The tech oligarchy poses a unique threat to democracy

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On the latest Forbes list of America’s richest people, Tesla co-founder Elon Musk ranks first, with a net worth of US$428-billion. Second richest is Larry Ellison, co-founder of the software firm Oracle, at US$276-billion. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, is close behind, at US$253-billion, followed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, at US$241-billion.

What all of these gentlemen have in common, besides being staggeringly rich – and male and white and in the tech sector – is that they have been drawn, willingly or unwillingly, into the orbit of Donald Trump. Mr. Musk, who spent more than US$250-million in aid of Mr. Trump’s election, was practically living at the White House at one point, as the head of the notional “Department of Government Efficiency”; he then had a falling out with Mr. Trump, at one point claiming, apparently correctly, that Mr. Trump’s name was in the Epstein files, but has since been attempting to ingratiate himself again.

Mr. Ellison, for his part, is a close associate of Mr. Trump, with a long history of contributing to right-wing and Republican causes. Mr. Zuckerberg, by contrast, was once known as something of an antagonist – Mr. Trump was banned from Facebook following his attempt to overturn the 2020 election – but has since made peace, contributing US$1-million to his inauguration fund and appearing with him at public gatherings. Mr. Bezos has traced much the same arc. Mr. Trump’s rapidly escalating moves to install himself as dictator do not appear to have inspired any of the four to rethink their relationship with him.

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More troubling still, each of these billionaires controls significant media outlets. Mr. Musk is the owner of X.com (the former Twitter), in some ways an even more important social media site, in terms of its political impact, than the much larger Facebook. Mr. Bezos is the owner of The Washington Post. Mr. Ellison’s Skydance Media (run by his son David) has lately acquired control of Paramount, parent company of CBS, and is exploring a bid to take over Warner Brothers Discovery, owner of CNN. He also leads a consortium that was awarded control of TikTok’s U.S. business in a forced sale brokered by – why yes, it was Mr. Trump. The President’s attempts to control the media directly, through the regulatory powers of the state, are alarming enough. But it is his indirect control, via a coterie of compliant oligarchs, that may be the graver menace to democratic debate.

Past generations of the super rich surely used their wealth to purchase influence. They bribed candidates, funded political machines, and manipulated legislatures. But they never intervened so overtly, so massively, or so uniformly as the current tech oligarchy has in support of Mr. Trump. In part this is the result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which removed all limits on corporate and union spending on political advertising and led to the rise of “Super PACs,” supposedly independent groups that can raise and spend unlimited amounts to support or oppose political candidates. Billionaire money has combined with grassroots democracy to create a strange kind of tyranny: Republican politicians who cross Mr. Musk or other oligarchs face the threat of being “primaried,” in which they are targeted by heavily financed campaigns designed to prevent them from standing as a candidate for the party at the next election.

But oligarchic power and influence took on new meaning with the arrival of Mr. Trump on the scene. On the one hand, there was never a candidate who so openly advertised his willingness to trade legislative and regulatory favours for their support, monetary or otherwise, in a way that crossed all legal and ethical lines. On the other hand, there was never a candidate who so openly threatened those he viewed as being unsupportive – Mr. Trump once vowed to imprison Mr. Zuckerberg for “the rest of his life” – and who so conspicuously followed through on many of these threats once he was restored to power.

For some, then, such as Mr. Zuckerberg or Mr. Bezos, sucking up to Mr. Trump is a matter of survival. For others, it is a matter of opportunity. But for many it is an active preference. Silicon Valley, once a hotbed of liberalism on the left, or libertarianism on the right, has become the breeding ground for all sorts of bizarre millenarian ideologies, from the post-democratic utopianism of Peter Thiel (co-founder, along with Mr. Musk and others, of PayPal) and his guru, the lunatic neo-feudalist Curtis Yarvin, to the techno-libertarian accelerationism of Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, to the latest fad, “successionism” – the idea, not only that human beings are about to be supplanted as the planet’s apex decision-makers by artificial intelligence, but that this is okay, the natural order of things, to which only “carbon chauvinists” could object. They see the manipulable Mr. Trump as the vehicle for the realization of their societal dreams.

This is what makes today’s tech oligarchs such a unique threat: not only that they have acquired such wealth, and not only that they can deploy it to furthering their political ends with so few constraints, and not only that they have aligned themselves with such a malignant force as Donald Trump, but that they are themselves so utterly detached from reality.

Consider how unlike they are from previous generations of billionaires: not only in the astronomical scale of their wealth, but how it was acquired. The “robber barons” of a previous era – John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Henry Clay Frick, plus a handful of others whose net worth, in today’s dollars, is estimated to have exceeded US$1-billion – made their money over decades, through the gradual accumulation of properties and the ability to mobilize thousands of people to perform tasks together.

Astor, who made his fortune in the fur trade – his American Fur Company had posts across the Great Lakes and the Pacific Northwest – and then in real estate, did not become a billionaire until his 60s. Vanderbilt, who started as a ferry operator in New York Harbor, then built a steamship empire before turning to railroads, was worth about US$3-billion when he died (again, in today’s money), most of it acquired after he was 65. Carnegie likewise rose from telegraph messenger to railway executive, before investing in iron bridges and steel. When, at the age of 65, he sold Carnegie Steel to J.P. Morgan, he had 25,000 workers in his employ. Ford, like Carnegie, did not become a billionaire until his 50s, at which time the Ford Motor Company had more than 100,000 employees.

And so on. On the road to their enormous wealth, they were obliged to spend long years immersed in the reality of other people’s existence, negotiating, cajoling, issuing orders no doubt but surely aware that orders are not always followed. For the world as it is, the analog world, is flawed and insubordinate and must be accommodated, in some degree, even by the powerful. They were hardly angels – Ford was a notorious antisemite, Carnegie a ruthless union-basher, Rockefeller a predatory monopolist – but they were men, for all their faults, of this Earth.

Today’s tech billionaire, by contrast, might come into his billions by his twenties or thirties – because he had a great idea for an app. Mr. Zuckerberg was 19 when he started up Facebook; within four years he was on the Forbes list, at an estimated net worth of US$1.5-billion. Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, the co-founders of SnapChat, were 25 and 26 respectively when they made their first B; John and Patrick Collison, founders of Stripe, were 27 and 28. The Google boys, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were just over 30. Their companies existed mostly on paper, or rather in the digisphere. They employed several hundred people, at most.

Crazy money, it is well known, makes you crazy. But crazy money that lands all at once, with little effort or direction but based solely, it seems, on the sheer brilliance of the founder, can only be compared to a mind-altering drug. One symptom is intellectual hubris. Your typical tech bro is not particularly well-educated – they were too busy coding. They know their own industry very well, and might have taken a deep dive into a topic or two, but they do not have the sort of breadth of learning that makes for a well-rounded intellectual. And they certainly do not have that mixture of curiosity and humility, the openness to other ways of thinking, the awareness of how much they do not know with which the wise approach the big questions of philosophy or politics. Which would be fine, if they didn’t insist on being treated as intellectuals, or on imposing their crude takes on Nietzsche or Ayn Rand on society.

Mr. Musk’s string of business successes have earned him a place in history. But listen to him opine on politics, and you are struck only by how banal, how simplistic, how altogether adolescent his thinking is. Yet there he was, for a time, he and his team of undergraduate acolytes, handed the power to reshape the entire U.S. government. And there he still is, manipulating the X algorithms to his designs, broadcasting his own increasingly fascist urgings, dictating to elected legislators, whispering in the ear of whichever members of the Trump entourage are still on speaking terms with him – as there always will be, for someone with that kind of money to burn.

I used to shrug at people who railed against “the billionaire class.” I mostly still do: you make a product people like, get them to part with their money, you’re entitled to your bundle, for all the good it will do you. (Chesterton defined the very rich of his time as “clever enough to get all that money [but] stupid enough to want it.”) Pay your taxes – lots of them – and we’ll stay out of your affairs.

But there was an implicit bargain in this: you stay out of our affairs. The minute the billionaires start throwing their weight around in politics, the issue changes – from the concentration of wealth to the concentration of power. A billionaire’s wealth entitles him to as many pools or houses or private jets as he can find the time to buy. But it entitles him to no more say in how a country is governed than any other citizen.