Two billionaires 2026 – 21 x 29cm, pencil on paper
This is the first time the Extraction series has directly confronted the billionaire class, the ultimate extractors, the ones who own the algorithms, the platforms, the grids, the drones, the data futures markets.
Where the YouTubers were consumed by visibility, the citizens pinned by location, these two are the ones who design and profit from the consumption and the pinning.
The drawing refuses to let them appear distant or abstract; it brings them into the same intimate, scarred space as everyone else, yet they dominate it. The frames around their heads are not protective; they are cages of their own making, the rectangular logic of screens, boardrooms, and balance sheets that they impose on the world and now find imposed on themselves.
The psychological charge is unmistakable: these are not caricatures of greed or villainy; they are portraits of people who have fully internalised the logic of extraction to the point where their own faces are scarred by it.
The frantic marks around them, loops, scratches, overlaps, read as the residue of their own systems: the comment storms they profit from, the outrage cycles they amplify, the surveillance they deploy, all bleeding back into their own image.
The left figures wide-eyed intensity and the man on the right revealing a narrowed calculation mirror each other, yet they are trapped in the same feedback loop they created, still speaking, still performing, still extracting, even as the extraction turns inward.