Spoilers ahead for all seven seasons of Billions. The characters are fictional: this piece is about what the story shows about organisations, not about real people, and it is not a diagnosis of anyone.
Every company has a father figure
Founder, owner, first chief executive — inside an organisation these roles are rarely just functional. People inevitably bring to them expectations formed in their own families: the need for recognition, the fear of being punished, the wish to be protected, the readiness to rebel. Psychoanalysis calls this transference, and in a company it is every bit as powerful as in a consulting room.
While the founder is active, this dynamic is often invisible, or even useful: it generates energy, loyalty and a sense of shared purpose. But when power is handed on — to a successor, to the next generation of the family, to a new management team — it comes to the surface. The question of who will run the business turns out to be a question of how the older figure lets go and how the younger one separates.
Billions plays out this dynamic in three versions. None of them is a model to follow, which is exactly what makes them instructive.
The Rhodes family: an inheritance that comes with strings
Charles Rhodes Sr. is a wealthy, well-connected political operator. His son Chuck is a prosecutor who has built his career on being a man of principle. Both went to Yale, and the father is the trustee of his son's trust. There is an inheritance, but the older man still holds the purse strings.
Across all seven seasons the father keeps stepping into his son's affairs: he asks a favour for a friend, trades on inside information against his son's adversary, backs a rival candidate in the race for governor and, in the final season, tries to bribe an examiner on behalf of his grandson. Chuck resists — and yet increasingly reaches for the same methods. By season four the two of them are working together, staging a sham land deal as a trap.
Anyone who has worked with family businesses will recognise the picture. The next generation receives resources but not full authority. The founder has formally stepped back but remains the real centre of decision-making. The heir either adapts or goes to war, and in both cases their strategy is shaped by the relationship with the father rather than by what the business needs. And what reaches the third generation is not only capital but a set of unwritten rules: how to treat the law, competitors, defeat.
Axe and Taylor: the protégé who leaves
The second storyline is about mentoring. Bobby Axelrod spots Taylor Mason as an intern and offers them a million dollars and his personal mentorship. In season three, while Axe is barred from the business, Taylor becomes the firm's CIO. At the end of that season Taylor takes some of the investors and launches their own fund, Taylor Mason Capital.
What follows happens in business more often than people admit: the mentor experiences the protégé's independence as betrayal. In season four Axe destroys Taylor's fund and absorbs it. The series is explicit in showing Axe as a leader who demands absolute loyalty and takes revenge when it is broken.
What happens next is telling, too. In season five Taylor works for Axe's adversary, Chuck Rhodes; in season seven they co-run Prince's firm, only to turn against him in the end. A protégé who was never allowed to leave does not become an independent player. They move from one powerful figure to the next, each time defining themselves through alliance or opposition.
Mentoring almost always carries a hidden contradiction. A good mentor is developing someone who will one day manage without them. But when the protégé is, for the mentor, an extension of their own identity, the departure feels like losing a part of oneself. Separation then becomes a war rather than a natural stage of development.
Axe and Prince: the founder who cannot leave
The third storyline is succession in its classic form. At the end of season five Axe sells his firm to Mike Prince for two billion dollars and leaves for Switzerland. Prince renames it Michael Prince Capital and pursues his own agenda. In the finale of season seven Axe comes back, brings Prince down and moves back into his old office.
It is an extreme version of what management literature calls founder's syndrome: the company remains psychologically "his" even when it legally belongs to someone else. The successor gains formal authority but not legitimacy. And the founder, once out of the business, finds no new place for himself — so he returns to where his identity was built.
For the team, this scenario is particularly hard. People who joined under the founder find themselves caught in a conflict of loyalties: serve the new leader or wait for the old one to return. Dual power is rarely declared openly. It shows up as quiet sabotage, decisions that stall, and informal back channels to the "real" boss.
Repetition or war: two ways succession goes wrong
Put the three stories side by side and two patterns emerge — the two directions in which a handover most often slides.
Repetition. The successor becomes a copy of the founder: the same methods, the same decisions, the same culture. From the outside it looks like stability. But the organisation loses its capacity to change, and the heir is living someone else's role. In effect, the departed leader is still in charge.
War. The successor defines themselves as the opposite: everything the founder did is declared obsolete. Or the founder reads every new decision as a dismissal of their legacy. The company becomes a battlefield over the symbolic right to be in charge.
The point is that these are two sides of the same bond. Imitation and rebellion both keep the successor dependent on the founder's figure. Neither produces what the business actually needs: an independent leader who draws on their predecessor's experience but makes decisions from present reality.
What an owner can do
Succession is not only a legal and financial procedure. It is a psychological process, and it can be made more conscious.
- Separate yourself from the company. Ask yourself who you are if you are not the head of this business. Without an answer, stepping down will be either a formality or an impossibility.
- Name what is being handed over. Not only assets and authority, but values, unwritten rules and ways of handling conflict. Some of it is worth keeping; some of it is worth deliberately leaving behind.
- Give your successor the right to make mistakes and to be different. If every departure from "how we've always done it" counts as betrayal, the successor is left with two options: submit or fight.
- Agree on your new role. Adviser, board member, shareholder without an operational remit — each role has its own boundaries. An unclear role for the founder is the main source of dual power.
- Notice your own family script. How were power, the business and responsibility passed on in your family? Owners often unconsciously re-enact with their successor the relationship they had with their own father — or do precisely the opposite.
Succession works not when the heir resembles the founder, nor when the heir rejects them, but when both of them are able to become separate.
Why an outside psychologist
In Billions the firm has its own in-house figure, Wendy Rhodes — a psychiatrist and performance coach who sees what really drives people and is able to say it out loud. As a dramatic image it rings true: every transfer of power has a layer that the people involved cannot see from the inside. But her way of working is a lesson in what not to do. She combines the roles of coach, the owner's confidante and wife of the prosecutor investigating the firm, and she uses personal information as a weapon in corporate battles.
Psychodynamic work on succession depends on an outside position and clear boundaries. The consultant does not take the side of the founder or the heir, does not take part in business decisions and never turns what they hear into leverage. The task is to help the people involved see what is happening between them, and to separate what the company needs from unfinished family and personal stories.