Reviewed by Seán Maigh. Full disclosure before a word of judgement: I know Gary Stevenson as an associate through a tax pressure group we are both involved with. Read everything below with that in your back pocket.
On 12 June, the world minted its first dollar trillionaire, when SpaceX’s stock market debut pushed Elon Musk’s fortune past the thousand-billion mark. Barely four weeks on, Channel 4 hands ninety minutes of primetime to a man who thinks that number is not a triumph but a tumour. The timing could hardly be more pointed, and Stevenson knows it.
The backstory is by now well-thumbed. Born in Ilford, Stevenson studied economics and mathematics at the LSE before landing a trading job at Citibank at 21 — famously by winning a card game. He became a millionaire betting that inequality would grow and keep interest rates pinned to the floor, and claims to have been Citibank’s most profitable trader globally in 2011 — a claim disputed by former colleagues, notably in the pages of the Financial Times. He walked away in 2014 for an economics MPhil at Oxford, and in 2020 launched the GarysEconomics YouTube channel, which now boasts 1.62 million subscribers. His 2024 memoir The Trading Game went to number one on the Sunday Times bestseller list. This film is his first documentary, and there is a nice irony in the credits: it is produced by Mindhouse, the production company founded by Louis Theroux, Arron Fellows and Nancy Strang — because whatever else he is, Gary is no Louis Theroux. He doesn’t do the raised eyebrow and the artful silence. He is an economist, and his mind is finely tuned to one frequency: the arguments of economic inequality.
The film itself runs through a blend of the usual suspects. Stevenson travels the country meeting those squeezed hardest by the wealth gap alongside the multi-millionaires and billionaires at the other end, taking in economists, financiers and public sector workers, and going head-to-head with critics of his views. Francis Fulford of The F*ing Fulfords turns up, as does a billionaire with a penthouse he has never set foot in. And it all simmers down to the oldest argument in the book: tax the rich, to which the rich reply that if you tax us we shall leave, and then who will make the money?
History doesn’t support the threat, and it never has. For every Mick Jagger who scuttled off to the south of France, there was a Paul McCartney who stayed put. George Harrison wrote Taxman — the most famous grumble about the Inland Revenue in the pop canon — and he never left either. That is the point Stevenson, himself a member of Patriotic Millionaires UK, embodies rather than merely argues: if you invest in the country through your contributions, you earn the right to complain about it and to want it better. A multi-millionaire making that case carries a weight no think-tank pamphlet can.
Here is the problem with inequality as television, though: start breaking down the numbers and people glaze over, as they do with any serious policy discussion. We all know the funnelling of wealth into fewer and fewer hands is grotesque — a trillionaire is simply an unfathomable thing. Where Stevenson’s argument gets real traction is when he talks about a time before. When the Beatles were writing anti-tax songs, yes — but the health service was great, education was free, and they actually paid you to go to university. Everyone could afford a home, even if it was a rented council house, and most working households ran to a car and a holiday. Those times have passed, and the rich have got richer. That is the connection. That is what needs to be stopped.
Not everyone is buying it. One hostile early notice ran under the headline that Stevenson is “a self-styled economist who’s out of his depth”; Channel 4’s own commissioner, by contrast, calls him “one of the most distinctive and provocative voices in Britain right now” on inequality. Somewhere between the sneer and the press release sits the truth: you won’t get to the crux of it laughing at the uber-rich here as surely as you will watching his Gary’s Economics output, where the argument has room to breathe.
But as a whistle-stop tour of what politicians urgently need to address, this is as pressing as climate change. And it is worth noting that the billionaires don’t seem to care much about that either.
How To Get Filthy Rich, with Gary Stevenson is available on 4OD Catchup and was broadcast 8th July 2026 at 9pm on Channel 4 in the UK.