As U.S. President Donald Trump lined up the incoming team for his new term, one thing was clear: A lot of them have substantial bank balances. In total, 13 billionaires will serve under Trump, including the secretary of commerce, Howard Lutnick (with a net worth of US$1.5 billion), the soon-to-be head of NASA, Jared Isaacman ($1.7 billion), and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk ($340 billion). 

But the people in Trump’s inner circle aren’t just uncommonly wealthy, even by elite standards; they seem to have remarkable sway. Trump’s point man in the Middle East, Steve Witkoff ($500 million-$1 billion), recently negotiated a mutual hostage exchange between Israel and  Hamas. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DoGE) is meanwhile going through the government bureaucracy, canceling contracts and firing civil servants en masse. 

Trump’s inauguration seemed to symbolize this intersection between money and politics, where a handful of the world’s richest men—who’d among them contributed millions to the inauguration—were seated immediately behind the stage, in front of the cabinet itself. 

In a speech on January 15, the outgoing U.S. president, Joe Biden, warned that Trump would usher in a new era in which the favored few have captured the government: “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that really threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedom.” But isn’t money in politics as American as it gets? Days before Biden gave that speech, he bestowed the United States’s highest civilian honor—the Presidential Medal of Freedom—on his longtime friend David Rubenstein ($3.8 billion) and the liberal mega-donor George Soros ($7.2 billion). 

So what, if anything, is really new about the influence wealthy businessmen wield in the U.S. administration today?

Quinn Slobodian is a professor of international history at Boston University and the author of Hayek’s Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right. It’s partly a matter of financial scale, Slobodian says; Trump’s cabinet is several times richer than Biden’s. But it’s also a matter of political style, largely on account of Trump’s billionaire supporters’ new ideological alignment. Slobodian sees the year 2020 as a breaking point for them, not least for Elon Musk. That year, America underwent a series of political convulsions—from Covid-19 mandates to the Black Lives Matter protests to a series of tech-worker walkouts. The simultaneity of these events convinced Trump’s billionaire backers that they now faced a unified and radical left-wing challenge to the very foundations of American society, which they all saw as pointing them in one direction …

Gustav Jönsson: What would you say is distinctive about the billionaires supporting Trump in and beyond the last election cycle? 

Jared Short

This article is for members only

Join to read on and have access to The Signal‘s full library.

Join now Already have an account? Sign in