Part biopic, part psychological examination of America's original "Succession" story. BILLY charts the 40-year rise of William Henry “Billy” Vanderbilt from a Staten Island farmer to a railroad robber barron even richer than his father, the infamous Cornelius Vanderbilt. From a transatlantic reunion on a luxury yacht in 1853, to an interrogation inside a speeding train car in 1882, BILLY provides a portrait of the origins of private wealth in Gilded Age capitalism — a close-up on the emotional moments of a man generally thought to have none.
What happens to a family when it becomes a mega-corporation? What matters more, a father's approval or a nation's?
