Underbranding
How the Silence of the Super-Rich Robs Brands of Their Voice.
In Juan S. Guse’s new novel A Thousand Times More Money Than Now (Frankfurt am Main, 2025), we meet four men – Basti, Arne, Malte, and Sebastian – who tried to “dribble around capitalism […] by getting into crypto” and ended up absurdly rich. But instead of living visibly with that wealth, they turn it into one thing above all: invisibility. No luxury watches, no flashy cars, no loud brand signals. One works as a cemetery gardener; another lives in seclusion with 20 million euros in digital assets – dressed in functional outdoor wear. The brand may still be present, but it has lost all meaning. This isn’t understatement. This is underbranding.
Of course, brands appear in the novel – dozens of them. One chapter is titled “Forever the Saab,” and one brand experience is described as: “drives like one last visit to someone you love.” How could one describe the contemporary world without naming brands? And yet, they no longer signify status or identity – they appear only as incidental inventory.
Guse’s novel portrays crypto millionaires who have mastered the “craft … [of the] … art of speculation,” who remain outwardly inconspicuous – and thereby unintentionally undermine the cultural foundations of brand value. What unites them ideologically is a “purée of liberalism, libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism, and technocratic utopia.” They scorn FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) and believe in WAGMI – We’re All Gonna Make It.
Guse describes these men as “sleepers” – average on the outside, elite on the inside. What the novel subtly conveys is a profound transformation in the cultural operating system of consumption. If brands once served to express belonging, distinction, or aspiration, they now seem like nostalgic relics from a time when status had to be shown. It’s a (in the novel) quiet but culturally consequential shift.
For more than a century, brands have played a central role in literature and society – as symbols of social order, projections of longing, and narrative markers of ambition and exclusion. What used to be narrated is now silent. In Guse’s world, wealth sheds its signs – not demonstratively, but casually. The brand is still there, but it no longer speaks.
This is the real shift. If the super-rich no longer rely on brands, why should the rest of us still believe in them? Brands derive their economic value – especially in the luxury segment – from a social dynamic of aspiration: some wear them, others imitate. But when the top tiers embrace ironic renunciation or conscious underbranding, the chain breaks. Brand value becomes an empty figure – recorded in corporate dashboards, but void of cultural force.
And this is the muted, yet devastating conclusion of Guse’s novel: it documents not just a milieu shift, but a withdrawal of the super-rich from the branded world. They could buy anything – but they buy nothing visible. In doing so, they undermine the symbolic capital that brands rely on – they erode their function as carriers of social meaning. What begins in the realm of luxury branding doesn’t stay there. When the desire for visibility dissolves at the top, the entire model loses gravitational pull. Signs that once provided orientation, identity, or affiliation begin to fade – first among elites, then everywhere. And perhaps this is branding’s final irony: the rejection of brands only works where branding has saturated everything. Only those surrounded by brands can afford to act as if they don’t need them. The post-brand world presupposes the branded one.
Guse identifies one of the crypto world’s core features as the erosion of trust: “Too many systems today are standing on the shaky legs of trust.” Hence the mantra: “Don’t trust, verify.” And yet the novel ultimately tells a story about the need for trust – in new technologies, platforms, protocols, and yes, in the brands of the crypto sphere. From Quant to Chainlink, trust is not eliminated but reconfigured – into new, technical forms of symbolic assurance.
My modest proposal: Maybe brand strategists should spend less time on market research – and more time reading contemporary fiction. What hasn’t yet appeared in the metrics is already written there: The powerbrand is losing its voice – precisely among those who once made it speak. Because good literature observes more closely – and is attuned to those seemingly weak signals from which fundamental change emerges. Or, in the novelist’s own words: “Because [fiction writing] is a highly sensitive tool for the field-analytical decoding of capitalist hierarchies of power.
