IIn the final speech of his presidency, Joe Biden described the United States the way he usually describes only the nation’s adversaries: as a minority government. His concerns about the “dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few wealthy people” came after weeks of discussing the influence of the superrich on the incoming Trump administration. At least 13 billionaires are set to hold government positions under the new president, with his government expected to be worth at least $7 billion, double what his first term was, a staggering number. 60 times more of net present value. Statistics from Trump’s close advisor, Elon Musk, indicate that the number is more than half a trillion. It has always been a happy marriage between wealth and power in America. What’s different now? It can be expressed in three terms: size, sector, and strategy.
The one thing about billionaires in the United States is that they keep making more of them. In 1990, there was About 60. Ten years later, there were 298. Today there are approximately 750, enough to fill two jumbo jets (assuming some can be persuaded to fly economy). Billionaire status is no longer enough to make you a household name. Those who have the “Scrooge McDuck” or “John D. Rockefeller” status of people who are “so rich that they are famous for being rich” are more accurately defined as billionaires: people who are worth more than $100 billion.
Of the top ten billionaires in the United States, all but one (Warren Buffett) made their money in the technology sector, which has boomed since the turn of the millennium. In his speech, Biden modified President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s speech Warning from 1961 About the “military-industrial complex” To sound the alarm about the “technological-industrial complex.” Neither of them mentioned the old financial-industrial complex. Over the past several decades, the revolving door in American politics has thrown you in one place more than others: Wall Street. The intersection between the private sector and the ruling class has long been dominated by one investment bank in particular, Goldman Sachs.
Goldman’s then co-chairman, Robert Rubin, was Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary, and Goldman CEO Henry Paulson held the same role for George W. Bush, overseeing the bank’s management. 2008 bailout plan (And its friendly conditions granted to his comrades in finance). Steve Mnuchin and Gary Cohn joined Trump’s first cabinet from Goldman Sachs as well. To some extent, this pattern persists. Both the Commerce and Treasury Departments are expected to be led by billionaires from the world of investment banking — one of whom even made his fortune with the famously wealthy George Soros.
But the most striking newcomers to Washington, D.C., are those from Silicon Valley. Tech figures like venture capitalist David Sachs — tapped to be Trump’s “AI and cryptocurrency czar” — and Musk, who is set to head the “government efficiency advisory division,” are following the path taken by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who made a risky bet on supporting Trump in 2016, when those like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos were vocal in criticizing him.
When Trump takes the stage on Monday to be sworn in for a second time as president of the United States, he will be surrounded not only by these former critics but also, somewhat surprisingly, by TikTok CEO Xu Ziqiu, the company’s president. A company that Biden is set to make illegal. Wall Street, long the dominant actor in the White House, appears to have now found a match among the tech giants.
This brings us to the question of strategy. What does Silicon Valley want? The easy answer is that they want what tycoons have always wanted: regulation that serves their interests, cleared paths for mergers and acquisitions, crushing antitrust efforts and AI restrictions imposed by a Biden presidency, and a lower share of profits for workers. And, of course, lower corporate and personal income taxes. Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, his only major piece of legislation likely to become permanent, are set to expire, a fourth cash drip into the arms of the nation’s wealthiest.
They will also want to reap the usual rewards of federal contracts. Entry-level weapon manufacturers such as Anduril powered by Thiel It has challenged existing weapons giants such as Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and others. Thiel’s company, Palantir, contracts its analytical tools to the US Department of Defense, as well as police departments in the US and around the world. Musk’s company SpaceX has been NASA’s satellite launch provider for more than a decade, and would like to see Trump’s tariff threat open up more markets for X.com, Starlink satellite internet, Tesla’s electric cars and eventually robotaxis. . Trucks.
So far, this appears to be standard practice for the convergence of corporate and political power in the United States as we saw in the twentieth century. But around the edges, there are hints of something more extreme. The same Silicon Valley figures who will share the stage with Trump have long professed a fundamental hostility toward the state as such. Some in their circle, like venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan, have even drawn up detailed plans for “Get out” The nation-state, including the creation of new private political systems or “network states.” In 2009, Thiel dreamed of dividing the world map into thousands of new countries. “If we want to increase freedom, we want to increase the number of countries,” he said.
Musk’s move toward what some liberals call “soft separation” in rebooting the “company town” idea in Texas — and talking at length about escaping the planet altogether for Mars with a few chosen companions — suggests a new flaw in America’s latest dalliances with the rich and powerful. . It seems that some of these few are not particularly connected to the legacy of the United States at all. Their affiliations may be as mobile as their companies, which “base” themselves where the tax burden is lighter.
The Second Coming of Maga may also be the rise to power of some people least committed to any particular plot of land, and more willing to flee when a more suitable partner presents themselves. It is no coincidence that Steve Bannon, the firebrand ethno-nationalist, has (rhetorically) declared war on Musk and others. Bannon’s calls in 2016 for hard borders, decoupling from China, and breaking up big tech companies are a far cry from the language of the Silicon Valley right. They learned from the first four years that Trump had a developer’s talent for cutting deals with other wealthy people.
Biden should be applauded for realizing on his way out that the threat facing the United States is less blood-and-soil fascism than nihilistic capitalism. It is unfortunate that neither he nor his party did enough to fight him when they spent their years in power.