Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the rise of a new breed of American oligarchs

Donald Trump has never had a shortage of wealthy friends and supporters. That’s hardly surprising, given his lifelong passion for the trappings of wealth and power available to the scion of one of the richest families in the US. But in recent months, a coterie of younger Silicon Valley ultra-wealthy entrepreneurs – of the type known as “tech bros” – has gravitated strongly towards Mr Trump in his presidential campaign in a manner with ominous implications for US economic policy, the relationship between business and government, and even the future of US democracy. We may be witnessing the rise of a new breed of American oligarchs, in the worst sense of that term. One of the most striking features of this coterie of would-be “Maga” oligarchs is the extent to which many have entirely changed their views regarding Mr Trump. One podcasting wealthy tech bro, Chamath Palihapitiya , used to deride Mr Trump in the most vulgar terms and wanted him to serve scores of years in prison for the January 6, 2020 insurrection against Congress. Now he showers the former president with praise and donations. Others are a more natural fit into Mr Trump’s orbit. The founding figure of this group is Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder who spoke on behalf of Mr Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention. He has long sought to translate personal wealth into political influence . Mr Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, is a protege of Mr Thiel who discovered him as a Yale law school student and gave him his start in venture capital. Mr Thiel later funded Mr Vance’s successful Senate bid in 2022, the only significant Maga victory in a contested election other than Mr Trump’s own presidential win in 2016. But the most prominent and dynamic member of the group is Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, who has taken to showing up at Trump rallies with extravagant displays of excitement and enthusiasm. Mr Musk is giving tens of millions to Mr Trump’s campaign. Some legal experts say his recent offer of $1 million to registered voters who sign petitions supporting conservative causes is, in effect, an offer to pay people for registering to vote. That would be a blatant violation of US election laws. Mr Musk has played a significant role in facilitating, and more recently engaging in, the dissemination of highly damaging disinformation about the US political scene. Almost all of it seems intended to promote Mr Trump and the extreme right. He famously purchased Twitter , changing its name to X, and returned hundreds of right-wing extremists who had been previously banned for spreading incitement to violence, racism and dangerous disinformation (including about the Covid-19 pandemic) to that platform. One of the under-appreciated characteristics that unites some of these figures is that they are white men who spent their childhoods living under – and benefitting, by virtue of their race – from apartheid. Mr Musk, Mr Thiel and David Sacks (another prominent pro-Trump venture capitalist) all share this background. Their upbringing under the systematised inequalities of apartheid may well help to explain why all of them seem committed to the idea that human societies are inevitably divided between winners and losers, and that governance should be restricted to a natural aristocracy. That heritage may well resonate with Mr Trump’s own upbringing. His father was famously arrested, although under murky circumstances, at a violent Ku Klux Klan rally in 1927. And one of the most formative experiences of Mr Trump’s early business career was the 1973 battle that he and his father waged against the administration of Richard Nixon – hardly a civil rights champion – over their systematic housing discrimination. Mr Trump’s father had built an empire of working and middle-class housing in the outer boroughs of New York, particularly in the booming decades following the Second World War. When Mr Trump was brought on board to help run the company, it was accused of systematically instructing agents to mark all applications from African Americans with the letter C (standing for “coloured”), an indication not to rent to those prospective tenants, as has been widely reported in US media. In the end, Mr Trump and his father settled with the government, promising to end the practice. Mr Trump and the new crop of Silicon Valley would-be oligarchs seemingly recognise each other as kindred spirits. The tech bros are throwing their support behind him in the apparent hope that the personalised rule that he is promising can be used in their favour . At a minimum, they might hope to avoid government regulation themselves. The wealthy in US have never lacked for influence. The details of its framing Convention show that the constitutional system was consciously designed to facilitate the political expression of financial power, while balancing that with the power of voting majorities. Since the Supreme Court held that political donations are a form of protected “free speech” and that corporations are legal persons with political rights, that has greatly intensified in recent decades. But the new wannabe oligarchs now flocking around Mr Trump are either seeking to pioneer new ways of politically empowering themselves via their fortunes, or at least returning to the excesses of individual political clout among the super-wealthy characteristic of the Gilded Age at the turn of the 19th century. At the time, political reformers recognised this undue influence as a form of corruption and attack against the democratic system. Led by Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, the progressives of the time broke up monopolies and restrained the worst excesses of individual and corporate financial power on the political system. But, if he wins, another Republican president, Mr Trump, seems set to try to give his allies among the super-wealthy the kind of political clout their predecessors could only dream of. A personalised and autocratic presidential administration backed up by, and in turn favouring, personalised and politicised individual wealth has a familiar ring in today’s world. Its next epicentre could be in Washington.