New York: A rich kid stands in the doorway of a marble-lined bathroom, a mobile phone pressed to his ear. His face is strained. He’s yelling and waving his free arm. He swears in French, very clearly having a tantrum, with his father on the line, over money for a trip to Miami.

“Papa! It’s expensive! The people there, they spend money!” he yells in accented English. “I need 10,000!”

Aris Yeager, back then a business major at Northeastern University, starred in the video, mimicking obnoxious behaviour he had witnessed by a wealthy friend. He uploaded the 21-second clip to TikTok in May 2022 with the title “When ur rich international roommate asks his parents for money”.

The clip went viral, and Yeager, 24, realised he might be on to something. He created a social media account called The European Kid and an online persona, Louis, the spoiled son in an ultra-rich European family who flaunts his wealth to bully his way into chic nightclubs, push into exclusive parties and sail through the notoriously difficult co-op board process to buy a New York City apartment.

A rich kid walks into a fancy Italian cheese shop in New York, picks up an entire wheel of parmigiano and lugs it towards the counter.

“Whoa, what are you doing?” the incensed owner asks.

“I’m buying it,” the rich kid answers as other customers look on, appalled. “I know it’s $2000. Do you think I can’t afford it?”

With every post, the clicks kept coming. The European Kid amassed millions of followers and billions of views on TikTok and Instagram.

New York is awash with influencers strip-mining the city’s restaurants, nightclubs and subway cars for social media content. Some manage to reach the heights of internet fame by doing nothing more than using the city as a scenic backdrop to ask strangers how much they pay in rent, or to quiz couples about how they met.

But Yeager, who has slicked-back hair, limbs like tree branches and piercing blue eyes, has tapped into something different.

His posts have landed at a moment when the incoming president has tapped half a dozen billionaires for top government posts, and society’s age-old fascination with wealth has shifted. Instead of gawking at the gold-plated interiors of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous or MTV Cribs, viewers are guffawing at the badly behaved billionaire Roy family on Succession, the objectionable luxury vacationers on The White Lotus and the elites in almost any recent TV miniseries starring Nicole Kidman.

The popularity of hate-watching the rich has created a lucrative genre for Hollywood – and for Yeager. He is now striking deals with luxury brands that sponsor his shtick, being paid anywhere from $US15,000 to $US30,000 ($24,000 to $48,000) to collaborate on posts, he said.

Yeager created The European Kid to mock the rich by pretending to be one of them – and now he’s getting rich doing it. How much has he earned? He says he isn’t counting. But there are signs the gig is paying off.

“I recognise how preposterous it is,” he said, relaxing in the rooftop lounge of his Manhattan apartment building, which is equipped with a bowling alley, indoor golf simulator and cold-plunge pool.

‘Rich people problems’

A rich kid stands in a luxury clothing store holding a coffee without a lid and gets into a fight with a salesperson who is worried he will spill.

“What’s your problem? Do you realise what kind of client I am?” the rich kid asks. “I can buy your whole little store.”

Yeager did not start out as a member of the super rich but he was surrounded by them growing up in Belgium. His father is an American marketing consultant-turned-high school teacher and his mother is Greek and works in politics. The family was “middle-class comfortable”, his father said, but well-off enough to afford a $US45,000-a-year international school in Brussels that was attended by the children of chief executives, government ministers, diplomats and Qatari royalty. Many of Yeager’s classmates stood to inherit millions.

Yeager arrived at college with a love for acting and a deep curiosity about how internet content spreads. He made music and uploaded it to Spotify, but that didn’t seem to resonate. He posted travel videos, but they didn’t get many clicks. Bored during the pandemic, he created an online character that satirised mafia life, but it was taken down by TikTok, which thought it was real. By the time he got the account up and running again, he had lost interest.

In 2022, he enrolled in summer courses and stayed with a college friend who was boarding at the Fairmont Copley Plaza, a luxury Boston hotel that boasts of “lavish guest rooms” and “beautifully plush linens”.

“Just to get a sense of how rich kids are, he wasn’t even staying in his apartment any more,” Yeager said. “His parents got him a hotel room to stay, which is ridiculous.”

Late one evening, as the two men snacked and watched Avatar, Yeager began acting out a scene he had witnessed of another wealthy friend begging his father for $US10,000 over the phone. His roommate found it hilarious and discreetly filmed the episode.

“I saw it the next day and thought that was kind of funny,” Yeager said. “I posted it.”

The video hurtled across the internet, racking up more than 10 million views and thousands of comments. Many viewers thought it was real and were disgusted. One called it “the most gross thing I’ve seen”.

“I love rich people problems,” another commenter said. “They live in a completely different world.”

Audiences have devoured plots that point out the absurdities of wealth since the days of Aristophanes, but Yeager still marvels at how this particular video took off.

“It was just making fun of friends,” Yeager said. “I basically became a meme about a rich kid overnight.”

He ran with it, reaching back in his memory to the spoiled behaviour of his classmates in Brussels and taking mental notes every time he spotted new obnoxiousness. His life was fertile terrain.

“I just know exactly how to do this character because obviously my whole life I’ve grown up in an environment surrounded by very pretentious, affluent kids who act a certain way,” he said. “It’s almost like I instantly know all the humour.”

The French accent Yeager adopts for the videos (he can speak French and four other languages but in real life has an American accent) adds to the snobbishness of his character. Part of the fun of his posts comes from the response of his foils, who are often recognisable figures.

A rich kid loses his mind when he shows up for dinner at Lucien, a high-end French bistro in the East Village where it is notoriously difficult to get a table. The restaurant host can’t find his reservation.

“I’ll buy your restaurant, all right?” he yells in front of wide-eyed diners seated at tables. “You’re going to be working for me!”

The host, the restaurant’s owner, Zac Bahaj, plays along.

“Tell this French guy to go back to Charles de Gaulle, man,” he says. “Charles de Gaulle, direct flight, Air France, buddy. I’ll see you at JFK.”

In his posts, Yeager brags about the models he knows, shows off fancy cars and watches, meanders through the Hamptons and detoxes in Mongolia “to get away from the models, the peasants, Burning Man”, he says. Jokes about old money versus new money abound.

Some of the ideas pop into Yeager’s mind in the moment, if he happens to be on a friend’s private plane, at an exclusive party or visiting relatives in Greece. Quickly he’ll ask a pilot, a bouncer or a waiter to play along, but patrons and passers-by aren’t in on the joke.

“I almost got punched at one club,” he said.

A rich kid walks up to the entrance of Paul’s Casablanca, an exclusive New York nightclub, and demands to be let in.

“Do you know who you’re messing with? The richest family in Europe,” he yells at the bouncer. “Do you realise who my dad is?”

The clip was shared widely across Europe after many viewers mistook Yeager for a real-life rich kid, a son of Bernard Arnault, the richest man on the continent and chair of the luxury empire LVMH. The video was so convincing that one of Arnault’s sons, Alexandre Arnault, issued a public denial.

“Super-funny,” the younger Arnault wrote on social media. “But that’s not me nor my brothers.”

Just like the rest of us

A recurring character in Yeager’s posts is his own father, Chris Yeager. In the European Kid videos, he plays a billionaire father annoyed by his spoiled child.

“He’s my son and I wanted to support him,” Chris Yeager said in an interview.

The elder Yeager said that when he first saw the European Kid posts, he questioned their career value for his son. His own path in business had been more traditional – he worked for two decades in marketing and is now a high school economics teacher. But he said he had learned to view his son as Generation Z’s version of an entrepreneur.

“Aris is dyslexic and he struggled in school, and I don’t think a traditional academic and office environment would have suited him,” he said. “I’m grateful he’s found a path that is working for him.”

A rich kid sits in an aeroplane cabin with his father and immediately starts complaining.

“We are in the smallest private jet right now. Do you realise how embarrassing that is?” the rich kid says. “My friends, Papa, they have commercial-sized jets. The Sultan of Brunei, he has an Airbus or a Boeing, and we’re here pulling up in a little Citation.”

His father turns to his assistant. “Book him a flight. Commercial.”

Aris Yeager said he never intended to make money from his European Kid posts. He just wanted to entertain his friends, then later a generic internet audience. But about a year ago, Yeager had a fake-it-’til-you-make-it moment that made him realise he had attracted a different audience than he had imagined.

“I’m with my brother and we’re in Greece and are filming content, and we see this insane yacht,” Yeager said, estimating its worth in the tens of millions of dollars.

He searched online and found that it belonged to Tilman Fertitta, the billionaire owner of the Houston Rockets. The last name looked familiar. He scrolled through the followers of his European Kid account and, sure enough, he found Blake Fertitta, Fertitta’s son, an actual rich kid. It turned out the scion was a fan.

“I text his son and say, ‘I just saw your boat, it’s sick’,” Yeager said, recounting the interaction. “He responds and says, ‘You’re welcome to come on it in St Tropez’.”

He kept scrolling through his followers, showing them to his wealthy friends, who pointed out other members of the 1 per cent. The more he posted, the more wealthy followers he gained.

Yeager learned what has been a lucrative lesson: wealthy people are just like the rest of us – they also like to make fun of wealthy people.

“There are a lot of very affluent people who love my content,” he said. “Rich people are always sending it to each other – ‘Oh, look, this is like your son’.”

A few luxury brands noticed Yeager’s reach and offered to pay him for collaborations in his skits. He filmed himself ordering gold-encrusted desserts from the Manhattan bakery MOD and making outrageous demands in the cabin of a private jet that is available for rent, to those who can afford it.

“It’s too small for the models! I was going to bring 10!”

A rich kid walks into a high-end mattress store and stretches across a $US600,000 bed.

“I heard Post Malone has one,” Louis tells the mattress salesperson, referring to the musician. “Whatever Post Malone has, I want better.”

The invitations started pouring in. The clothing brand Moncler flew him to St Moritz, where he stayed in a five-star hotel and hobnobbed with Anne Hathaway on Alpine slopes. At Miami’s Art Basel he was introduced to Leonardo DiCaprio. It was a convergence of a star who had spent years honing his craft to make movies on the big screen and an influencer who had achieved celebrity on a six-inch screen using improvised lines making fun of people like DiCaprio.

His posts have included cameos from Formula 1 driver Carlos Sainz Jr, rapper Swae Lee and boxer Jake Paul. He has filmed content in Turkey, Dubai, Egypt, Brazil and Saudi Arabia, some of the trips sponsored. His global audience is growing; later this month he will travel to India, where he has gained a large following.

‘I’m European, you know?’

It is reasonable to wonder whether all the brushes with celebrities have turned Yeager into a person more similar to his character.

“I can’t deny that I’m my character sometimes,” he said. “I am very snobby. I’m European, you know?”

The lavishness, however, is not for him. In fact, he is slowing down the European Kid posts and shifting his focus to a new business, Storytime, almost an alter ego of European Kid. It’s aimed at helping promote small businesses by pairing them with neighbourhood influencers.

“I very much created a culture that made rich people look very cool, yet they are not cool people,” he said. “Popping a Dom Perignon bottle or spending thousands of dollars at a club – the people who are doing this, in my eyes, honestly, are usually losers.”

A rich kid in real life now, Yeager dropped by Jacob & Co, a luxury watch brand in midtown Manhattan, on a recent evening.

A $US1 million diamond necklace was in the window of the store, which also sells a $US7.7 million “Billionaire” watch. But he was just saying hi; he had collaborated with owner Jacob Arabo on posts. Employees greeted him with nice-to-see-you hugs and pleas to not be such a stranger.

“He’s a friend of the brand,” said Luba Dudenko, the company’s head of content. “Hopefully more next year.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.