The American Oligarchs and their Ideologies

Note de la rédaction: This essay is appearing today in the European publication Le Grand Continent. Click here for the French version, and here for the Spanish.

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In just the three days after Donald Trump’s election, Elon Musk’s net worth increased by $26.5 billion—more than $100,000 per second. It has subsequently jumped by nearly $125 billion more, for a 750-fold return on the $200 million Musk spent on Trump’s campaign. Not surprisingly, he has been ecstatic about the election results. Trump has of course appointed him to lead a Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”) that aims drastically to slash the size of the federal government. According to Musk and his co-director Vivek Ramaswamy, current government operations are undemocratic and impose “massive direct and indirect costs on taxpayers.” But the taxpayer who would save the most from this regulatory slash-and-burn is Musk himself. It might well make him the world’s first trillionaire.

Musk, however, is only the most prominent of the ultra-wealthy oligarchs who backed Donald Trump’s return to power and are now poised to reap the financial rewards and wield unprecedented political influence. Some of them, embracing a soup of political ideas with elements of Caesarism, technocracy and extreme libertarianism, have little sympathy for democracy. Instead, they want to bring the Silicon Valley program of “creative destruction”—also known as simply “breaking shit”—to the heart of the American state.

Extreme wealth does strange, extreme things. It seals off its owners from the ordinary world behind an impenetrable screen of bodyguards, servants, sycophants, limousines, helicopters, yachts, private jets, and private islands. It gives them an irresistible sense of their own genius and righteousness. It makes them meddlesome, and often power-hungry. It turns mere moguls into oligarchs.

Despite having more money than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes, oligarchs almost always want more. ProPublica has reported that between 2014 and 2018, even as Elon Musk’s wealth grew by nearly $14 billion, he paid an effective federal tax rate of just 3.3 percent, and yet still railed against the regulations that supposedly prevented him from getting even wealthier. Similar yelps came from his former business partner Peter Thiel, who, by exploiting a federal program designed for middle-class investors, kept $5 billion in capital gains income entirely tax free.

Oligarchs want political influence, and their wealth buys it. In the United States, since the Supreme Court removed limits on campaign spending by corporations and outside groups in 2010 (the “Citizens United” decision), wealthy donors have given billions of dollars in campaign contributions and expect their quid pro quo. U.S. Politicians today mostly do not even bother pretending, as they once did, that campaign donations buy nothing but “access” (how quaint that now sounds). The politicians vote the way the donors instruct. The money also buys media, the most prominent example being Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, which allowed him, in 2024, to bombard the platform’s 76 million American users with a torrent of ads for Trump as well as “news” content skewed sharply towards the Republican candidate. The use of media purchases to advance unholy alliances between oligarchs and right-wing strongmen was pioneered in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, where businessmen connected to the ruling Fidesz party now control an estimated 80 percent of the country’s media, and have shut down opposition. In return, the Hungarian state, the country’s largest advertiser, directs 90 percent of its ad spending to those same businessmen. Donald Trump, an admirer of Orbán, may well try to follow this example.

Joe Biden warned, in his farewell address last week, that an oligarchy is just “taking shape” in US. In this, as in so many other things, the president has been far behind the curve. The age of the oligarchs is here, in the US and across the world. The word first gained currency with respect to Russia, where the men in question (no women) made their vast fortunes by looting the vast natural resources of the former Soviet Union. In the West, where it has taken longer to recognize a genuine oligarch class, they did so mostly in the tech economy or by moving colossal amounts of money around more skillfully than anyone else and taking their cut. But in both cases, the size of the fortunes, both relative to the total economy and to the wealth of average individuals, dwarfs anything seen for a century or more.

The relationship between oligarchy and politics has evolved differently in the east and the west. In Russia, during the first decade after communism, a first wave of oligarchs acquired enormous power and influence. But after Vladimir Putin rose to power, he curtailed their independence, forcing some into exile, imprisoning others (notably Mikhail Khodorkovsky), and bending the rest to his will. He also helped create a second wave of oligarchs, fiercely loyal to him, some of them his boyhood friends (e.g. the brothers Boris and Arkady Rotenberg).

In the United States, by contrast, the men to whom the 1990’s initially brought unprecedented wealth – Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos – had relatively little interest in changing American politics. Gates used some of his gigantic Microsoft fortune to create a charitable foundation (as did Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook somewhat later). Jobs, with his ostentatiously counter-culture vibe, distained the political game and kept a low political proflie. Bezos did the same for many years. In 2013 he purchased The Washington Post, and four years later, in a pointed reaction to Trump’s inauguration, the newspaper adopted the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

The so-called “PayPal Mafia” is different, and key to understanding American oligarchy today. The term refers to a group that first connected at the financial services company PayPal in the late 1990’s, several years after the start of the dot.com boom. PayPal itself, which was bought by eBay in 2002, did not raise these men to oligarch-level wealth. Musk, the best known of them (he founded the predecessor to PayPal called X.com) received $176 million from the eBay purchase—pocket change by his current standards. The lion’s share of his current $415 billion comes from stock in the electric car company Tesla, of which he became the majority shareholder in 2004. Thiel, a PayPal co-founder, parlayed an initial $500,000 stake in Facebook into over $1 billion, and made many other savvy investments in addition to founding the data analysis company Palantir (the name comes from The Lord of the Rings, an obsession of his). David Sacks, PayPal’s founding Chief Operating Officer, started the genealogy website geni.com, and has made many other profitable investments in the technology sector.

Thiel and Sacks were the original ideologues of the group, long before Elon Musk turned to politics. Thiel, a brilliant philosophy major at Stanford in the late 1980’s, was horrified when the university dropped its “Western Culture” requirement (protestors led by Jesse Jackson had chanted “hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Culture’s gotta go”). In 1987 he founded the Stanford Review, one of a group of student publications in elite universities bankrolled by conservative foundations. While a law student at Stanford in the early 1990’s Thiel met Sacks, then a writer for the Review. The two went on to publish a harsh critique of political correctness and multiculturalism called The Diversity Myth, which among other things called the rape awareness movement a pretext for vilifying men (they later apologized for the argument). But, for the moment, they remained largely within the ideological ambit of Reagan-era conservatism.

David Sacks’s subsequent evolution, as he made his fortune, has largely mirrored that of the Republican party as a whole. He now calls himself a “populist” and a champion of the working class and has bankrolled many candidates who reflect this change in the party. In 2024, he donated to Ron DeSantis before finally accepting Trump’s dominance. Since the election he has celebrated Trump for having run (as he put it on X), “a substantive campaign based on issues like the border, inflation, crime, and war.” Trump has named him the new administration’s “czar” for cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence.

Thiel’s politics moved in a stranger, more sinister direction as he gained wealth and influence. In 2009 he published an article in Cato Unbound, the organ of a powerful Washington libertarian foundation, in which he declared: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Looking back over the previous century of American history, he argued that “the 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics.” But then the expansion of the welfare state and women’s suffrage (yes, women’s suffrage) ensured the triumph of an “unthinking demos.” At the time, Thiel urged libertarians to abandon politics altogether and seek their salvation in technology: above all, the internet and space travel. And he also wrote: “The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom.”

Thiel is in fact an intellectual crank, who cobbles together ideas plucked from libertarian science fiction, Tolkien, the philosopher René Girard, and the political theorist Leo Strauss. Most recently he has taken an interest in the Apocalypse and expressed anxiety about the coming of a secular Antichrist. A recent column he published in the Financial Times gives a good sense of his profound eccentricity. Thiel has also promoted the work of a business protege, the blogger Curtis Yarvin, who is a major figure in a reactionary movement that calls itself “Dark Enlightenment.” Yarvin has argued that what he calls the “Cathedral”—a conglomerate of the mainstream media and universities—exercises totalitarian control in the United States through its management of public opinion. He has called for a dictator or “monarch” to arise and smash it.

By 2016, Thiel had decided that a retreat from politics was irresponsible and donated significantly to Donald Trump. But he quickly grew disenchanted with the chaos of the Trump administration, and its inability to overcome America’s “senile, central-left regime.” He despaired that any “great man” could still emerge to change the world. The journalist Barton Gellman wrote in a 2022 profile that Thiel’s “libertarian critique of American government has curdled into an almost nihilistic impulse to demolish it.” But at the same time Thiel spent lavishly to promote the political career of a young lawyer he had hired in 2017 to work at his investment firm: J.D. Vance. When Trump picked Vance as his vice-presidential candidate, Thiel came back on board with him. Through Vance, Thiel now stands poised to exercise real influence in the new administration.

Thiel is not the only Trump-supporting oligarch to have deeply strange, anti-liberal ideas derived from that dark corner of the culture where science fiction, libertarianism, and vulgar Nietzscheanism collide. There is also Marc Andreessen, billionaire developer of the first commercial internet browser. Last year, he co-authored the so-called “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” which professes an unlimited devotion to technology as the solution to all humanity’s problems and includes a long passage from Nietzsche’s Last Man. It attacks concepts such as “sustainability” and “social responsibility,” which it links to communism, and it declares: “our enemy is the ivory tower.” It also has a section entitled “Becoming Technological Supermen” which includes the following statements: “We believe in greatness…. We believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness – strength” (italics in the original). Andreessen has been reported as expressing supreme contempt for ordinary Americans: “I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep these people quiet.” No surprise that he gravitated to the hyper-aggressive candidate who believes in strength above all else and wants to “Make America Great Again.” Since the election, he has been advising the transition team and, along with several of Musk’s lieutenants, has been interviewing candidates for top government positions.

Many other oligarchs donated lavishly to Trump and look likely to have his ear in the next four years. There is Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of Oracle, who has sat in on transition team meetings. There is Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge funder radicalized by the recent anti-Israel student protests, especially at his alma mater, Harvard (he helped lead the movement to oust the university’s president Claudine Gay, whom he accused of defending anti-Semites). There is Miriam Adelson, the Israeli widow of billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who is a fervent backer of Netanyahu and the Israeli far right. There is the billionaire junk bond king Nelson Peltz, who in February brought together a large group of Republican-leaning business figures at his $334 million Florida estate to rally them behind Trump (Musk was guest of honor at the event). Moving in Trump’s direction is pharmaceutical billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of The Los Angeles Times. At the end of the presidential campaign, he suppressed a Kamala Harris endorsement by his paper, and after the election promised to name a new editorial board that would be “fair and balanced” (not by coincidence, the original slogan of Fox News). The older-generation oligarch Jeff Bezos has moved towards Trump as well. With huge federal contracts for his data services possibly at stake, he killed The Washington Post’s planned endorsement of Harris. After Trump won, Bezos posted a cringing note of congratulations on X. More recently, the Post refused to print a cartoon showing Bezos genuflecting to Trump, leading to the cartoonist’s resignation.

Most of these figures have only limited interest in the wilder ideas peddled by Thiel, Yarvin and Andreessen. What they find most attractive is the libertarian program that includes a possible elimination of income taxes, a wholesale culling of federal regulations, and undercutting the dollar with cryptocurrencies, all of which would serve their supreme purpose of making them even richer. They generally have very little appreciation of the differences between government and a corporation where thousands of workers can be fired in order to increase shareholder value. They think the Silicon Valley ethos should apply to both equally. Making the human race “multi-planetary” interests them much less.

But then there is the most prominent member of the PayPal mafia, Elon Musk. Unlike Thiel and Sacks, Musk does not have a long history as a libertarian or conservative. Indeed, as recently as 2015 he claimed to have had little interest in politics at all, and to have voted mostly for Democratic presidential candidates. He also frequently warned about the dangers of climate change and of course ran the world’s most famous electric car company, Tesla.

But as the fortune of this supremely eccentric man grew to colossal dimensions, so did what can only be called his messianic ambitions. Above all, Musk dreamed of colonizing outer space, starting with Mars, seeing it as the only way to guarantee humanity’s survival. In 2001 he founded SpaceX, a company that seeks drastically to reduce the cost of lifting material into earth orbit—a necessary step in future space efforts. Musk also promised to develop new tunneling technology to make possible radically new high-speed rail transportation here on earth. He has founded a company that aims to connect human brains directly to the internet. And he became a fervent natalist, despairing at low birth rates in developed countries, and insisting on the need for “superintelligent” people to breed more vigorously. He has had twelve children of his own by several women, including three named X Æ A-Xii, Exa Dark Sideræl, and Techno Mechanicus.

In the present decade, three events radicalized Musk profoundly. The first was the Covid pandemic and the subsequent shutdowns. In March 2020 Musk tweeted that “the coronavirus panic is dumb.” A month later he called Covid restrictions “fascist,” and in May he announced he would reopen the Tesla production lines in defiance of them. Then, in 2021, under pressure from the United Auto Workers union (which had tried, unsuccessfully, to unionize at Tesla), President Biden pointedly declined to invite Musk to a White House meeting on electric vehicles, enraging him. Most importantly, that same year, Musk’s transgender child by his first wife broke with her father and formally changed her name. Musk blamed the event on the “woke mind virus,” which he called “arguably one of the greatest threats to modern civilization.” He became increasingly convinced that the mainstream media was suppressing free speech and allowing the “virus” to spread. It was this conviction that spurred him to purchase Twitter in 2022, to rename it X (like the initial name of PayPal), to open it up to all manner of conspiracy-theorizing right-wing extremism, and to use it to promote Trump’s candidacy. He also, of course, became a fanatic Trumpian and a fixture at Mar-a-Lago, in the process changing his earlier views on climate change. During the presidential transition, he has sat in on many meetings with Trump, and even on calls with foreign leaders. Some pundits have jokingly called him a co-president.

It is still very much an open question how much influence the oligarchs will wield over Donald Trump in his second term. Trump won the election in large part by appealing successfully to working-class, non-college educated voters whose interests deviate in obvious ways from those of the ultra-wealthy. Will Trump risk losing their support? The President-elect also, notoriously, cares above all about his own public image, as seen in news coverage, popularity ratings and crowd sizes. And, as a businessman, he tends to measure his success by the stock market as well. In the end, he may pay more attention to Dow Jones and Gallup than to Musk and Thiel (the latter channeled through Vice President Vance). Republican politicians may kowtow to the oligarchs because of the money they donate to campaigns, but, for the moment, there is little indication that techno-Caesarism has much genuine appeal among the party’s officeholders. Musk may well not have the patience or humility to pay court for long amidst the chaotic and cutthroat politics of Trump World, despite the financial gains he hopes to reap from doing so (he already lost one large battle when Trump declined to name his favorite, Howard Lutnick, as Treasury Secretary). Musk and the other oligarchs have little sympathy for Trump’s latest nationalist flights of fancy: annexing Canada and Greenland. And despite Trump’s plans for extreme deregulation, the federal government is not in fact a company whose employees can be dismissed, and its bylaws rewritten, at the whim of a CEO. After prominent MAGA figures recently attacked Musk for defending the practice of giving preferential visa status to highly skilled immigrants, he retreated. Still, as a leading critic of immigration conceded: “You’ve got to understand, even if you’re the most MAGA of MAGA people, these guys helped Trump get elected, and he owes them.”

The economist Branko Milanovic has called the ideology of Musk and his fellow oligarchs as “global Caesarism.” Many of them, he notes, have little real attachment to any particular nation-state, believing rather in the supremacy of a global, supra-national elite (one reason why they are generally such fervent believers in crypto-currency, and even hope it will one day supplant the dollar). They cynically exploit nationalism to get their preferred candidates elected but otherwise seek mostly to keep the lower classes docile with bread and circuses. An American invasion of Greenland is not on their agenda.

Yet there are elements of the oligarchs’ ideas and policy proposals that seem to have a surprisingly broad appeal, both to the disenchanted, resentful post-industrial working classes, and to the disaffected young men who voted for Trump in surprisingly large numbers. The idea of taking a sledgehammer to “the system,” and dismantling much of the federal government, does not sound so terrible to many in communities ravaged by fentanyl, unable to afford decent housing, and paying sky-high prices for groceries. Getting their political information principally from social media, podcasts, and wildly partisan cable television and radio, they see “the system” as rigged against them, dominated by feckless Democrats who care more about migrants and transgender issues than about ordinary, patriotic Americans (as Trump’s most successful TV advertisement put it, “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”) These information sources also singularly fail to note that a massive disruption of the federal government would threaten the food stamps, disability payments, social security and Medicare on which so many of these people depend (recall that protestors demonstrating against the Affordable Care Act in 2010 waved signs saying “Keep Your Government Hands Off My Medicare”).

As for “techno-optimism” and vulgar Nietzscheanism, they have found an enthusiastic audience among the young American males who now go by the name of “tech bros.” Fans of the podcaster Joe Rogan and of the far-right internet personality who calls himself “Bronze Age Pervert,” they glamorize body-building, extreme sports like MMA, paleo diets (including raw beef liver), questionable health supplements, and survivalism. Their culture is homoerotic, deeply misogynistic (they urge women to become stay-at-home “tradwives”), and infected by all manner of conspiracy theorizing. Much of their best-liked imagery centers on ancient Rome and uses the faux-Roman tag “RETVRN.” It goes without saying they would enthusiastically support an American Caesar (unfortunately, it will be Caligula). It is hard to say how large a phenomenon they actually amount to, but Joe Rogan, the most important radio/podcast personality in the US since the late, unlamented Rush Limbaugh, has 14.5 million followers on Spotify.

And even if this popular support turns out to be transient, Musk, Thiel and their followers are bringing radically undemocratic ideas, some of them wholly at odds with American society (indeed, with sanity) into the highest levels of American government. The very fact that these ideas have now gained some credibility in leading Republican circles (and portions of the general public) is alarming. A serious crisis, which Trump’s ignorant and willful style of governance makes all too likely, could bring them new prominence. For the moment, no Techno-Caesar stands on or close to the banks of an American Rubicon. But in a few years, who knows? Money, after all, talks, and the American oligarchs have more of it than even Croesus dreamed.