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THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A GOOD BILLIONAIRE  
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Carl Beijer
January 21, 2025
Jacobin
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_ Democrats want us to believe that there is some cohort of “good
billionaires” who can be relied upon to fight for political
progress. But as the right-wing turn of tech billionaires like Mark
Zuckerberg and Elon Musk suggests, this is nonsense. _

Guests including Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos, Sundar
Pichai, and Elon Musk attend the inauguration of Donald J. Trump in
the US Capitol Rotunda on January 20, 2025, in Washington, DC., Julia
Demaree Nikhinson - Pool / Getty Images

 

Joe Biden said, in his farewell address
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I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern.
And that’s the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of very
few ultra-wealthy people, and the dangerous consequences if their
abuse of power is left unchecked. Today an oligarchy is taking shape
in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally
threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a
fair shot for everyone to get ahead.

Biden’s parting comments have been hailed among liberals and
leftists alike for its rare acknowledgment of oligarchy in the United
States; Bernie Sanders, for example, praised him
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as “absolutely right” and added that the danger of oligarchy is
“the defining issue of our time.”

But later in his speech, Biden added crucial context to that warning:
“I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a
tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country
as well.”

Though comprehensive campaign finance data is still unavailable, it is
already clear that Silicon Valley played a major role in Trump’s
reelection
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that it is already exercising enormous influence on his
administration. And this, Democrats have made it clear, is
their _real _concern: not with capitalism’s vast concentration of
wealth per se, but with its specific concentration into the hands of
Republican donors.

“There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with
Democrats, who share our values, and we will take their money,” Ken
Martin, a leading candidate for Chair of the Democratic Party, said
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at a forum on Sunday. “But we’re not taking money from those bad
billionaires.”

One practical problem with this approach is that even the “good”
billionaires make unreliable allies. During the 2020 election, for
example, Bill Gates claims
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to have given $50 million to a nonprofit supporting Kamala Harris. But
after a recent trip to Mar-a-Lago, Gates now says that he’s come
around on Trump
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I felt like he was, you know, energized and — you know — looking
forward to helping to drive innovation. You know, I was frankly
impressed with how well he showed a lot of interest in the issues I
brought up.

Similarly, Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia, who maxed out on donations to
Harris in 2020, now claims that he voted for Trump
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He is not a fascist determined to destroy democracy. . . . He deeply
cares about government efficiency and spending. (I also care about the
next generation, and love the whole DOGE initiative.) He cares about
bringing common sense back to our country.

Biden may warn against a “tech-industrial complex” today, but it
was only a few years ago that Democrats still counted tech plutocrats
like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen as “good billionaires.” Even if
all of these men simply had a change of heart, this poses a serious
problem for Martin’s approach to the oligarchy: it places the entire
Democratic Party at the mercy of decidedly mercurial overlords.

But there are of course ways to explain why our tech billionaires have
switched sides other than pure caprice. As I spelled out at length in
the case of Mark Zuckerberg
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tech billionaires have powerful business incentives to align
themselves with whoever is in power. They want contracts, they want to
avoid regulation, and they want to influence policy — all in the
interest of profits. And this incentive is so powerful that it has
proven more than capable of convincing our tech billionaires to change
their partisan alignments.

Ken Martin wants us to believe that there is some definite cohort of
“good billionaires” who can be relied upon to fight for political
progress, but the tech-industrial complex is showing us exactly why
this isn’t the case. Whatever personal sympathies our billionaires
have, capitalism will always compel them to prioritize their financial
interests above everything else. There will always be a systematic
tendency
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the biggest campaign donors to oppose regulations, taxes, and anything
that pulls workers out of precarity and gives them an ounce of
independence.

There are innumerable reforms the Democratic Party can enact to limit
the influence of its billionaire donors, but the rich have learned to
work around campaign finance regulations in the past (for example
through PACs), and they’ll inevitably do so again. This is why
democracy, ultimately, just can’t coexist with the massive
concentrations of wealth that are guaranteed by a capitalist economy.
Instead of hoping that “good billionaires” will work against their
own business interests, socialists need to fight for a world where
there are no billionaires at all.

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Carl Beijer is a writer at carlbeijer.com [[link removed]].

* Rich People; Billionaires; Science and Technology;
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