the children of mythological monsters. Also, a good chunk of his still-living ladies were gifted homes. Apparently, he made a few really smart investments, then just never bothered to keep up with them and bought whatever he damn pleased on the (correct) assumption that he just could.
• Tony Stark, anyone? How many billionaires do you know that spend most of their time and money on Powered Armor development?
• Roberto da Costa, aka Sunspot. He has multiple companies under his name, some of which he bought just because he could. He bets cars on golf games or doles them out to employees that impress him. One time he got sick of being a superhero and took his best friend on a 'permanent' beach vacation. The ridiculousness of his purchases is only matched by how blasé he is about them.
• The Dead Boy Detectives: Crystal's parents, Maddy Surname and Seth von Hoverkraft, are a pair of spoiled performance artists who gallivant around the world in the name of art and mostly leave her to her own devices. When confronted with the possiblity that Crystal's school burned down they're not even upset that they may have to pay for the damages, they only hoped she was involved.
• Discussed in Chapter 9 of The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, where Scrooge returns to his hometown of Dismal Downs, Scotland, after having begun building his business empire in America and having become a billionaire in process. Upon meeting his father and his sisters, they notice that he is travelling around with several large barrels and question him on it. Scrooge gleefully reveals that said barrels contains a portion of his fortune in cash, and that he likes to bathe in said cash, continuing it demonstrating it in front of his confused family. After seeing this display, his father, Fergus, wearing an expression of horror, looks to the sky, and despairingly declares "Downy, dear — our son is as crazy as a loon!" Scrooge's sister, Hortense, corrects him, pointing out: "Poor people are crazy, papa! Rich people are eccentric!"
• Richie Rich, of course. Just look at all the ways he plays (yes, "plays", not "spends") with his money. Heck, it sometimes results in more money for no real reason but improbable luck.

Comic Strips

• In The Wacky Adventures of Pedro, Emeralda Von Snootz, the richest woman in Burropolis, becomes one of the first people to purchase some of Pedro's green, plant-flavored ice cream, after she decides to throw a "green party". When Pedro gets whisked to a beauty pageant on another planet on the way to the party, Emeralda dons an alien disguise, and wins the pageant, in order to reclaim "Burro Boy" and the ice cream. Pedro himself also becomes this after his green ice cream becomes an intergalactic success.

Fan Works

• Oversaturated World: Oversaturation: "Tones": The head of the science department has enough money to, by himself, fund a science facility that has an EEG, at least. And the adjective of "eccentric" is specifically called out:
  The head of the science department was... eccentric. He certainly had enough money to qualify for the adjective.

Film

• The deceased great-uncle, Rupert Horn, in Brewster's Millions (1985). Part of the bit is that he was the classic skinflint tycoon in life, but had enough guile to leave a booby trap in his will intended to make his inheritor hate spending money.
• Rodney Dangerfield made this role something of a specialty, as in Caddyshack and Back to School.
• The Happiest Millionaire: Anthony Biddle is very much like this, with a bible study class that is more about boxing and having pet alligators in his conservatory in his Philadelphia mansion.
• Felix Happer of Local Hero, a Big Oil executive whose office doubles as a planetarium and is willing at the end to spend untold millions setting up a center for marine and astronomy research instead of building an oil refinery.
• The Magic Christian revolves around Sir Guy Grand, a millionaire who uses his fortune to play cruel practical jokes on others.
• Tony Stark as portrayed in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He buys million-dollar paintings just because they're overpriced, but dislikes being handed anything. He flies to Monaco to watch an F1 race, but decides at the last minute to instead actually compete. Getting the picture?
• The Million Pound Note: Henry is mistaken for this, and his benefactors really are this.
  • Peter Sellers, who played Grand in the film (it was adapted from an earlier novel), was an excellent real-life example of this. In particular his passion for cars was so infamous it was referenced in The Goon Show and a sight gag in the short film Simon, Simon (his lovely sports car is run into; he steps out, snaps his fingers, and a new one in a different color is wheeled out for him to drive off in). His poor money management due to his tastes left him almost insolvent in the early 1970s. He was also a practical joker, but less cruel and destructive than Grand.
• Adam Sandler's uncle in Mr. Deeds fits the description before he dies.
• As the page quote indicates, John Cleese's character in Rat Race. He's later joined by casino guests all wanting to place bets on the titular race.
• The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent has Javier Gutierrez, the billionaire owner of a Spanish olive grove and decoy leader of a drug cartel. He spends a large portion of his wealth on movie memorabilia, and goes to extreme lengths to write Nicolas Cage's next blockbuster (such as paying Cage a million dollars to attend his birthday party), despite having no professional screenwriting experience.

Literature

• Joe Bob Fenestre from Animorphs presents this image to the public. The truth is altogether more sinister.
• The Dark: Dominic Kirkhope, heir to a ship building franchise and co-owner of several properties, at Beechwood House, funds mystic experimentation.
• The eponymous Gog, one of the richest men on Earth, is nihilistic and omnicidal and admits to being attracted to crazy people and their stupid ideas, which take up most of the novel.
• Samuel Westing of The Westing Game fits this trope. He loved fire works, playing dress up, and generally messing with people. He also involves all the main characters (one of which turned out to be him) in a complicated game for his inheritance.
• Roarke, from In Death, is a multi-bazillionaire former thief with Only One Name who helps his wife solve murders as a hobby.
• Elon Tessic of Shattered Sky is an eccentric multibillionaire who wants to spend his fortune in unusual ways. In one of his earliest scenes, we see him buy a restaurant-owner friend's pie recipe for millions of dollars.
• Sir Gabriel Martineau from the backstory of Tunnels was the 1600s version of this. He employed exclusively albinos at his factory, then moved them into an underground city to survive the expected coming of Judgement Day. He is based on Joseph Williamson, an early 1800s philanthropist who built a network of tunnels beneath Liverpool, which inspired the series.
• Mr Toad in The Wind in the Willows could be a deconstruction on this trope; he enjoys blowing his inherited money on whatever he thinks is most enjoyable, from boats to a caravan, but gets in trouble when his newest obsession with motor cars goes too far. He risks losing his fortune on his obsessions when he could have used it responsibly to help him live his entire life comfortably.
• Hubertus Bigend, the massively wealthy and Bunny-Ears Lawyer-ish advertising exec whose plans and interests form the core of William Gibson's Bigend Books.
• In the highly metatextual Complete World Knowledge series, author John Hodgman claims to be the "Deranged Millionaire" he plays in some They Might Be Giants' work. See below under Music.

Live Action TV

• Jimmy James from NewsRadio.
• Never quite confirmed if he is a millionaire, as his income is only described as "six craploads a year", but Barney Stinson from How I Met Your Mother qualifies if so. He has spent money on two TV's that cover an entire wall, as well as many different contraptions to upgrade his apartment and as props in his ridiculously convoluted schemes to seduce women. During a fit of rage, he once smashed a TV that was discarded in a dumpster and the Running Gag of the episode has him smashing a TV from the dumpster every time he gets upset. When the dumpster ran out of TVs, he freaked out, went to a nearby store and bought a brand new flatscreen HD TV so he could smash it.
• The Millionaire: John Beresford Tipton, the title character, acts as a trickster by throwing a disruptive catalyst (i.e., a check for a million dollars) into people's lives.
• A Lampshade Hanging example from Mitchell and Webb.
• Chairman Kaga in Iron Chef and his nephew in Iron Chef America. The former is on record as stating he spent ¥843,354,407 just on ingredients for Kitchen Stadium (roughly $8 million at the time), while the latter has several Kitchen Stadiums built (including one in space). Let's remember, this is to host Cooking Duels. If that ain't eccentric...
• Thurston Howell III on Gilligan's Island. He's so eccentric he uses his money as leverage on a deserted island.
• In the 2007-09 series Life, Detective Charlie Crews definitely fits the bill. (If you were in the LAPD and they railroaded you for a murder you didn't commit, then you were exonerated years later and received a multi-million dollar settlement from the LAPD for your false imprisonment, would you really go back to work for the LAPD?) Somewhat downplayed in that most of his quirks are clearly derived from his imprisonment, rather than his wealth.
  • In one episode, Crews encounters a support group for multi-multi-million dollar lottery winners. At the end of the episode, Crews asks if he can join the group. He tells them that he didn't win the lottery, per se. However, his settlement amount (which he is forbidden to disclose) would otherwise qualify him for membership in their club.
    • One of the lottery winners in that episode had become so paranoid that he became a gun hoarder who built a high cinder block wall around his house.
• John Hodgman has a reoccurring part as a "Deranged Millionaire" on The Daily Show.
• Frontier Circus: Duke Felix Otway in "The Race." An Egomaniac Hunter and collector of men, he makes a $1,000 bet that his men can beat all comers in a cross-country horse race.
• One episode of Mad About You had Jerry Lewis as one who decided to sponsor Paul's next movie. Among the things he was able to give the crew was an autographed Bible.
• What Could Have Been — Ted Allen, host of the popular cooking/food show, Chopped, humorously remarked that the show was originally going to take place in an eccentric millionaire's mansion, with the millionaire's butler as the host and the losing dishes being fed to the millionaire's pet Chihuahua. Naturally, the Food Network found this "too weird," but wanted to keep the general premise of the show and put it in a more straightforward competition format.

Music

• The Deranged Millionaire, a recurring character from the work of They Might Be Giants, played by author and comedian John Hodgman. He hosts the music video compilation/Concept Album "Venue Songs" (and figures into the Myth Arc explaining the project), and has appeared in some of their stage performances and podcasts. See Literature, above. The band wrote a themesong for him, called "Yeah, The Deranged Millionaire''.
  He lived in a secret location, burnin' money all day
  And people from miles around were miles away''

Video Games

• In Captain Morgane and the Golden Turtle, the rich merchant funding Morgane's expedition considers himself to be this (with "eccentric" being his preferred softer alternative to things like "mad" or "crazy", which is what people who know his objective tend to call him).
• In Criminal Case: Grimsborough, Archibald Ashworth from Maple Heights is a weird old patriarch who loves his bees more than anything else. When told that his grandson had been brutally murdered, Archibald's reaction was very nonchalant, and even glad that there's less of his greedy relatives trying to fight over his riches; but when one of his bees died, he went completely berserk.

Web Animation

• Helluva Boss: Loopty Goopty, a recent sinner in the episode "C.H.E.R.U.B.", was a billionaire inventor in life who keeps his inventive ways in Hell with a healthy amount of eccentrics. He even says himself that he's "eccentric and must therefore do eccentric shit".
• I'm Anton!: Terada is a rich guy who pays people mainly Anton and his crew to do strange things such as a fishing-crane game with girls to get himself a girlfriend.

Webcomics

• GF Serendipity: Downplayed with Stan. He has a bathtub installed inside his office but otherwise the story doesn't show how he spends his money.

Western Animation

• American Dad!:
  • An episode of has a popular hairdresser, named Beauregard, who moves to New York City from Langley Falls to carry on the city's tradition of "wealthy obnoxious weirdos".
  • The episode "American Fung" opens with a Chinese billionaire proudly announcing he's bought the show from Seth MacFarlane, and assuring the viewers that nothing would change. His products are promoted at various points, until he decides to guest-star in the episode himself and completely derail the B-plot, expressing excitement at being in a cartoon.
• Rudolph Mintenberg from Atomic Puppet, although he's a billionaire with a strong emphasis on the "eccentric". He is constantly bored out of his mind and entertains himself through various experiments, business ploys, and inventions that usually end up causing a lot of trouble for Atomic Puppet.
• Bob's Burgers: Bob's Drop-In Landlord, Mr. Fischoder, is the richest guy in town; in fact, he owns most of it, including the Wonder Wharf amusement pier. He's also not all there, and while he has a soft spot for Bob it also means the Belchers are usually the first to get entangled in Fischoder's Zany Schemes.
• The Critic has Jay Sherman's Cloud Cuckoolander father Franklin.
• DuckTales (2017):
  • Mark Beaks, who unlike the miser with a heart of gold Scrooge, or very much eccentric but openly murderous Flintheart Glomgold is a clout chasing tech bro who likes to put on a front of being a fun loving party dude who does crazy things to get more social media likes and followers but is a Corrupt Corporate Executive who also steals other peoples inventions.
  • Doofus Drake, a young boy, inherited a massive fortune from his grandmother, and the unearned money went completely to his head. He fritters away cash on childish whims, smashes expensive artwork as a way to relax, and tries to imprison actual people as keepsakes. He also turned his parents into his literal waitstaff, and treats them horribly. It's not shown if he was this much of a sociopath before becoming rich.
• Super Chicken from George of the Jungle. His identity is millionaire playboy Henry Cabot Henhouse III (Hunt Strongbird Jr. in the unaired pilot).
• Señor Senior Senior and his son, Señor Senior Junior, on Kim Possible. After some unwitting suggestions from Ron, SSS decides to take up villainy as a hobby (and as a way to bond with his son), strictly adhering to Cartoonish Supervillainy for the fun of it, and SSJ's obsessed with his appearance and becoming a world famous celebrity (usually a pop singer of some kind).
• Sir Iknik Blackstone Varrick in The Legend of Korra is a profound case of this. Unfortunately, people forget that there has to be competence beneath the eccentricity for him to have created his fortune, and he is able to serve as a recurring villain before anybody even considers suspecting him.
• In The Looney Tunes Show, Foghorn Leghorn had this role, as he was an absent-minded Wealthy Philanthropist and Wide-Eyed Idealist who ended up becoming Best Friends with Daffy Duck and bringing him aboard for his projects (with often disastrous results), on one occasion making him CEO of his company on a whim.
• A one "Humphry Muffet" in a VeggieTales short was one of these.
  Minnesota Cuke: He's loopy!
  Bob: No, he's eccentric.
  Minnesota: What's the difference?
  Bob He's rich. Eccentric is loopy with money.
• We Bare Bears: In "Adopted", the Baby Bears are briefly taken in by Charles Worthington, a childish man who likes to think of himself as "the fun kind of rich person". He has a very bizarre taste in fashion (wearing worn old sneakers with a purple pin-stripe suit), lives in a mansion littered with toys, and keeps a gorilla as a pet.

Real Life

• Canadian financier Charles Vance Millar was an infamous practical joker. His best-known eccentricity was the Great Stork Derby, wherein Millar, having no heirs at the time of his death, left the majority of his estate to the Canadian woman who gave birth to the most children in the ten years following his death. Truth in Television, indeed.
• The late Steve Fossett. He flew around the world in a balloon and a jet that didn't need refueling, both times solo, and set more world records than can be recorded here.
• Howard Hughes was considered this back in the day, with his plane design "Hercules" (known to others as "the Spruce Goose") being a major obsession. In hindsight, though, he had debilitating mental illness and severe obsessive-compulsive disorder.
  • He once told his aides that he wanted to watch some movies in a darkened screening room. He ended up staying in there for four months, never leaving once. He continuously sat there watching movies, often naked, and ate only chocolate bars and chicken, drinking only milk. His aides were told not to look at or speak to him unless spoken to.
    • Continuing his movie-watching obsession, he once watched Ice Station Zebra at his home, on a continuous loop... about 150 times.
• Billionaire clown (and CEO of Cirque du Soleil) Guy Laliberté plays high-stakes poker for fun and does quite well, possibly because the money involved is nowhere near enough to make a difference to him. In 2012, he announced a $1 million buy-in tournament to raise money for a charity he founded. He's also been into space.
• Philadelphia socialite Anthony J. Drexel Biddle (1874-1948) is an early real-life example of this trope. His wealth allowed him to pursue interests such as the theater, politics, self-published literature, religious study and physical fitness (particularly boxing) at his leisure. He also kept alligators as pets in his home. A novel, play and the film The Happiest Millionaire were based on him and his eccentricities.
• Markus Sittikus (1574-1619), the enormously wealthy archbishop of Salzburg, used his massive wealth to collect strange and exotic objects and animals (or paintings thereof) and (unusually for an archbishop of that time) was a well-known prankster. The water gardens of his Hellbrunn Palace are filled with hidden knobs that lead to jets of water being squirted at unsuspecting visitors. Among his most famous pranking instruments is a large stone dining table with stone chairs around it. At the end of the dinner, everybody customarily got up when the Archbishop gave the signal that the meal is over, and jets of water would spring out of every chair except his own, splashing his guests. He even commissioned a smaller palace to be built in the remarkable time of one month, all because he wanted to surprise a friend, who saw the building from the window of his room in Hellbrunn and had to do a double take.

• Jason Kingsley, founder and CEO of the video game development company Rebellion, made a fortune from said company and has, quite charmingly, plowed said fortune into indulging his passion for medieval history. He owns and trains horses, including destriers, and explores facets of daily medieval life for everyone from kings to peasants. Why is this charming, you ask? Well, because he's made a YouTube channel about it, Modern History TV, to share his knowledge with the masses — and because he is one of the most unpretentious YouTube hosts out there.
• Richard Garriott amassed a fortune developing the Ultima series of games. He goes out in public dressed as his "Lord British" persona from the games, built "Britannia Manor", a medieval themed home — named after his character's castle in Ultima — filled with secret passageways and rooms and decorated with a collection of eccentric items. The home is also the site of an annual haunted house attraction where he pull out all the stops to scare the life out of visitors. He also became a space tourist^note fulfilling a childhood dream of following the footsteps of a his father, astronaut Owen Garriott, into the space, which had been stymied by eyesight issues and took the opportunity to create Apogee of Fear, the first narrative movie filmed in space.

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