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ELON MUSK AND THE AGE OF SHAMELESS OLIGARCHY  
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Whizy Kim
November 25, 2024
Vox
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_ Musk is showing other members of the ultra-wealthy a bold
alternative to stealth politics, urged on by a president-elect who has
embraced giving billionaires a seat at the table. If you're rich
enough, you can grab power in full public view. _

Happy Elon Musk, by jurvetson (CC BY 2.0)

 

President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk have become an inseparable
duo. Since Trump’s reelection, the richest man in the world — and
one of Trump’s top campaign donors — has been a shadow
[[link removed]] trailing
[[link removed]] him at his Florida
residence. The tech billionaire has taken center stage in the incoming
administration, promising to slash $2 trillion
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the federal government’s budget.

A whirlwind relationship developing between a politician — in this
case, the president-elect — and a financial backer isn’t unusual.
What stands out is how much the donor himself is in the spotlight. Tim
Walz’s joke
[[link removed]] that
Musk, not JD Vance, was Trump’s running mate, rings more true every
day. “We’ve never really seen anyone be that directly connected
with a campaign unless they were the candidate,” says Jason
Seawright, a political science professor at Northwestern University
and co-author of _Billionaires and Stealth Politics_
[[link removed]].

It makes Musk an oddity among his billionaire class, who almost always
use their influence quietly.

He’s showing other members of the ultra-wealthy a bold alternative
to stealth politics, urged on by a president-elect who has embraced
giving billionaires a seat at the table
[[link removed]].
A private citizen can grab power in full view of the public — as
long as they’re rich enough, and have enough fans.

“We are in an era that I call ‘in-your-face oligarchy,’” says
Jeffrey A. Winters, a professor at Northwestern who researches
oligarchs and inequality. Twenty years ago, it was a challenge to get
his students to understand that there were oligarchs in the US. Now,
he says, “I have a very hard time getting students to accept the
idea that there’s democracy.”

Related: Elon Musk is Trump’s biggest booster — and patron. Why?
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Buying political power is nothing new – but Musk’s brazenness is
different

American politics has always been dominated by its most well-heeled
citizens, whether by holding office themselves, using their money to
get their preferred candidates into office, or helping shape policies.
Benefactors are often well-rewarded
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access to the levers of government, whether it’s receiving a cushy
ambassadorship
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even cabinet position, getting generous government contracts
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acting as informal advisers
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steering controversial foreign policy decisions,
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taking on a more shadowy but
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less influential role
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While both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris enjoyed
an abundance of ultra-rich supporters
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just 10 billionaires gave 44 percent
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all the money supporting Trump. It’s part of why the word
“oligarchy
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is being thrown
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although not for the first time. “Going back more than 2,000 years
in history, oligarch has always referred to people who are empowered
by tremendous wealth,” explains Winters. “That’s always a small
part of the population, but they’re able to convert their wealth
into political influence.”

Musk donated some $130 million to help elect Trump and other
Republicans, and he doesn’t have an official appointment in the
Trump administration at this point — instead, he’ll be leading the
Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE for short
[[link removed]]) alongside fellow
billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy. The twin heads of the efficiency
commission aim to chop at least $2 trillion
[[link removed]] in government
waste [[link removed]] — such as
the budgets of pesky regulatory agencies that slow down building
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worth noting that there’s already an agency
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with trying to ensure the federal government runs efficiently.)

Barbara A. Perry, co-chair of the Presidential Oral History Program at
the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, tells Vox that she
can’t think of another example in American history quite like Musk.
“It just seems that Musk is taking a much larger role than any other
person who would have come close to playing his role,” she says.
Musk doesn’t have previous experience in a similar political
appointment, nor is he stepping down from any of his companies despite
potentially wielding a lot of sway over agencies that regulate his
firms.

Back in 2016, the big Trump donor drawing scrutiny was hedge fund
manager Robert Mercer. The Mercer family gave over $15 million to
support Trump’s run, and their considerable investment in the
right-wing news site Breitbart was influential in promoting Trump’s
presidential candidacy
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The parallels to Musk are striking, given his ownership of social
media site X and the role it played in spreading right-wing
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misinformation
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voters, as well as the owner’s explicit Trump endorsements.

But Mercer’s contributions came behind the scenes. He’s hardly
ever given interviews, and little is known about his personal life.
That’s the case for the vast majority of wealthy donors — it’s
Elon Musk, posting incessantly on X
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how he sees the world, who’s the outlier.

Musk could be a sign of how billionaire political strategy is changing

In _Billionaires and Stealth Politics_
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published in 2018 in the aftermath of the first Trump election,
Seawright and fellow Northwestern researchers Matthew J. Lacombe and
Benjamin I. Page studied how this tiny subset of the super-rich
engaged in political activity. What they found is that while most
never speak publicly about their views, conservative billionaires
tended to spend more money while speaking less; liberal billionaires
spent less, but they were more likely to speak up.

Take Mark Cuban, who became one of the most visible billionaire
boosters of Harris this year but made a point to say he didn’t
donate at all
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her campaign. On the flip side, while Musk got all the attention as a
Republican megadonor this cycle, the actual top donor
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a man you might have never heard of: Timothy Mellon
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a banking heir who the public knows little about.

Stealth has pretty much been the modus operandi for as long as rich
Americans have been putting their fingers on the scale of democracy
— until Musk came along.

Musk isn’t the only vocally partisan conservative billionaire donor
today, though — there are also figures like hedge fund manager Bill
Ackman
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crypto investors Tyler
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Winklevoss [[link removed]] who
have no qualms about sharing their politics online — but he is the
most emblematic of this shift. Musk isn’t just Trump’s financial
backer and the media mogul behind an increasingly instrumental arm of
right-wing messaging — he’s an influencer with a following that
most politicians running for office probably wish they commanded.

Corporate executives today are more than bosses. They’re thought
leaders who publish memoirs offering broad lessons on how to succeed
in life
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are often propped up as idols. Musk is the prime example. Though he
has now lost some of his original admirers
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his word is still gospel to a horde of mostly young men who think Musk
will fight back against the liberal establishment. It’s spurred on
by an ecosystem of social media fan accounts
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him achieving fake heroic feats
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and above all, by Musk’s own words as he holds forth on his personal
X account. On X, Musk currently has over 200 million followers; at a
Trump town hall that Musk hosted in October in Pennsylvania, it was
clear
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at least part of the crowd had come to get a glimpse of the famous
billionaire.

The nature of Musk’s public persona is important, too: Like Trump,
he portrays himself as a populist who understands
[[link removed]] your
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acquisition of Twitter was framed as a remedy to “fake news”
pushed by legacy media outlets, purporting to create a town square
that boosts all voices. According to Musk, even the budget-cut ideas
for DOGE will be crowdsourced (with the aid of volunteers willing
to work 80-plus hours
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week for free) and broadcast
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richest person in the world presents as a man of the people.

Some might argue that Musk is “no different than the kind of
oligarch that we see in many other countries,” says Benjamin Soskis,
a historian and senior research associate at the Urban Institute’s
Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy. “What I think is different
about it is that Musk is doing this in the full glare of public
regard, and with a kind of presumed democratic legitimacy to it.”

For his fans, in other words, Musk’s position as the incoming
president’s right-hand man isn’t the dirty maneuvering of a
billionaire using money to access power. It reads almost as a
“philanthropic commitment” and an example of “do-gooding,”
says Soskis. (Musk has famously not been very philanthropic
[[link removed]].) If
the noblesse oblige of billionaires in the past manifested in founding
libraries and hospitals, Musk shows it by claiming to be a voice for
the people — a megaphone for their anger and resentment.

When asked why a billionaire like Musk might be so comfortable
announcing their political worldview, Seawright offers one theory:
Maybe there are thresholds of wealth where the consequences — like
public backlash or losing a few billion dollars — just don’t
matter that much.

If so, that has worrying implications for the trajectory of American
society. Our billionaires are certainly enjoying never-before-seen
heights of wealth. Tesla’s stock has soared since Election Day, with
Musk’s personal net worth now hovering around $300 billion. But
it’s worth noting that the birth of the centibillionaire is very
recent; Musk, along with many other tech leaders
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saw his fortune balloon during the pandemic. In 2019, he was worth a
comparatively paltry $22 billion
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of what he paid to buy Twitter in 2022.

Musk is unprecedented simply for the fact that there has never been a
political donor, adviser, and celebrity all rolled into one with the
gravitational pull of a $300 billion fortune. While wealth has always
bought you access in America, Musk is one of the most unsubtle
examples we’ve ever seen. And for all the worry one might feel upon
witnessing him waltz into the White House, there’s something
instructive about it, too. It lays bare the mechanism of power in
American democracy in the starkest terms.

_Whizy Kim [[link removed]] is a reporter
covering how the world’s wealthiest people wield influence,
including the policies and cultural norms they help forge. Before
joining Vox, she was a senior writer at Refinery29._

_Join us, support Vox journalism. [[link removed]]
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* Money in Politics
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* Billionaires
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* Elon Musk
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* Donald Trump
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