When Donald Trump takes office on January 20, alongside an administration stocked with billionaires and crypto dudes, he’ll be ushering in a grim new form of power. Let’s call it a bro-ligarchy.
Oligarchies are governments in which power is concentrated among a small group of people, often relying on oppression or coercion to consolidate their rule and use their power to enrich themselves. Russia is the most fitting example of an oligarchy in this context: After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, business entrepreneurs quickly became wealthy, scooping up previously state-owned assets as the nation privatized; once they became billionaires, these business oligarchs were able to act as a sort of shadow government to use their power and influence to further enrich themselves. In modern Russia, President Vladimir Putin has maintained the oligarchic system, provided the oligarchs support his authoritarian rule, and use their wealth — NPR likens them to “ATM machines” — to enrich himself and his allies.
Some political scientists have long speculated that the United States is, if not a true oligarchy, at least somewhat oligarchic, as wealthy and powerful elites are increasingly able to wield influence over policy and contribute to growing economic inequality. And if we were once merely flirting with being an oligarchy, Big Tech’s newfound embrace of Trump is rocketing us right into one.
Trump's ties to Elon Musk are the most obvious example. After spending $44 billion to take control of Twitter, a major global source of information, the richest man in the world poured more than a quarter of a billion dollars into the election campaigns of Trump and other Republican politicians. Trump has now tasked Musk and fellow businessman Vivek Ramaswamy with advising on slashing government spending, which may give Musk the opportunity to push for less federal oversight of his own companies.
Trump has also reportedly heard Musk’s counsel on his Cabinet picks. And in the most recent and blatant example of Musk’s influence, in December Musk helped scuttle a bipartisan political spending bill that would have prevented a government shutdown, a move Trump ended up backing.
Musk isn’t the only billionaire currying favor with Trump: Tech billionaires Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, and Sam Altman of OpenAI have each donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund, even though all three were previously critical of Trump. Zuckerberg called Trump “badass” after he survived an assassination attempt in July and dined with him at Mar-a-Lago after his election. In late December, Trump, Bezos, and Musk, a longtime Bezos rival, all had dinner at Mar-a-Lago — and Bezos told Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times DealBook summit that he is “very optimistic” about Trump’s regulatory agenda. Additionally, Forbes reported that crypto billionaires like Tyler Winklevoss, Cameron Winklevoss, and Marc Andreeson all publicly backed Trump in 2024 too.
As is the case with Musk, Trump will likely repay the super-rich for their obsequiousness, and not just via tax cuts (although those will certainly help the nation’s richest); he’s already tapped more than a dozen billionaires for potential roles in his administration, including Musk and WWE cofounder Linda McMahon.
Even the non-billionaire picks seem poised to benefit. Venture capitalist David Sacks caped for Trump in the 2024 election, and his MAGA turn has netted him an appointment as Trump’s AI and crypto czar, signaling that the new administration will be more favorable to people with large cryptocurrency holdings than Biden's administration. (Trump is also involved in a cryptocurrency business venture that could potentially benefit from a light regulatory touch.)
Additionally, Trump is replacing Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chair Lina Khan, who fought hard to regulate big tech companies, with Andrew Ferguson, a current FTC commissioner who consumer protection experts expect will be more favorable on the antitrust issues Khan made a cornerstone of her run. Trump has nominated Paul Atkins, a cryptocurrency advocate, to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which will likely be another big win for tech and the crypto industry.
There’s more: CNN reported in December that Trump’s allies have floated eliminating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), a bank regulator established during the Great Depression that protects bank deposits of up to $250,000. Under the current FDIC system, if a bank fails — as many have in just the last 24 years — depositors would not lose their life savings, provided they had less than $250,000 in their accounts. Eliminating the FDIC would remove that crucial safety net and make everyone’s savings accounts a heck of a lot less safe. It would also destabilize the US banking system, which some crypto boosters speculate could push people into crypto, because US currency, by that point, would be somewhat less secure, once again boosting the tech barons who are in turn boosting Trump. (Experts do say that Trump is unlikely to do this, since it’s politically radioactive.)
Over the last half-century, wealth inequality has skyrocketed in the United States. Researchers with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank, have found that three-quarters of all wealth in the US is concentrated among the top 10% wealthiest families in the nation. The country’s 800 billionaires, including Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg, hold about 3.8% of all US wealth, according to Americans for Tax Fairness, to the tune of about $6 trillion. And their wealth has reportedly doubled since Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which the Brookings Institute found disproportionately hurt the middle class. Now, a chunk of those billionaires are in or close to power under Trump 2.0, and they’re likely to get richer and more powerful over the next four years, at everyone else’s expense — provided, of course, that they bend the knee.
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