How to Marry a Billionaire

“I’m looking for a man in finance/ Trust fund, 6ft 5in, blue eyes.” This viral ditty by the TikToker Megan Boni (@girl_on_couch) may be considered the anthem of the “high-value dating movement,” a new on-line movement among women. In this movement, female influencers from around the world dispense advice on how to marry a high net-worth man. Examples include the YouTube star Leticia Padua (aka SheraSeven), the matchmaker Tiff Baira who posts about how to find rich men in New York, and the TikTok dating coach Karla Elia. 

So how do you marry a billionaire? The best way, according to a new research by economist Ria Wilken, is to be in the upper class yourself. Using a unique data set of all American billionaires and their spouses, Wilken found that 95% of the spouses of billionaires were upper class themselves, meaning that their occupations put them in an upper-class position (see Figure 2 below from the study). Those in the upper class were defined as those who have a large volume of capital holdings (the economic upper class); those who have a large amount of cultural capital (the cultural upper class); and those who have both economic and cultural capital (the balanced upper class).  The economic upper class includes owners of large businesses, chief executives, and financial brokers; the cultural upper class includes directors and board members of cultural institutions such as museums, top artists, models, producers, as well as top academic positions as professors and scientists; and the balanced upper class includes civil servants, judges, medical doctors, philanthropists, pilots, and top politicians.

While upper class homogamy was the rule among the billionaires, the researcher found large sex differences in marital behavior. First, most of the billionaires themselves were male (88%). Most of these men were not married to billionaires—only about 30% of the male billionaires' spouses were billionaires, while about 65% of the female billionaires' spouses were billionaires themselves. The female billionaires were less likely to have earned their billions and more likely to have inherited the money than the male billionaires: about 68% of the women inherited their wealth, compared to about 21% of the men. Women were also more likely to have become billionaires through marriage than the men—none of the billionaires who became rich through marriage were men.

There was also significantly more missing data on the female spouses of male billionaires—meaning they had no documented, public role and likely followed a traditional lifestyle of home and family management. About 33% of the male billionaires had missing data on their spouse’s occupation, compared to about 10% for the female billionaires. The chance of missing information decreased with the number of years a billionaire had appeared on the Forbes list, suggesting that having a public occupation is more common among the female spouses of more recent billionaires. Female spouses of billionaires were more likely to occupy positions in the upper class that depended on their husband’s income, such as positions in charitable and philanthropic organizations, horse breeders, art collectors, or designers. For example, 29% of the male billionaires’ spouses held a position in philanthropy. For such wives, their role is to earn prestige for the family rather than to earn money.

All this indicates that while billionaires are more likely to marry people in the upper class, the division of labor among billionaires and their spouses tends toward the traditional. Billionaires were traditional in other ways too: both male and female billionaires were more likely to be married than the rest of the U.S. population and had more children on average than most Americans. About 74% of the billionaires were married, compared to 48% of the general population. The billionaires each had about three children, on average; while the number of children ever born for a woman in the general population is about 1.3 on average.

Wilken’s findings suggest that the upper class still practice homogamy, as they have throughout most of history. The royalty of Europe, for example, has long helped maintain its position through intermarriage. The slogan of the long-lived House of Habsburg was “Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube” (i.e., “Let others wage war: thou, happy Austria, marry”). Queen Victoria famously spread haemophilia throughout the European royalty by marrying her children off to them.

This research also suggests that despite all the change in the world of work, sex differences in mate preferences and marriage behavior are still evident and follow traditional lines. Nothing in her findings would surprise a woman in Jane Austen’s world of early 19th-century Britain. Female billionaires are not constrained in their marriage choices by economic concerns or the types of social norms that constrained Austen’s heroines, yet Wilken’s evidence shows they are twice as likely as male billionaires to choose fellow billionaires as spouses. After marriage and children, these super-rich men and women can afford to do whatever they want, yet they tend to have children and occupy traditional marriage roles. Even if these billionaires espouse non-traditional values and support left wing causes, as many do, their own marital behavior tends to be more conservative. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, as the French say.

Rosemary L. Hopcroft is Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is the author of Evolution and Gender: Why it matters for contemporary life (Routledge 2016), editor of The Oxford Handbook of Evolution, Biology, & Society (Oxford, 2018), and author (with Martin Fieder and Susanne Huber) of Not So Weird After All: The Changing Relationship Between Status and Fertility (Routledge, 2024).