The thing is, I'm not saying I'm particularly against Jonah being rich, because seeing all the people he frequented in the 1800s, he must have been -- and I also assume that when you're opening an Institute at that time to study the paranormal and your friends only treat it as your little Special Jonah Excentricity, you must have enough money that you'll only get teased and not fully judged for it.
It's just that, unless my memory is severely failing me, it's also obvious that Jonah was all-in when it came to the Institute; that his friends were also telling him to chill a bit and to relax and not work as much. And I feel it's so much more interesting to have him be an academic losing himself to the study of fear (being enough of a recluse that his friends want to coax him out, and yet still good enough at the social game that he HAS friends coaxing him out to begin with) than just a... random Rich Son owning Mills who Just So happen on the Side to have the Institute.
(And I'm not even against Jonah, as a rule, being a snob about social classes either? Like. I don't buy it fully, but being from a higher social statut WOULD, at least early on, give him so biases which: fair enough I guess, even if it's not really... visible in text at least in TMA for me.)
Also like, actually, erasing all of TMA from memory, it's also kinda weird even if we just consider the Protocol World? I KNOW they didn't say it was Jonah's diary when we had the episode, but like, please???? This was so much like Jonah it would be absurd to invent a whole other character for it. So i've got to assume that whatever "official" information Georgie found on the Institute and its founders are just like. what it is. an "official", easy story to digest, that does not reflect the truth whatsover of what happened to Jonah. If anything, STILL not knowing the full truth about him WOULD be the one consistent thing we get about Jonah. Like who knows. Maybe he had a cousin with the same name. Maybe trans Jonah is real, Jonah Magnus was the first born son who died and Jonah was like "stealing the name for me btw".
Anyhow. Whatever. Fanfiction of fanfiction. i need to stop thinking about this.