There are other opinions in this thread but I think you could make a strong argument for anti-corporate messaging.

Most of the capitalist figures in SpongeBob are portrayed as greedy assholes. There are several instances of rich jerk fish, and I feel like I barely need to mention Mr Krabs himself.

Mr. Krabs’s relentless emphasis on profit -expressed through wage suppression, obsessive cost-cutting, and the conversion of social relations into transactions - renders him a concentrated embodiment of profit-driven logic. SpongeBob’s boundless cheerfulness and dutiful labor on the other hand present the idealized worker who performs emotional compliance as part of his job; his behavior makes visible the moral contradiction at the heart of an economy that prizes surplus extraction over workers’ wellbeing. The Krusty Krab’s daily rhythms - timed shifts, commodified leisure, scripted upselling, and constant attention to margins - show how extraction becomes normalized through routine rather than force.

The rivalry between Mr. Krabs and Sheldon J. Plankton further highlights the system’s subtly coercive nature: their ceaseless competition is less about innovation than about maintaining status atop the same extractive order, a ruthless free market theater in which two capitalists conserve and contest power while workers absorb the costs. The comedy works because it literalizes these dynamics - affection as account entry, friendship as transaction - so that the satirical clarity of the show forces viewers, even while amused, to recognize how profit as an organizing principle reshapes everyday life and renders cheerfulness itself a technique of compliance.

/s