Cool people want to be rich. Rich people want to be cool. It’s clever because it’s true.

What this cheeky maxim is really describing is a status loop, a double-mimetic cycle in which both parties desire not what the other has—but what the other represents.

The irony is that neither camp—“cool” nor “rich”—can ever fully possess what the other has, because to do so authentically would be to give up the identity they’ve used to accrue power in the first place.

Mimetic Desire of Cool

René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire tells us that we don’t want things — we want what others want. And more specifically, we want what desirable (read, cool) people want.

Not because of intrinsic value, but because of social gravity. 

• The street artist wants gallery validation.
• The hedge funder wants edge and cultural fluency.
• The actor wants tech equity.
• The founder wants a nickname in a rap lyric.

Cool — defined loosely here as cultural fluency, style, edge, taste with confidence — is itself a form of power. But it’s not liquid. Cool is a non-fungible asset. It can’t be handed down like equity or bought like acreage. You can’t buy cool, wholesale. You can only orbit it, accumulate signals of proximity to it, and hope that by osmosis or expense, it begins to stick.

Meanwhile, wealth — financial capital, assets, access — is an older form of power. But it lacks cultural agility. It can buy exposure to cool, proximity to cool, even temporary use of cool’s aesthetics. But it rarely becomes cool on its own.

So rich people do what they’ve always done: they hire it. They commission it. They wrap themselves in it. They use (or mistake) status symbols as a stand in for natural taste. (Not always a bad strategy as some high-status symbols are, in fact, actually cool).

All of this creates a loop:

• Cool people, often excluded from structural wealth, want security, scale, and freedom to continue the pursuits that made them cool in the first place.

• Wealthy people, often excluded from cultural relevance, want legitimacy, edge, and youth.

The result is a kind of status laundering—each side trading what it has for what it lacks, hoping no one notices the exchange.

Cool Is Leased

What makes cool valuable is its inaccessibility. It’s not just about originality—it’s about "coded-ness." It lives in reference, implication, nuance. The moment a symbol becomes widely recognized as “cool,” it risks losing its exclusivity. And the moment it becomes legible to mass culture, it dies.

Wealth, on the other hand, thrives on visibility. It wants recognition, proof, scale. But the moment wealth gets too loud in the wrong language, it signals insecurity. That’s why some billionaires wear plain hoodies and why legacy families hide their names. The truly rich don’t need to show wealth. They want to show taste.

So the rich hire the cool — like creative directors. Not to overly-decorate—but to choreograph signals. To translate wealth into relevance.

And so wealth looks to cool for camouflage. And cool looks to wealth for oxygen.

The Cool-Rich Convergence Economy

We now live in a post-hierarchy landscape where cultural capital and financial capital are mutually dependent currencies. The most powerful players are those who can transmute between them:

• A$AP Rocky becomes a fashion house muse.
• Jay-Z builds art collections to reinforce legacy.
• Elon Musk memes his way into pop culture relevance.
• Founders hire ex-Vogue editors to run their lifestyle brands.
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This convergence has created a new class of buyers—those who don’t just want to be seen as rich or cool, but seen as inevitable tastemakers who can collapse the distinction entirely.

In this landscape, status becomes less about possession and more about curation. Not “what do you own?” But “what do you signal—and how early?”

The ambitious don’t actually want products anymore. They want a narrated identity. They want aesthetic sovereignty: complete control over how they’re perceived across every surface of their life.

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There’s a  market opportunity for “cool-making” agencies

— although the verbiage / positioning still needs to be worked out.

These agencies don’t exist to make clients “cool.” That’s a fool’s errand. They exist to engineer the illusion that they always have been.