Netflix’s Gunther’s Millions arrives dressed as a novelty: meet Gunther, a German Shepherd said to sit atop a fortune worth hundreds of millions, the self-styled “richest dog on the planet.” It’s the kind of logline built for a lazy Sunday and a glass of red while your own dog gnaws a peanut-butter Kong and dreams of prime rib. But the docuseries has bigger, stranger ambitions, and the reason to keep watching isn’t the money. It’s the machinery of lies built to explain it, and the collateral damage that machinery left behind.
The lie at the center
Start with the fairy tale the series first hands you. A German countess named Karlotta Liebenstein, having lost her husband and then her son to suicide, supposedly left her entire fortune to her beloved dog, with a family friend, and later that friend’s son, the eccentric Maurizio Mian, installed as caretaker. Heartbreaking, tidy, and, the documentary eventually reveals, invented. Filmmakers couldn’t turn up a death certificate for the countess, and Mian admits why: she and her tragic son never existed. They were, by his account, fictions created to move his own family’s money around while avoiding taxes.
That’s the pivot the whole series turns on. The “richest dog” premise was always a costume.
The one thing that was real: the money
Strip away the countess and something concrete remains. The fortune traces back to the Gentili Institute, a pharmaceutical company that developed alendronate, a compound that proved genuinely effective against bone diseases like osteoporosis. That discovery made the company valuable enough that Mian’s mother sold it to Merck, and the family came into serious wealth. The dog that inspired the entire mythology was, more prosaically, his then-girlfriend’s pet. As the director has put it, the money is the only part of the story that isn’t a fabrication.
A very well-fed illusion
To the film’s credit, and unlike some of Netflix’s other animal-adjacent spectacles, the actual dog is clearly cared for. Because the saga has stretched far beyond any single dog’s lifespan, there have been several Gunthers across the decades. It began with Gunther III; the reigning one is Gunther VI. Early footage of a Gunther being served premium beef on fine china by a private chef is genuinely funny, if only because it makes your own kibble-fed dog look, and possibly feel, cheated. The dogs live in luxury. It’s the humans arranging the luxury who curdle.
The experiments only get weirder
The best stretches of Gunther’s Millions document the elaborate fictions Mian and his Gunther Group staged to keep the myth spinning. The centerpiece is a manufactured ’90s pop group called The Burgundians: Mian recruited five conventionally gorgeous members, installed them in a Miami mansion once owned by Madonna, and set out to record an album, only for it to become clear that none of them had talent beyond their jawlines, which he’d apparently intended all along. He then had a researcher in a lab coat, with no actual scientific credentials, live in the house and film the residents around the clock, a stunt somewhere between a reality dating show and a psychology experiment. Pushed out by fed-up neighbors, he simply restarted the whole thing in Pisa with a fresh cast.
The part that isn’t funny
Underneath the eccentric-billionaire comedy is something genuinely ugly, and it’s the part a pet publication can’t wave off. To keep a steady supply of canine “heirs,” Mian used a German Shepherd breeder in Vecchiano, Italy. When an animal-rights group finally got inside the facility, they found more than 50 dogs living in cramped quarters, malnourished and neglected. The series notes it and moves on, pivoting back to Mian’s own struggles with depression and gesturing at a redemption arc, complete with a vague plan to buy a private island and turn it into an animal sanctuary, for which the film offers no evidence of follow-through.
“This is the thread I wish the documentary had pulled on, because it’s the thread a lot of viewers will miss,” says Dr. Priya Nair. “Whenever an operation treats dogs as a renewable supply of a specific look, whether it’s a myth about a rich Shepherd or just a trendy breed, the animals at the bottom pay for it in crowded pens and poor care. A dog is never a costume or an accessory. The most useful thing this story can do is make people ask harder questions about where any dog comes from.”
That’s the honest verdict. As a portrait of what money does to people, right down to Mian buying an Italian soccer team and naming two adult-film stars as its presidents, the series delivers. As a story about a dog, its most important scene is the one it treats as a detour: the rescue of dozens of Shepherds who existed only to sustain a lie.
What’s real now
For anyone wondering how it ends: the fortune has passed down Gunther’s bloodline to Gunther VI, and by the filmmakers’ account, Mian and his current dog remain genuinely bonded and are doing fine. The countess stays fictional, the money stays real, and the richest dog in the world turns out to be exactly as rich, and as invented, as one man needed him to be.
