But the grimmest thing about “Billions” in general, and about this episode in particular, is not the personal damage these characters do to the people they know and work with and even love. It’s the utterly impersonal destruction they visit on people, thousands of them, whom they don’t know at all.

Sure, Bobby broke Rebecca’s heart. But she can cry herself to sleep on a billion dollar bed as a result. The 50,000 employees of the store Axe annihilated along with his relationship? They’ll take what they can get.

“What they can get” is whatever Bobby, Sandy and the rest of these sociopaths, with their childlike nicknames and salt-of-the-earth affectations, deign to give them. To such men, the lives of the working class are worth less than a rounding error.

That they have working-class roots themselves appears only to harden their resolve not to care anymore. They got out; what’s everyone else’s excuse? The notion that their own cruelty might be what’s keeping their former peers down, and that their predecessors in the game helped create the very conditions they felt it necessary to escape, never occurs to them.

It’s not a lesson they have any incentive to learn. They’re earth movers. The world is their extreme sandbox, and they have the place to themselves.

Perhaps that’s why so many real-life billionaires are willing to appear on a show that makes them look like monsters. They can afford to.