‘Billions’ Recap, Season Five Premiere: Enlightenment and ‘Deca’-dence
In the season opener, Axe is betting on bitcoin. But is the risk really worth the reward? We unpack what’s at stake
“Kings? They don’t blow around, man. They stand there and they take.” Axe is back, and he’s on the road, scruffy and bearded, on an ostensibly Zen motorcycle trip with Wags, his right-hand reprobate (we’re not judging). In a tent with a shaman, they trip out on ayahuasca, a psychedelic popular in all the places you’d expect—Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Brooklyn.
There’s vomiting and visions, and Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis) promises the shaman they will “move your knowledge into the world.” We guarantee he’s already working out the possible returns on moving such knowledge to Wall Street.
The trip is cut short when Wags (David Costabile) gets a note that Vanity Fair wants Axe for a cover story it’s doing on “The New Decas,” as in, people who are worth $10 billion. It’s also the title of the premiere episode (written by creators Brian Koppelman and David Levien, directed by Matthew McLoota).
Hitting such a rarefied height—there are only about 155 people in the world worth that much or more, according to Forbes—leaves him feeling empty, though. Bobby’s ego won’t let him rest on his success.
That ego is going to push Axe to explore a number of alternative investments, one of this season’s recurring themes. One of the recurring themes of these recaps is to be cheerful pedants, pointing out where the writers go right and wrong in their portrayal of the world of high finance (a topic with which we are somewhat familiar).
That brings us to upstate New York. Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) is now the state’s attorney general and his deputy Kate Sacker (Condola Rashad) leads a team of Windbreakers into a warehouse filled with glowing computers. These are “mining rigs,” specialized computers built for a single purpose: to “mine” the digital currency bitcoin.
If you’re not familiar with it, bitcoin is really just a computer program that runs on a network of linked but independent computers, each running a copy of the same program. Miners operate those computers, in exchange for a reward of newly minted bitcoin. They also compete against each other for those rewards. The program has a built-in disincentive to keep any of them from trying to take over the network: It’s insanely expensive to run the program.