The Bobby Saputra phenomenon: A homegrown satire on Crazy Rich Asians

Since early 2024, users scrolling through their YouTube or TikTok feeds may have encountered Bobby Saputra, a self-proclaimed Chinese Indonesian billionaire playboy and “Professional Son”. He claims his father, William Saputra, is the 7th richest man in Asia and owns highly profitable companies like bottled water giant Danone Aqua.

Bobby’s content has gone viral repeatedly, amassing over 840 million views on YouTube and over a million followers on both YouTube and TikTok, both of which are highly popular among youths and young adults worldwide. His videos flaunt his family’s mansions, luxury watches, supercars, and even Singaporean maids, mimicking luxury “flex” influencers showing off affluent lifestyles on social media. He also shares clips of himself giving “charity” to Singaporeans. In his words, “there are not a lot of them (Singaporeans), and they’re actually very poor.”

But all is not what it seems. The luxuries shown on camera are loaned from friends he met during his time as a private chef for wealthy clients, and used solely for filming. Bobby himself is a character played by Indonesian content creator Ben Sumadiwiria, known online as supercoolben.

Instead of glorifying excess, Bobby’s absurdity serves to parody the nepotism and corruption perpetuating the generational wealth of Indonesia’s elite. His skits involving Singapore overturn existing stereotypes about economic disparities between Indonesia and its richer neighbours.

But why do his videos appeal so strongly to his primarily Southeast Asian audience? How has he become so prolific that even political figures like Jakarta Governor Pramono Anung and Vice-President Gibran Rakabuming willingly appear in his content to signal their cultural relevance? Why has he received almost no backlash, even from those he mocks?

One key reason is relatability. In Ben’s words, “everyone knows a Bobby” – someone entitled, obnoxious, and out of touch with others. These traits are often seen as by-products of wealth and privilege. Social media reinforces this perception by constantly promoting influencers who flaunt wealth to sell online self-improvement courses and build personal brands. Such lifestyle-based content creation has become a global industry worth approximately US$32.55 billion in 2025. Engagement-based algorithms push such content beyond their intended audience, to viewers who find it cringeworthy or insincere. Rather than being aspirational, the content provokes frustration and fatigue among those uninterested in luxury content.

Ben’s videos turn this trend on its head. Through Bobby, he caricatures the most disliked traits of social media influencers, portraying an over-the-top rich kid who sincerely thinks his lifestyle is relatable. By exaggerating these traits to comical extremes, he highlights the gap between influencers’ attempts to appear aspirational and the audiences who see them as delusional. In doing so, he provides netizens an opportunity to laugh at a genre of content they otherwise find annoying.

Bobby’s appeal is also shaped by deeper societal frustrations. His satire appeals to a growing sense of disillusionment among Southeast Asian youths, who are increasingly sceptical of entrenched elites. The top three concerns among the 3,081 respondents of the 2024 ISEAS Southeast Asian Youth Survey were unemployment and recession (89.3 per cent), corruption (85.5 per cent), and widening socio-economic inequality (84.8 per cent). Youths in Indonesia (53.9 per cent) and Thailand (47.3 per cent) were especially pessimistic, believing that positive changes to reduce political corruption and reduce income inequalities between the rich and the poor are unlikely.

This disillusionment is tied to real-world events. Allegations of electoral fraud and favouritism marred Indonesia’s 2024 Presidential Election. The winners, Prabowo Subianto and Gibran Rakabuming Raka, were believed to have been unfairly supported to victory by Gibran’s father, then-President Joko Widodo. In Thailand, many reacted cynically to the return of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and the pardoning of the corruption charges he had fled from.

In a world where abuses of power happen openly to demoralise critics, satire becomes a way to push back. It allows the disillusioned to poke fun at the powerful, to engage and critique the absurdities of the status quo. While Ben insists his videos are apolitical, his satirical skewering of nepotism and corruption is on point because it touches on issues central to the region’s political and economic landscape. Beneath the absurdity of his jokes lies a truth that feels uncomfortably real.

This style of humour is not exclusive to Ben or Indonesia. In Thailand, content creators sarcastically refer to themselves on social media as “Grey Chinese” gangsters, parodying the rising influence of Chinese organised crime in the country. Much like Bobby Saputra, these creators flaunt veneers of exaggerated wealth to highlight absurd realities that many feel powerless to confront. Their popularity reflects a shared disillusionment and a desire to laugh at a system seen as unfair and ineffective.

Satire has become a way for youths to engage with the absurdities of existing power structures in Southeast Asia. Compared to conventional methods of protest used in the past within the region, satire carries far less risk of punishment. It allows them to safely process their frustrations, challenge power with humour, and in doing so, reclaim a sense of agency.

Bobby Saputra is more than just a viral persona. Through a sharp caricature, Ben Sumadiwiria captures the cynicism of a generation shaped by daily annoyances and larger societal frustrations. Like his fans, he finds humour in the madness of it all.

Mr Brandon Tan Jun Wen is a Research Officer with the Media, Technology and Society Programme at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute.

This article was first published on Fulcrum on 17 June 2025.