hen tech billionaires and crypto moguls hailed Donald Trump’s reelection and flocked to his inauguration ceremony and ball, million-dollar donations in hand, some were abandoning previous liberal affiliations and all were now lining up behind an openly authoritarian president. The surface rationale is that megabusiness leaders such as Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, and Marc Andreessen are safeguarding their companies and their shareholders’ interests. The underlying explanation is that America is being reborn as an oligarchy.
This new class—with Trump megadonor Elon Musk as its self-appointed tribune—has thrown its support behind a libertarian economic agenda that maximizes private power and minimizes public accountability. Whether the billionaires’ alignment with Trump and Musk is merely pragmatic or sincerely ideological, they stand to gain from the new administration’s crash program of dismantling government and regulatory agencies. For Trump, allying with such concentrated economic power helps him consolidate political control, at the expense of democracy. This fusion of money and power is nothing new. I saw something similar take shape in my native Russia. But three decades later, the Russian oligarchs’ bargain has ended up with only one true beneficiary: Vladimir Putin.
America’s billionaires should take note. When extreme wealth combines forces with extreme power, the former can profit enormously for a time. As in Russia, the benefits of the executive’s policies are likely to flow upward: Super-wealthy Americans will enjoy tax breaks and deregulation for their businesses, while the poor will face rising prices, shrinking services, and reduced opportunity. But America’s tech oligarchs may discover sooner rather than later that, by undermining democratic governance, they are empowering an authoritarian president who can pick them off one by one—just as Putin did with the oligarchs who helped cement his rule.
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